Makaron WIP (2010/05/19) - 模擬器

http://dknute.livejournal.com/33491.html

To answer questions that have been popping up recently: No, I have not
abandoned Dreamcast. It is true that lately I was focused mostly on NAOMI but
that was due to all the work done on cart based games. It would be a waste
not to implement these changes right away.

It's actually harder to get Dreamcast working right. NAOMI has fewer games,
none of which uses WinCE kernel, and except some JVS woes the emulator base
is pretty much complete now. What's left are NAOMI 2 extensions and maybe the
comm board emulation. Renderer issues aside of course.
Let's be frank here, Makaron T12 had some major changes in it and didn't turn
out all that great. What's more, there are still two major issues left
unresolved:

1) Disc swapping
2) Proper fullscreen support

These two are very closely related. See, Makaron does support disk changing
while running but the GUI won't allow you to do anything of the sort. And if
you were playing fullscreen, you'd have to switch back to windowed mode to
even access said GUI in the first place.
After I promised I'd bring back the ALT+key game image switching I realized
that hacking T12 is pretty much pointles. I should focus on making it work as
it's meant to. Sorry Yuki :) So, Dreamcast Test 12 branch is dead, I'm doing
a major rewrite for T13.

I figured I only need to add GUI for the most important options, the rest
should not be touched anyway unless you know what you're doing. Then there's
the fullscreen and aspect ratio issue. I still haven't decided if I want to
use slower but easier fake mode, or the real deal. I could perhaps do both
but that means more code and obviously I don't like it :) Right now Makaron
is unable to recover from a "device lost" situation and while it could be
worked around, it'd be very ugly.
Another thing is WinCE support. There is a different way of doing MMU address
translation, something I discussed long time ago with Nathan Keynes (lxdream
author). It's much faster for Linux/FreeBSD but it remains to be seen what
speedup, if any, I could get with games. It's a big change but fortunately
Makaron is already half way there as is. This is something I actually look
forward to, not a mindless bug hunting.

This kinda brings me to another topic, that is nullDC source code being
opened. I'd hesitate with word "freed" here, it's not exactly as simple as
some people think. Looking at the issues page it's obvious that there are
still only two real maintainers: drkIIRaziel and PsyMan. I don't think this
was the intended result. Whether or not someone picks it up or the original
authors loose interest completly remains to be seen - but it's what I always
say, not that many people are interested in writing an emulator. Source code
being closed is no excuse, after all I started from zero on my own so anybody
can do that. On the other hand, once the code is open you don't really see an
army of helpers, now do you... Hacking in a feature or two does not count as
proper development.

Since I touched the subject of features, I'm still against keyboard based
gamepad support so don't get your hopes up. Get a wired X360 pad, it's the
closest thing to a DC controller that can be hassle-free connected to a PC.
I'm against Microsoft hegemony but having some standards put in place really
makes my life easier. The hoops I need to jump through to get around bugs in
DirectInput device drivers... ugh.
I'm also not going to add any additional texture filters, you don't like big
pixels, go play a recent game and don't bitch about '98 graphics being poor.
I might add full-screen filter effects though, depending on how bad it looks
on widescreen LCD :)

So... when is Test 13 going to be ready? No idea. I might be forced to drop
some of the changes I want to make in favour of faster release (like, say,
integrating input plugins back to main executable). The software renderer is
not going to make it in and thats pretty much certain, I only started playing
with it. The rest... I guess we'll see about that.


簡單說就是下一版的進展相當大這樣

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