Subject: Re: [stella] Stella Emulator and .PRO files From: Rob <kudla@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 23:53:37 -0500 |
On Wednesday 22 January 2003 16:00, Manuel Polik wrote: > It's such a waste of talent to have three independent > VCS emulators of that high quality. Just thinking about > this giant amount of totally redundant work bothers me. Well, the way things are now we have the portable but not 100% accurate emulator (Stella and its variations), the obscenely optimized and obsessively accurate emulator for an obsolete and unsupported operating system and which depends on a lot of assembler code (Z26), and then PCAE is sort of in the middle of those (I know everyone rags on its debugger, but it worked for me last time I used it....) > Just imagine "what if" John and Eckhard would've worked > all their current Z26 knowledge into the Stella core, > rather than spending a years time porting Z26 to > Win32... Well, for a long time Stella's license wasn't exactly outside developer friendly, and I always thought the other emulators were more an answer to its perceived slowness and inaccuracy. Nowadays all the emulators are on closer to equal footing in most respects and it's easy to posit what-if scenarios like this, but I can't see it ever having happened. Personally, I'd love to see even a win32 port of Z26 because at least then there'd be a chance of it running well under Linux. (Yeah, I know, use dosemu, but running emulators under dosemu seems to be a fairly reliable way to lock up one's video card. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong.) Meanwhile, I'm glad there's more than one emulator because stella, while it has problems with illegal opcodes and is tougher to make work with esoteric bank switching schemes (like Andrew's), works fine under Linux. Not that I necessarily have a lot of hope for WinZ26 either because PCAEWin won't even start under normal wine or crossover, and immediately dies with some richtext error under winex. I could try to port the Delphi code to Kylix but the thought of rewriting all that DirectX stuff against SDL gives me hives. I can scarcely believe Z26 will be *more* friendly to foreign operating systems. So I'm still rooting for the portable one (Stella). As for the question about "how do you deal with making a stella.pro entry every time", I've only built 4K and standard 8K binaries myself and at the time, the functionality of DOSKEY was plenty (edit file, hit cursor up three times to get dasm, run dasm, hit cursor up three times to get pcae.exe, exit pcae, hit cursor up three times to get my editor command line...) and nowadays I'd probably do the same thing but write a perl script "asm" like this: $bin = $asm = shift @ARGV; $bin =~ s/asm$/bin/i; system("dasm -f3 $asm $bin"); ($md5, undef) = split(' ', `md5sum $bin`); open OUT, ">$bin.pro"; print OUT qq("Cartridge.MD5" "$md5" "Cartridge.Type" "3F" (or whatever....) "" ); close OUT; system("stella.sdl --pro $bin.pro $bin"); after which I could type "asm booga.asm" and it would build booga.bin, make a booga.pro file and use it to run booga in stella. (Being perl, this should work just as well under Windows assuming you change program names appropriately.) Rob ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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