Gens4All with Z80 Emulation

[mistamontiel]

Obviously

Dreamcast is too save-hungry for this! And I've two Genesises and Everdrive Pros

For what it's worth

[TapamN]

Them dreaded saves twice in a row on exit rom it says don't have the space available n then makes me power cycle the Dreamcast

I tested the out-of-space handler when I first wrote it, but I guess I broke it when making changes to the loader?

Yeah, I think I see the cause. I'll try to fix soon.

Actually, one kind of pointless feature I added might be useful here. it's possible to make a temporary RAM save if there are no VMUs inserted. The save will be lost when the console is turned off, but you can avoid the out of space screen.

[Ian Micheal]

Them dreaded saves twice in a row on exit rom it says don't have the space available n then makes me power cycle the Dreamcast

I tested the out-of-space handler when I first wrote it, but I guess I broke it when making changes to the loader?

Yeah, I think I see the cause. I'll try to fix soon.

Actually, one kind of pointless feature I added might be useful here. it's possible to make a temporary RAM save if there are no VMUs inserted. The save will be lost when the console is turned off, but you can avoid the out of space screen.

I have found some games dont work using rca leads Phantasy Star iv is one but works flawless on vga cable it just goes black on rca leads

many others as well this happen
people reporting a game not working prolly dont have a vga cable

[WedgeStratos]

This has been an exciting update. I've ended up with over 630 games now. So many games that previously didn't work, great to see epics like Buck Rogers working, as well as Sonic 3D Blast fully functional, Road Rash, and thanks to saving, there's no reason not to enjoy the many Phantasy Star games, including the text adventures with translations.

I'll be releasing this collection soon, but I need engagement now!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17sU ... sp=sharing

This link is to my new and improved game list. It doesn't have the same details as before, but it's a bit more concise and all-in-one. I wanna have recommendations. The previous release, I was removing a lot of games out of personal discontent and repetition. I'm trying to avoid that this time, knowing some people might enjoy a particular season of their favorite sports game. However, I'm running into a storage war here, and I believe I'll need to split this collection for those who want to use CD-Rs.

Every game has been tested from versions off GoodGen V3.21, but I'm also interested in adding more games, particularly good freely redistributable homebrew games (sorry, that means no Xenocrisis especially with the Dreamcast release being out there) and translations that didn't make their way into GoodGen back in... you know, 2012.

The Docs link is in commentary mode, so be it here or in the Doc, I want feedback! Suggest games, ones to add, ones to remove! I want this to be the most comprehensive Genesis catalog that is compatible with this emulator. I've also got a better workflow so it'll be easier if new versions release to test and confirm additional games, or discover fixed titles.

[mistamontiel]

Not present in MoeFoh's CDI (I am in favor of multiple er two-disc set if anythan)

Sonic 3D Blast

Xeno Crisis (did purchase don't know how to throw this your way nor prove I did I guess Gmail screenshot lol yeh bitmapbureau doesn't do account system)

Gunstar Heroes

Panorama Cotton

Toy Story

[MoeFoh]

Not present in MoeFoh's CDI (I am in favor of multiple er two-disc set if anythan)

Sonic 3D Blast

Xeno Crisis (did purchase don't know how to throw this your way nor prove I did I guess Gmail screenshot lol yeh bitmapbureau doesn't do account system)

Gunstar Heroes

Panorama Cotton

Toy Story

I can make a special build of Xeno Crisis just for you and not for public release. I'd like see to how it runs on gen4all.

[Ian Micheal]

Not present in MoeFoh's CDI (I am in favor of multiple er two-disc set if anythan)

Sonic 3D Blast

Xeno Crisis (did purchase don't know how to throw this your way nor prove I did I guess Gmail screenshot lol yeh bitmapbureau doesn't do account system)

Gunstar Heroes

Panorama Cotton

Toy Story

I can make a special build of Xeno Crisis just for you and not for public release. I'd see to how it runs on gen4all.

xeno crisis runs fine on my old build so i dont see why it would not here

[mistamontiel]

Certainly

[WedgeStratos]

Not present in MoeFoh's CDI (I am in favor of multiple er two-disc set if anythan)

Sonic 3D Blast

Xeno Crisis (did purchase don't know how to throw this your way nor prove I did I guess Gmail screenshot lol yeh bitmapbureau doesn't do account system)

Gunstar Heroes

Panorama Cotton

Toy Story

all 5 tested working in the newest build just fine. Cotton worked in the old build too, fwiw.

Xenocrisis does exhibit some strange behavior to the sound driver that causes PCM warping in all other Genesis games after playing. This doesn't happen in the older v3 build, which is VERY interesting.

[TapamN]

Minor update to version 4.1:

• No softlock when VMU is full. It's also possible to retry a save when the VMU is full by pressing A, so you can swap VMUs or delete files if you find out you don't have space. You can cancel a save by pressing B.
  
• Another change is to how the in-game menu is drawn. Before, when certain raster effects happened, so many polygons could be drawn for the tilemaps that the PVR would run out of vertex memory to draw the in-game menu. Now the menu is drawn before the tilemaps, so it will never drop out.

Source and prebuilt 1ST_READ are included.

I noticed that my build of KOS seems to have a bug when calculating the date for the save file, which results messed up dates (like the year 2042 or something). It seems to be a bug in newlib for converting unix time to human readable. I started on a work around, but it looked like it would take more than 5 minutes to figure out how to safely override KOS's timestamp, so I put it off for now.

I don't know why there are problems when running on something besides VGA. Does it only happens with certain games, and not all of them? Is the in-game menu visible? Is there sound?

The emulator runs at 640x480 in the loader, and 320x240 in-game. It should auto-detect the cable and select NTSC or VGA when switching resolutions. (There's a partially finished compile-time option for aspect correct 256x224 that uses a custom resolution (640x240) that I only have working on VGA, but it's disabled by defines, so that shouldn't be the cause.)

I'm not sure how it reacts to PAL. If KOS picks 60hz, it should work as well as NTSC, but if it uses 50hz, I think there would be some problems.

I've been testing on a US Dreamcast, outputting to VGA, running from dcload-ip. I've never tried running from a CD, and I don't have a good setup right now to test interlaced video.

On a different note, I was looking through some old stuff I worked on, and found a video I recorded. I noticed the year when I recorded it. 2012. It's been about decade since then.

My main goal, DC-wise, has been make something that causes people to go, "Wow, the Dreamcast can do that?" I don't want something impressive just for homebrew, I want to upstage stuff like Le Mans, Shenmue II, or DOA2 on a technical level. I haven't accomplished that yet, and I've been wasting too much time doing "support" stuff (working on a scripting system, better PVR driver, etc.) or side projects (Gens4All, SimCity Classic) to actually get anywhere. so I've decided to just kind of drop everything and focus on making an actual 3D game of some kind.

This means I'm probably not going to do much on Gens4All for now, to focus on the game. But if someone else wants to work on improving Gens4All in the mean time, I could still give advice.