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Is SID a priority?

(español abajo)When I started this Patreon Sorg proposed me to work on a new C64 SID implementation. I have never used a C64 so I'm not that familiar with the alleged sound differences. I looked into the problem and there seems to be a lot of variation among C64 machines, even when using the same chip. So the prospect of a satisfying solution to everyone is not great given this variation. From time to time one or two people ask me to work on this.I'd like to know if this is something my patrons care about or whether you'd prefer me...

CPS Public Release

(español abajo)One week after publishing the release candidate version, I am finally bringing CPS to the light. Code source is available here. Binary files are now in the jtbin repository and can be obtained with my update script (MiSTer) or manually downloading them for MiST/SiDi users. MRA files are in the same location.There are a couple of small things to check in the core but I think this is mature enough now for a broader audience. If you already had the RC version, this public version is the same except with better CRT support.Discord n...

Forgotten Worlds: CPS Release Candidate

FILES ATTACHED.We're finally here. The last beta file brings suppot to what was the first CPS game: Forgotten Worlds. This title uses a rotary control which needs a specific interface that took some work to implement. Although I have not connected the dial inputs to MiSTer pins yet, all the real hardware is there. At the moment you will use two buttons to rotate the characters. When I can get my hands on a dial solution for MiSTer I will try to support it.This week is special too because the core has achieved the Release Candidate stage. I ...

Emulators inside FPGA cores!

(español abajo)We are all in here because we want accuracy. We want no lag. We want the original speed. We even want the original glitches! And FPGA is the technology that provides it. FPGA allows you to make digital hardware at an affordable price. But what if I told you that you have used an emulator without knowing!Here's the deal: you can fit any kind of circuit in an FPGA and that includes of course CPUs. We are used to having Z80 and 68000 CPUs synthesized inside. But some cores out there have invited an extra Z80. What for? It runs ...

CPS0 CRT/DIP update

Many people have asked me to add CRT sync signal control on the OSD for all CPS0 games too. So here is a service release for that and some other items:1. CRT adjustment on OSD (only MiSTer)2. DIP support via MRA (needs latest firmware on MiST/SiDi). Needs attached MRA files3. Fixed scan doubler issue on vertical games (MiSTer, thanks to Paulnb)4. Fixed parsing of last object in the sprite table (affects several games)5. Aspect ratio set to 5:4 in all games (MiSTer)Some caveats:-If the game starts upside down, go into DIP Switches and toggle the...

Crash Course in Hacking Arcades via MRA

MRA files are now the standard way of loading ROM files into FPGA cores. Originally developed for the MiSTer platform, we have taken them to other platforms too via the command line mra tool.The MRA defines a list of files to be transferred to the FPGA. The order in which the files are transferred and even the byte order inside them can be set. But you can also alter information inside the files before transferring to the FPGA via the patch element in the MRA file.patch allows you to replace bytes in the final data stream so you can alter anyth...

Statement about MiSTer

As some may know I had a misunderstanding with MiSTer main developer yesterday. We have already sorted it out. Sorgelig and I have met in person twice in the past and he's a great host. I am also thankful to the work he's done for the MiSTer platform. Thank you to the people who showed support yesterday and apologies for the drama.Sorgelig and I still have a disagreement about how to handle source code, file distribution and other technical points but that is normal.For cores that are mature, I will try to facilitate porting to the main...

Pang! 3 -CPS beta #8-

FILES HERESmooth animations, new game elements and a full art gallery, that's Pang! 3. This game has copy protection, an EEPROM chip and the ROM dump is a bit special so it took a while to have it ready. But, here it is!DMA timing is better adjusted in this release. You will see that many of the slowdowns are now gone or diminished. I think the remaining slowdowns are genuine of the CPS system.12MHz speed should be correct this time too. And in case you want to play games without the DMA or 10MHz speed limitation, just select turbo on the O...

CPS beta #8 files (Pang! 3)

See attached files. Remember to delete old MRA files.MiSTer files: mra zip and RBF zip for MiSTerMiST/Sidi files: arc zip and RBF zip for your platformUpdated on May 2nd to fix mapper problem in WillowUpdated on May 3rd: MRA files for Mercs and some others replaced by the fix provided by terminator2k2

Legendary Wings Public Release

Welcome to another Friday update. This time we have a public release: Legendary Wings and SectionZ are now public (source code). RBF files can be obtained via the jotego MiSTer updater. For Sidi and MiST I have attached them here. MRA are only available here.Legendary Wings is a vertical game based on the Section Z hardware but with the Z80 set to 6MHz instead of 3MHz. Both games have very nice music so please don't miss it. Use sectionz.rbf for both games. Just different MRA.Please update the RBF file if you have the version from Monday. T...

Section Z! Special 1000 Patron Release!

(español abajo)Thank you, thank you and thank you. You have made this last year a terrific time of digging into old hardware and bringing it back to life in modern electronic form.I am very happy to announce that we have reached 1000 enthusiasts of retro gaming. To cellebrate I am releasing Section Z for all patrons (see attached files to this post). This is the ancestor of Forgotten Worlds and I really wanted to finish it before the CPS1 title. The game is a lot of fun but it does get much better after the first two stages.Note that this game...

Pokonyan & some bootlegs

(español abajo)New MRA files again. Please delete the old ones. You have the link to download in the first CPS post. Please read the post to find it. The files for today's update are marked 20200417 for today's date.This week most of the work has been focused on getting the DIP switches in and fixing MRA files. I think all released original games should work with full DIP switches. This means you can now enable continue on Ghouls'n Ghosts.DIP switches only work for MiSTer at the moment. I am working with Gyurco and Sebdel to get th...

Street Fighter II

(español abajo)What you need to know:-New MRAs. Delete old ones so buttons get recognized properly.-I have only tested the main ROM MRA versions. I know many of the alternative versions will fail. Please report them here.-Files are in the location indicated in the first CPS beta post.I have spent most of the week verifying the core timing. I think the 10MHz games should be running at the exact speed now. The DMA has been implemented as explained here and this has definetely changed the play feeling for some games. About 12MHz games: I cannot b...

DMA in CPS

Welcome back to one technical article. This time I'm going to talk about DMA (Direct Memory Access) in the CPS system. This aspect is completely ignored in emulators and has a large effect in the effective processor performance because if the DMA is active the CPU is stopped. The result is that emulators may be running the CPU of CPS games at some ~18% faster speed than the actual one. This article is very technical but I know some of you enjoy these reads and it also help me organize my mind.Why DMA? When a large chunk of data is to be mov...

Shooters!

(español abajo)IMPORTANT-Google Drive location is shown in the first beta post here.-MiSTer: All MRA files are new. Old ones won't work delete them-MiST/SiDi: All ROM files need be re-generated. Use the -A option to generate the ARC file too. mra file.mra -A -z zip-folder-MiST and SiDi now use .ARC files to load the games. Read the official documentation about .ARC files here. You can get them from the ARC folder in Google drive. Copy ARC, ROM and the RBF file to the root of your SD card. Rename the RBF file to JTCPS1.RBF-Support for verti...

Captain Commando & Mega Man - MiST(er) and SiDi

(español abajo)After much struggle, I have moved the memory controller to a 96MHz clock. This had large implications in the system. For those developers out there, not the whole core is operated at that speed, part of it runs at 48MHz in order to ease synthesis. Much of the time this week has been in making the core synthesize correctly with no timing errors at the new speed. Also, another change was to use the whole SDRAM space (32MB) instead of a single bank (8MB).So that was the pain, how about the gain? Well, the new speed solved the horiz...

Three Wonders, Mega Twins and Japanese Titles

(español abajo)As I have spent the week working on the Double Dragon public releases; I have only had time to test MRA files. Today's CPS update is only of MRA files, the RBF is the same one as last week's. The rest of the titles do need core changes so we will have a new RBF next week. This week's games are:-Three wonders-Mega Twins (very, very nice platformer)And three Japanese only titles:-Pnickies: puzzle game, you don't need to know Japanese to have fun-Tonosama no Yabou 2: quiz game based on Japan history-CAPCOM world 2: ...

Double Dragon Public Release MiST(er) and SiDi

(español abajo)If you have to spend more time at home in the next few days, as some of us, then at least kick some ass! After a long wait, here it is Double Dragon! Finally open to the public. Files are in jtbin, just run the the update script in MiSTer to get them.Sorry for the long wait. Initially DD1 was meant to be released in January but I got engaged with CPS and well, it kept me engaged! Now it's finally here. The release has been hard because for some reason Quartus (FPGA compiler) decided that the CPUs were not meeting timing now ...

Manga!

(español abajo)Hi all!Thank you for being there one more week. I have prepared a new set of games. This time the common theme is manga games!Important-Old MRA files are not compatible at all. Delete them-RBF files for MiST(er) and SiDi are in the same shared folder. The timestamp is 20200313. Refresh the page if you don't see them!New games added- UN Squadron / Area 88- Strider / Strider Hiryu- Nemo- Dynasty Wars / Tenchi wo kurauCore Improvements-Object priority in Quiz & Dragons is fixed, the dice is now on top of the cards!-Some perform...

Credits

(español abajo)I'd like to make the credits screen more elegant. I would like to know what you think of the credits in the Rampage core. For future JT cores the changes would be:- Same font for all games -instead of using a game specific font- Leave the game running in the background with dimmed colours- Scrolling screen instead of fixed oneFor me, as developer, this has the advantage of being more portable across cores so I can speed up the development cycle. But the most important thing is what you think about it. Although I am opening t...

Fantasy!

After much work I'm very glad to bring you four new titles for CPS! These titles belong to the fantasy genre. They have dungeons, they have dragons, and your character gains experience. Yet, they are not official D&D games.Installation-OLD MRA files are not compatible. Delete them!-You need to remap the joystick in MiSTer-Files are in the same folder as the first beta (here)-MiSTer: - Create a _CPS folder - Copy MRA files to this folder - Create a mame folder inside _CPS - Copy mame zip files to this folder - Create a cores folder inside _C...

CPS1 Beta

UPDATE: after many reports of SDRAM problems and particularly Elexor reporting that his SDRAM would work if he touched it with his finger; I had an idea to fix it and applied it this morning. The new core is in Google Drive now jtcps1_20200223.rbf. (please delete the old RBF file). We have tested it on three faulty systems with possitive results. I hope this works for everyone. Sorry for yesterday's problems.Here it is. Download the files for MiST or MiSTer depending on your platform.MiSTerInstall MRA and RBF files normally. Place MAME zipp...

Capcom System Update

CPS development has been progressing much faster than anticipated. I have now most games working and I think I do not longer need to restrain to a single title for the beta. Some of the pending tasks before the beta are:* Measure bus timing in PCB and compare with core* Implement layer priority in colour mixer* Fix ADPCM control bug (same as in Double Dragon 2)* Add HDMI output (using analogue output now)* Double clock frequency to avoid sprite glitches (48->96MHz)* Fix mapper for large games (such as SF2)* Fix ringing issue in JT51* Fix addres...

January Summary

This first month of 2020 has been pretty busy and positive.Highlights1. Public release of Black Tiger after fixing the background colour issue on higher levels2. Beta release of Double Dragon 2, with the support for a new ADPCM chip3. Video hardware of CAPCOM System 1 (CPS) implementedMaintenance work1. Fixed analogue video output of Double Dragon 1 and 22. Moved to latest official MiSTer framework (adding gamma support)3. Fixed direct video output (still doesn't work for everyone though)4. Fixed sprite issue on 19425. Fixed flip screen gra...

Sample Sound Effects in Arcades

It's time for this month's technical post. With the Double Dragon cores we have experienced two games with very intensive use of ADPCM sound effects. Oh, and Double Dragon II even shares the same ADPCM chip than CPS1 games. I'd like to briefly explain how ADPCM worked, comparison to consoles and pros and cons.We all know that PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) sound effects are digital recordings of real life sounds. They sound great but they take up a lot of memory. Before the advent of MP3 the industry, particularly the telephone industr...

Double Dragon II beta

Here comes Double Dragon 2!I have added the files to the Double Dragon 1 beta folder. Get the link from the original post.This game is similar to the first one hardware wise but it is not the same board. The designers replaced the MCU device with a regular Z80 (while keeping the bus arbitration virtually unchanged). Then they replaced the two individual OKI MSM5205 chips by a single OKI MSM6295, which is quite an improvement over an MSM5205. This change freed a lot of space on the board. The sound CPU also changed from a M6809 to a Z80. So alth...

Black Tiger/Dragon Public Release

Christmass in Spain ends today with the three wise men festivity. This is the occasion when children traditionally get their presents in Spain. I would like to honour this tradition with this offering.You can use the updater for JT cores to grab it automatically. Get the updater from here. Note that other files such as the readme, ROM scripts and MRA are only available in the repository. The updater only downloads the RBF file.I hope you will enjoy it!

Service Pack

The results from the poll were quite even but it was clear that keeping high quality is important to you. I have devoted the last few days to fixing reported bugs and have got many out of the way (log). I have also got support for the new MiSTer SYS framework, which means that gamma options and direct video work now. Thanks to Andrew for his direct video testing.Released cores-All: gamma and direct video support and internal changes for improved reliability-Tiger Road: USA versions are now stable. Japanese ADPCM sound quality improved-1943: Fix...

2019 Summary

This is the work I made on 2019 thanks to your support:Arcade Cores1. Ghosts'n Goblins2. 19423. Vulgus4. 19435. GunSmoke6. Tiger Road7. F-1 Dreams8. Bionic Commando9. Commando10. Black Tiger11. Popeye12. Double DragonChip Cores* JT51 for YM2151 (used in Double Dragon, Bionic Commando, designed before 2019)* JT12 for YM2612 (used in MiSTer's Megadrive and variants)* JT10 for YM2610 (used in MiSTer's NeoGeo)* JT03 for YM2203 (used in many arcade cores and in ZX Spectrum MiSTer core)* JT49 for YM2149 (used in 1942, 1943, Popeye...)* JT...