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
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