New "playable" game :-D

26-10-2008 @ 03:01, dev diary, Fabien,

Nicolas has just sent me 4 screenshots of Rival Schools 2 running with his plugin. The rendering is very wrong but the game seems to be playable. He is currently trying to improve the rendering.

Website online

22-10-2008 @ 00:01, dev diary, Fabien,

Hi everybody, I'm happy to tell you that Dustcream is under developpement and progresses nicely. As both my brother and I have quite busy jobs, this website will not be updated every day, but we try to work on the emulator as often as possible. SNK vs capcom 2 is the only "playable" game at the moment, you can check the screenshots in the screenshots section.

Nicolas is focusing his work on his PowerVR plugin which uses directX 9 to render the graphics. I am working on the rest of the emulator and have started writing an opengl PowerVR plugin but its output is really crappy at the moment :-p.

Currently I'm focusing my efforts on the AICA (sound processor), I would like to get it working in the bios. The strange thing is that the ARM7 is started by the SH4, it initialises the AICA but does nothing after that... I was expecting to see the ARM7 write to the KEY_ON bit in the channels registers while the Dreamcast logo is being drawn but nothing despite the fact that it is running. I wonder if it is linked with the fact that the ARM7 interrupts are not enabled.. Stay tuned!

The current status of the emulator is the following:

  • the SH4 is almost fully emulated using an interpreter, so it is slow. The big missing part is the MMU
  • the ARM7 is fully emulated using an interpreter, so it is slow too
  • the GD-Rom functions used by the games ran so far are emulated
  • the standard dreamcast controller is emulated (no VMU)
  • Nicolas' video plugin can display the bios almost correctly, mine shows ugly stuff (go to the screenshots section to see some examples of Nicolas' plugin)
  • the emulator features a debugger for those interested (some screenshots of the GUI can be found on the screenshots page)
  • some syscalls are emulated so you can start a binary without having to boot the bios :-) (handy when trying some homebrew, especially with a slow emulator)

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