Dreamcast-Talk.com

TapamN wrote:Here's the new version of Gens4All with rasters and a game list browser. Both a precompiled ELF and a 1ST_READ.BIN are included with the source. The 1ST_READ also has the in-game menu from the last version accessible, so now you can also save, reset, and change controller and rendering settings, like you were supposed to be able to in the last version.

There's also some performance improvements, but slowdown still occurs in some games (usually audio related). Tilemap shadow and highlight have not been updated to work with the improved window map and rasters yet, so you might get the wrong shadows or shadows over HUDs. For some games, like Toejam & Earl, you might want to turn S/H off in the video settings.

The game list is an improvement on the file browser from the previous version. It loads the file "gamelist.bin" from the disc, which stores the titles, ROM filenames, SRAM and controller settings, and enabled hacks for the list of games. There's an index option, accessed by pressing X, that lets you jump to a certain letter to navigate the list faster.

A game list can be made using the included "glc" program. The source is located in "src/glparse". There's no precompiled version included, but it's a normal PC program. You don't need a DC dev. setup, just GCC/Clang. Run "make" in that directory to compile it. It has two modes, one mode takes a list of ROMs and generates a text file containing titles from the ROM header as a starting point, and the other mode takes that text file and generates the binary game list file. It's split into two parts so that someone can clean up any issues with the titles and customize save filenames and controller settings.

If there is no gamelist.bin on the disc, the file browser from the last version is used. You can also hold A while pressing Start on the title screen to force the file browser, even if there is a gamelist.bin.

If you run a game from the file browser and create a save file, he filename is generated by a hash of part of the ROM. If you run that game from a game list that specifies a different filename, it won't find the right save. You'll have to rename the save with something like VMU Tool to access it.

I'll explain how the "glc" program works later, I don't have time to fully explain it right now. If someone wants to try to try it out blind, the rough idea is to run "glc -g list.txt [ROMS]" to create the list source file, edit the source to fix bad titles, change save data, or customize controls/hacks, then run "glc -c list.txt" to generate gamelist.bin.

There are a bunch of defines in the Makefile that might be helpful for anyone messing around with it, to enable debugging features or loading gamelist.bin from a PC over dcload for testing. There's a partially working option for aspect correct 256 pixel wide mode, but it only works on VGA at the moment (it uses a custom 640x240 resolution, and I haven't made and tested an NTSC version of the video settings).