CaSTaway GP feedback


stickofjoy

Active Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2003
Messages
542
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inteligent disc naming from .ini file
gamma level change ability
two rendering modes (per screen as it is now and per line)
hard drive support (map a SMC directory as a hard drive)
blank disc creation

sound ;)
bugfixes so Sensible Soccer works ;) ;)

i am so impressed with Jeff's work so far, this topic is just a guide to show what the public want out of the emu.

matt
 
Load your save disk while playing (rather than reseting gp to get to your save again :p)

Auto frameskip when disk is loading (to help with the likes of Space Crusade :p

little things for such a good emu :D
 
stickofjoy posted on May 2 2003 said:
inteligent disc naming from .ini file
gamma level change ability
two rendering modes (per screen as it is now and per line)
hard drive support (map a SMC directory as a hard drive)
blank disc creation

sound ;)
bugfixes so Sensible Soccer works ;) ;)

i am so impressed with Jeff's work so far, this topic is just a guide to show what the public want out of the emu.

matt
I'll work out something for disk naming; you can see we've been gabbing about it. I'm getting sick of remembering whaty the heck is in each disk image :)

Gamma.. its already about as bright as it can be withotu being lossy :/ (clipping)

It render per scanline now, except for the palette; I will be adding a per-scanline-palette option, but it'l slow the rendering way down.

Not likely hard drive support; its really a lot of work, and I dont' see it that beneficial.. I dont' expect anyone to run Calamus on their GP ;)

Blank disk.. you can format them in the desktop ;)

(I will be adding the eject and insert options sometime, and then you can format them :)

Lots to do :) Sound is top priority I think.

jeff
 
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Bonks posted on May 2 2003 said:
Auto frameskip when disk is loading (to help with the likes of Space Crusade :p
STEem (PC based Atari ST emulator) offers a "fast forward" through disc access option. perhaps CaSTaway/GP could offer the same and "intelligent frameskip" through decompression/maths if that could be done.
 
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One lad just suyggested the following..

Instead of having the left-shoulder rotate live through the input modes, he suggests having the left shoulder pause the emu, and then presetn a little menu at the bottom of the screen, letting you pick the modes. Wehn you pick one, the emu resumes.

So really, its like itsown input mode ;) Push left, pause, go left/right to pick the mode, it resumes.

Would make selection easier, but woudl pause the emu. Im not sure I'm a fan of pausing.. I like to change live :) But what do you think?

jeff
 
skeezix posted on May 2 2003 said:
Would make selection easier, but woudl pause the emu. Im not sure I'm a fan of pausing.. I like to change live :) But what do you think?
I'm in favour of it, i think. :unsure:

When would ther be a situation that pausing to change modes would be bad? Surely it's better than trying to change modes to sort frameskip out in the middle of a shoot 'em up only to miss a change joystick mode and die. Pausing would solve this.

I've also noticed the current pause option is a bit sensitive?

any chance of intelligent frameskip which would solve a lot of problems?
 
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Jeff, how do you think adding sound will affect speed? I'm so excited about trying out this emulator that it'll probably go on my GP before even my own emulator does ;)
 
skeezix posted on May 2 2003 said:
One lad just suyggested the following..
Hi Jeff,

That would be me :) I think the pause while selecting the mode isn't the most important bit, the most important bit is to make it easy to get to the mode you're trying to select. Because the button cycles at the moment, it's easy to jump over the option you wanted. If the shoulder button starts mode selection but doesn't do anything once there it'll be much easier to get to what you want (you won't have to worry about it being detected multiple times). It also makes it easier to see all the available modes without having to press the button again and again.

Pausing at the same time just seemed like a good idea to me, I can't think of a time you'd wish it hadn't paused (the mode selection is only really used while getting a game started, once it's going you tend not to need it much).
 
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one thing with this pausing menu, would this still work ok while the disk is loading? reason im wondering is say for likes Space Crusade, its got numerous bits where it loads in stuff, so you need to be able to change the frameskip during loading.... probably would work, just mentioning in case :)

oh and if you do do this, could you make the A - B buttons have different speeds for frameskip, so we can bump it right to 99 quickly whilte it loads (try doing that just now, very slow :p)

just my 2c :)
 
a small issue that Escape and Backspace only register on the first letter of their abbreviation ie. on "E" and not "s"; on "B" and not "s"
 
oh yeah, the F keys seem a bit screwie, you press the F to get F1, then 1 to get F2, 2 to get F3 ect ect :)
 
heh i like the idea of it pausing the emu, that would come in handy in extreeeeme situations :D but nah, not much work to do on it really tis just fancy dancy stuff!
 
1) Sound
2) Done. :)

Skeez, just dropping a quick note here. Intended on messing around with castaway for 5-10 minutes last night. Wife literally dragged me into the bedroom 2 hours later.

st-arkanoid.jpg
st-castles.jpg


st-eagles_nest.jpg
st-moon_patrol.jpg


st-trailblazer.jpg
st-xevious.jpg


If you all are not playing with CaSTaway, you are missing out.
 
Bonks posted on May 2 2003 said:
oh yeah, the F keys seem a bit screwie, you press the F to get F1, then 1 to get F2, 2 to get F3 ect ect :)
that explians something!
 
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stickofjoy posted on May 2 2003 said:
skeezix posted on May 2 2003 said:
Would make selection easier, but woudl pause the emu. Im not sure I'm a fan of pausing.. I like to change live :) But what do you think?
I'm in favour of it, i think. :unsure:

When would ther be a situation that pausing to change modes would be bad? Surely it's better than trying to change modes to sort frameskip out in the middle of a shoot 'em up only to miss a change joystick mode and die. Pausing would solve this.

I've also noticed the current pause option is a bit sensitive?

any chance of intelligent frameskip which would solve a lot of problems?
To me, I like just pushign the left-shoulder and goign to next mode, without interupting the action. Then again, I"m good at using it since I've been using it for weeks ;)

I'm thinking along these lines..

Put pause, save, frameskip, input-mode, etc, into the little menu. Bring it up with Start, so that we get the left shoulder back for other things. Select for save isn't needed now, either. So that'd free up left and right shoudlers and select for doign custom stuff. (right shoudler is often already used mind you, but I can review all the button stuff, since I just hacked them together)

Having it all in one place would be helpfull. I can add options for insert, eject disk, etc, there, too.

jeff
 
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RobertG posted on May 2 2003 said:
Jeff, how do you think adding sound will affect speed? I'm so excited about trying out this emulator that it'll probably go on my GP before even my own emulator does ;)
Not sure yet about sound, still working on it; Release 004 actually does some sound stuff but not to you.. ie: Internally it tracks some sound registers and smaple requests and such, since it needs to to keep the timing and stuff right. The sound generation may take half a frameskip worth of time.. the playback shoudl be pretty nil since the GP32 can do it in hardware.

So I'm hoping to lose 1 frameskip.. go from 1 to 2, that sort of thing.. but we'll see. Up in the air right now.

jeff
 
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Bonks posted on May 2 2003 said:
one thing with this pausing menu, would this still work ok while the disk is loading? reason im wondering is say for likes Space Crusade, its got numerous bits where it loads in stuff, so you need to be able to change the frameskip during loading.... probably would work, just mentioning in case :)

oh and if you do do this, could you make the A - B buttons have different speeds for frameskip, so we can bump it right to 99 quickly whilte it loads (try doing that just now, very slow :p)

just my 2c :)
Yeah, good plan. The current development version (is it in 004? I forget) uses up/down to add/sub 10 to frameskip.

I'll have to make frameskip mode not pause.. it'd be a drag if it paused the display like I may add for the other input modes.

jeff
 
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AdamDawes posted on May 2 2003 said:
skeezix posted on May 2 2003 said:
One lad just suyggested the following..
Hi Jeff,

That would be me :) I think the pause while selecting the mode isn't the most important bit, the most important bit is to make it easy to get to the mode you're trying to select. Because the button cycles at the moment, it's easy to jump over the option you wanted. If the shoulder button starts mode selection but doesn't do anything once there it'll be much easier to get to what you want (you won't have to worry about it being detected multiple times). It also makes it easier to see all the available modes without having to press the button again and again.

Pausing at the same time just seemed like a good idea to me, I can't think of a time you'd wish it hadn't paused (the mode selection is only really used while getting a game started, once it's going you tend not to need it much).
Frameskip mode shouldnt' be paused; thats the main one for me..

ie: I often crank frameskip up while disks are going and unpacking is occuring and other slow math intensive things. So I pull up frameskip mode and crank it right, wait, then crank it left and go to joystick mode. So if I had to exit first, wait, then go back into frameskip mode, it'd be a drag.

The others are okay..

So I could make the Start button pause and pull up the input mod emenu, as well as otehr options like Save, Eject, etc. Then maybe have frameskip assigned to Select, or as an option in Start that unpauses? IF its on select (ie: independant from the other items), then it's easy to toggle on/off frameskip mode.

For most emus frameskip is constant across the life of the emu, but I think for the ST we need to crank framesip up/down once in awhile.. reasonably frequenrtly with some games.

So maybe it makes sense for frameskip-mode to have its own button.. SELECT, and everythign else hangign off START, and have it pause while it does it.

That seems like a good setup.

Thoughts?

jeff
 
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Flack posted on May 2 2003 said:
1) Sound
2) Done. :)

Skeez, just dropping a quick note here. Intended on messing around with castaway for 5-10 minutes last night. Wife literally dragged me into the bedroom 2 hours later.
]

If you all are not playing with CaSTaway, you are missing out.
Nice screenshots. I'm yoinking them for my page ;)

jeff
 
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skeezix posted on May 2 2003 said:
So maybe it makes sense for frameskip-mode to have its own button.. SELECT, and everythign else hangign off START, and have it pause while it does it.

That seems like a good setup.

Thoughts?
great!

how about this: select puts you into frameskip mode, where you can change as normal.

L+SELECT takes you to frameskip 1
R+SELECT takes you to frame skip 99 (for burst loading)

so that it's really easy to go between realtime and frameskip loading?
 
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