Programming Discussion Thread

[AnyOldName3]

I have to congratulate you on two fronts:

It works.

You have somehow become worse at tetris than my mother.

[Shonumi]

I wrote in the video description that it wasn't my best game of Tetris. Being on camera makes me nervous :p The funny thing is, I got to Level 8 easily right before I got everything setup to record. Stage fright I tell you.

[AnyOldName3]

I may or may not have put myself down to write some kind of software renderer for computing coursework. I have a few questions.

1. Does vanilla Java 7 have any support for OpenGL or DirectX? The reason it was going to be a software renderer was that I don't think you can use these APIs without installing extensions, which you can't do on the school network.
2. Are there any relatively simple was of doing this?
3. The easiest way from my current knowledge to draw something 3D in vanilla Java would be to use a load of JLabels, and change their colour to match what they're supposed to be displaying. This won't be a fast or tidy way of doing things, but it would work. The question is, would there be anything easier?

[Shonumi]

I am shedding pixelated tears of joy at the moment. Finally reworked LCD emulation. Fixed transparency, and most major glitches are gone. 8x16 mode is implemented too. Combined with my previous implementation of the MBC1, I can now play dozens of games from the distant past on a piece of software I wrote from scratch. It's been years since I've really, truly played these games (even though I still have the cartridges and my Game Boy, not to mention a handful of other emulators). But having to test my emulator means having to play these old games all over. Finally going places since a lot of games are fully playable now.

This weekend, I'm going to set the project up on Google Code (then you can laugh at my coding style). It only builds on Linux right now. I'll try to get a Windows build working. I got a new external HDD, so I'm going to use the old one for a Windows 7 install (I don't care if USB 2.0 is relatively slow, I just need to compile things + lots of space, nothing fancy). I'll also get around to fixing whatever it was on Windows that I broke for Gekko :p

Picture time. Bomberman GB, Mega Man, Kirby's Dream Land, and Battle Arena Toshinden are all running pretty good.

[garrlker]

That's awesome! Speaking of it, I've been trying to code one with all of the help you sent me..... it isn't going well. But nonetheless I can't wait to try yours!

[Shonumi]

(07-26-2013, 04:01 PM)garrlker Wrote: That's awesome! Speaking of it, I've been trying to code one with all of the help you sent me..... it isn't going well. But nonetheless I can't wait to try yours!

Thanks

Beware though, it doesn't offer much atm, other than playing games without sound :p Stuff like save states, battery-backed save games, the rest of the MBCs, joystick and keyboard configuration, and a host of other things still aren't added. I've pretty much been focused on making the games run, and that's about it really. As you can read above, I did do custom sprites, but I need to recode most of that now that the LCD emulation has changed. I'd rather see major changes once the project is up on Google Code though, since I'm not using git on my computer atm (copy + paste into different folders = branches :/ ). Eventually I'll get there, but I think most of the heavy lifting is done.

If you ever need help, you can always ask me. I'll even take a look at code if you want me too. Don't give up, yo. Also, I'm pretty sure I sent this to you earlier, but if you want to try something easier than the GB, to get your toes wet so-to-speak, check out writing a CHIP-8 Interpreter: http://www.multigesture.net/articles/how-to-write-an-emulator-chip-8-interpreter/ It's got a lot of the basics you'll need if you want to pursue emulation programming.

[Garteal]

Very nice job Shonumi!

Let us know when your project is on Google code so I can finally check what insanity you've written.
(Hopefully it's clean code )

Do you have an idea how you will tackle emulating the sound?

[Shonumi]

Yeah, my code's clean... *hastily cleans code, adds comments*

About the sound, I could always use Blargg's Blip Buffer (which uses SDL) but I really want to understand how sound and sound programming work myself, on every level. I have some code demonstrating how to generate sound from raw data using SDL (which is poorly documented in SDL, which is quite odd given the rest of its stellar documentation). I just need to figure out how to manually create different waveforms (saw, square, etc) at different frequencies and volumes. The GB's Audio Processing Unit (APU) is actually well documented by Blargg himself.

[Duke Nukem]

This is why I left the programming/system developer business. I was never really good at it, but I couldn't handle the stress too.
You emulator programming guys makes it look so simple.

Now I realize I'm better with other things. But sure it was fun being a hotshot in a business suit.

[neobrain]

(07-27-2013, 12:45 AM)Shonumi Wrote: About the sound, I could always use Blargg's Blip Buffer (which uses SDL) but I really want to understand how sound and sound programming work myself, on every level. I have some code demonstrating how to generate sound from raw data using SDL (which is poorly documented in SDL, which is quite odd given the rest of its stellar documentation). I just need to figure out how to manually create different waveforms (saw, square, etc) at different frequencies and volumes. The GB's Audio Processing Unit (APU) is actually well documented by Blargg himself.

Fyi, if you're looking for something simpler to work with, libao is pretty easy to use if you just want raw sound output ala "output sound at frequency X at volume Y".