Karoshi MSX Community

Version 2.5 of blueMSX will be released globally 8.7 at 14:00 GMT ! The big launch event has been arranged today at the MSX Info Update 2006 party in Helsinki. Daniel Vik presents new features to all party visitors on video.

After almost 10 months since the previous release, the new version of blueMSX is a big update, full of very advanced features :

- The implementation of a new controllers and keyboard editor gives still more comfort to the gamers and will allow to support easily other computers or consoles in future versions.

- Requested since a long time by the MSX developers, the hard disk emulation is now a reality and besides the well-known Sunrise IDE hard disk controllers, blueMSX has also implemented the Beer IDE and GIDE supports.

- In the musical domain, blueMSX is the first emulator that is capable to support the Yamaha CX5M, CX5M-128 and CX7M-128 computers by emulation of the YM2151 sound chip and the YK-01, YK-10 and YK-20 music keyboards. The MIDI part of the Yamaha SFG cartridges is not yet available.


Which are the other changes ?

In the emulator :
- Added support for the MHT Ingenieros Gunstick and the ASCII Plus-X Terminator Laser
- Added support for two 80 columns graphics cards on MSX1 : Microsol VMX-80 and SVI-737 
- Added support for Video In, Sony HBI-V1 digitizer and the digitization part of the Philips NMS-8280 computer
- Added superimpose and external video source support in V9938 emulation
- Added support for PNG screenshots
- Added support for creating new disk images of various size on MSX and SVI-328
- Added support for undocumented screen mode (screen 0 with screen 2 style name table addressing)
- Added a new display synchronization method
- Added a video option to blend consecutive frames and get smoother picture
- Added support for the YM2149 PSG
- Fixed the MIDI-IN support in the Turbo-R machines
- Added new rom mappers for SFG-01 and SFG-05 (used in the Yamaha music computers), the F&M Direct Assembler System and the SG-1000 version of The Castle
- Improved SRAM enable/disable handling in FM-PAC
- Restructured Keyboard and Joystick input
- Optimized the video rendering
- Added support for running blueMSX from read only media
- Added support for running blueMSX without storing any data on local machine
- Fixed addressing in Konami mappers
- Fixed bug in 1kB ram mapper used in ColecoVision and SG-1000
- Border rendering is now cycle accurate
- Fixed HREFRESH timing in VDP
- Fixed bug in XVRAM emulation
- Fixed sprite status bug
- Fixed VDP timing in Turbo-R and MSX2+ machines

In the debugger :
- Added find dialog to search for strings or values in the memory
- Improved editing in memory window
- Added debugging support of OPL sound chips

In the trainer :
- Extended the cheat database to 396 MSX games

You can find this emulator here : http://www.bluemsx.com

Have to check yet, but: is there already a lite-version which isn't the CPU-hog the recnt BLUEs have been? (aiming at the menus for instance)

You can find in CVS an alpha lite version for Linux, but there's no lite version for Windows.

These are very good news  :D

There is indeed a blueMSXlite based on SDL/SDLgl in the CVS that compiles for actually both linux and windows. The lite version doesn't have any menus so all configuration needs to be done in the ini files or command line arguments.

Note though that at least on windows its quite a lot slower than the full version, mainly because openGL sucks big time when it comes to transfer big chunks of data from RAM to the video card. But I haven't tried to optimize it or use gl extensions but plain openGL was a big disappointment to me.

dvik ->  :god:


dvik ->  :god:

I'm on a trip right now, when I arrive home I'll surely test it and report. Congrats goes to the blueMSX team for the hard word in this new release of blueMSX!. Keep on the good work!!.  :D :D :D :D

I've been testing the lasts experiments I've written and here are the results :

(http://www.telefonica.net/web2/msxpage/others/sync.png) (http://www.telefonica.net/web2/msxpage/others/64chars.png) (http://www.telefonica.net/web2/msxpage/others/VDPir2.png)

That's how they look by having enabled the blending of consecutive frames, I like it! :D. Btw, the last one is from the [WYZ] demo and it works flawlessly too!  ;)

Now some comments...the skull demo doesn't sync well and some garbage appears in screen on MSX1 config. I can't recall correctly; but I think that I've tested it over OpenMSX, old BlueMSX and my real MSX1 (a bare one, only with external diskdrive) and always works without glitches. Last OpenMSX still shows the image correctly, BlueMSX don't, only does it right when running a MSX2 or higher configuration. I've tested this demo again some days ago on my MSX1, this time with a CF-IDE and it shows the same desync that in BlueMSX. So, let's see:

OpenMSX + MSX1 = OK
BlueMSX + MSX1 = NOK
MSX1 + CF-IDE = NOK (like BlueMSX)
MSX1 + diskdrive = OK? (must to test it again...)

From the results I can guess that one of the emus has some timing problem, isn't it?

Another anoying bug (or at least it seems so...). I've not been able to take those screenshots using PNG, every program I've tried to view them says that they're invalid PNG files ???. Seems that the blend setting has nothing to do with this behaviour, the PNGs are always corrupt. Maybe I'm doing something in the wrong way? ???
 
I'll keep testing...

I'm having the same problem with the emulator: Fireworks can't open then but the Microsoft Image Viewer can ¿? I had to change te file type for the screenshots in the Options menu.

Thanks for the feedback jltursan. The timing is indeed not correct in the skulls part. The problem is that I fixed another timing bug, the copper bars in Unleashed. But when fixing that bug, I introduced another one, basically its the timing between several events (vint, draw area, vram to display). So now I actually reverted the first bug fix which makes Unleashed buggy instead, but I'll try to find a solution that it correct.

The png support is a bit unfortunate, because the png files are shown in some image viewers but not in others. Unfortunately I didn't test the more common once  >:(

There are almost 10 known bugs in 2.5, none that serious but  I'm thinking of doing a new release in a month or two with fixes for the bugs and perhaps one or two new features.

dvik: I almost forget!. Your demo works ok on my hb10p!. Regards  ;)

Are you thinking about a something-like RZX feature for blueMSX. I use this very often in Spectaculator for playing Spectrum games and it's a good thing because I can "record" how to finish a game or how to play with it...

My wish-list for BlueMSX starts with WAV loading support for cassette interface emulation. :D

Support for something like RZX is actually what I was thinking of as one new feature. I've been promising this feature for quite some time now and it shouldn't be too hard to do. The trickiest part of it is to support smooth rewind of a recording but maybe thats not needed in a first version. The other tricky part is how to combine the recording with save states. It would be very nice if you could start a recording and then do save states and when a save state is loaded, the recording would continue from that point.

Wave cassette support is also something that would be very nice. I've been thinking of this but I'm not sure whats the best solution. openMSX always converts cas files to wav files inside the emulator which is what I prefer too, but I guess some users think its loading too slow. What do you think?

This time my vote goes to the video recording feature!,....after all, we can always convert a WAV file to a CAS one and, presto!, BlueMSX can load it. If you have a CD full of WAVs ;), you can do a silly launcher that first converts the WAV to a CAS into a temp directory and the launch the emu :); but hey!, if dvik has the needed routines already coded in BlueMSX go for it!. Everyone could select the preferred loading method, even the slow WAV, and enjoy the old loading color bars of some games. :)
About the video, I don't see the point to release a first version with all these fancy features, it's better to set up first, a plain but optimized recording routine that only dumps the playfield as AVI (or MPG) file. Nothing more and nothing less...

And .. I would like a more powerfull and faster debugger with a friendly GUI.Now I find it works fine but slow and hard to use. Softice alike would be perfect. ;)

Conversion from CAS to WAV is so easy. Loading time is not a issue because it lets you have the real MSX experience. On the other hand, if you want to load the game faster, you can overclock the emulated computer so that it is loaded in a few seconds. I use this trick (F9 IIRC) whenever I test my ROM to WAV conversions in openMSX. A similar solution would be greatly appreciated in BlueMSX.

The debugger was actually initially developed as a quick test to test the debugging interface and then it grew step by step. What I actually had in mind was to use an existing debugger and replace the backend. But I haven't done any research. Does anyone know of any good debugger with an open backend? I think it would be very cool to have a fully featured debugger with all fancy stuff for blueMSX. (I would think that it takes more than a month do to something like this so maybe not for next release....)

Try holding Alt+F9. I usually reconfigure the full speed shortcut to F11 because I like it better. The difference between the openMSX F9 and the bluemsx full speed is that the blueMSX one is not a toggle, so it runs full speed while holding the button and goes back to normal speed when you release it. I like this a lot better than a toggle because it gives more control (at least the way I like to use it).

There is appearantely a toggle fullspeed shortcut too. I never use it. By default its configured to LCtrl+LShift+M but If you use it a lot I suggest reconfiguring it.

hI

[Ante todo, perdonadme mi falta de educación por no contestar en ingles, pero es uno de mis defectos favoritos.

Simplemente decir que, si hay alguien en este foro que le pueda hacer llegar al que ha hecho la traducción de los menus del emulador, que hay una falta de ortografía en el menú archivo->cassette->rebovinar tras insertar, debería ser rebobinar.

Digo yo que un pequeño fallo tan tonto se podrá arreglar facilmente.
Un saludo.]

Hi de nuevo

[En encontrado otra pequeña errata en la traducción.

en la opción de propiedades-emulación, hay una caja de chequeo donde pone literalemente "No sincronizar unidade de disco". Supongo que querra decir "No sincronizar unidad de disco".

Espero que no se enfade el que haya hecho la traducción conmigo ;D. Pero quedaría mucho más elegante arreglando estos pequeños detalles, que supongo que serán faciles de arreglar.

Otro saludo, y mil perdones por mi mala educacion de contestar en español.]

Jos'b si me permites pongo aquí una traducción de tus comentarios:

Minor spelling corrections in Spanish version:



As Jos'b said: just some spelling corrections to get a more elegant emulator for the Spanish users. A great Job!!

Regards
--
SapphiRe

saphire: Thank you.

[Por cierto he descubierto alguna errata más, pero no queria abusar por si me echais del foro]

Creo que deberías postear todos los fallos de traducción que observes para que se puedan arreglar. Para nada te van a echar del foro por hacer esto.

I think that you must post each translation mistake you notice about. You won't be kicked out from these forums for doing this.

I agree, I also want to notice that YOU'LL BE KICKED OUT if you don't post each translation mistake you found he he he he... ;D ;D

Vamos, que si no sueltas prenda te pateamos el trasero hasta que adquiera un bonito COLOR 6,13 jajajajajajajajaja ;D ;D ;D

Pues mira hay otro detalle que se podría cambiar en "propiedades>configuraciones", donde dice "Deshabilitar Salvapantallas mientras BlueMSX esté en ejecució" , le falta la n final,
creo que se podría haber acortado la frase para que quepa entera..

En "Propiedades>Archivo" justo por abajo de la frase "numero de items ... " me salen varias lineas verticales pequeñitas. Claro que esto no sé si es de mi ordenata.

Y en "propiedades>video" la palabra scanlines ¿no se podía haber traducido por refresco horizontal ?. Tambien aquí creo que falta una "s" donde dice" Mezclar frames consecutiva"

Estos son algunos detalles que he notado a primera vista.

Supongo que lo de las traducciones a cada idioma se hará mediante algún archivo que se podría modificar facilmente. Digo yo.

All corrections of the Spanish language in blueMSX are welcome :)

When some letters are missing, there's indeed a problem of enough place in the emulator's interface. I get the same problem with other languages (also in French, my first language), so a solution is to shorten the translated terms, another one is to adapt the interface.

Translate 'scanlines' is not easy as the user must know that he can make appear the scanlines more or less visible, what has an impact on the video contrast. And there's also a problem of place in the emulator's interface for a longer expression.

Agreed. Maybe could be (hardly) translated to "lineas de barrido"; but I've never used a spanish expression when talking about scanlines, and of course it will be longer and prolly don't fit in the space assigned.

If someone is interested in touching up the Spannish (or other) translation, the help would be very appreciated. I'm also trying to rearrange the user interface a little bit to better fit too long lines.

You can find the latest spannish translation here (http://bluemsx.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/bluemsx/blueMSX/Src/Language/LanguageSpannish.h)

Currently we don't have active native speaking translators for the following languages (based on updates for 2.5) So if you want to start contributing or if you've done it in the past and liked it, we'd appreciate your help:

- Dutch (this one is covered now thanks to Sjoerd)
- German (http://bluemsx.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/bluemsx/blueMSX/Src/Language/LanguageGerman.h)
- Spannish (http://bluemsx.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/bluemsx/blueMSX/Src/Language/LanguageSpannish.h)
- Italian (http://bluemsx.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/bluemsx/blueMSX/Src/Language/LanguageItalian.h)
- Portuguese (http://bluemsx.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/bluemsx/blueMSX/Src/Language/LanguagePortuguese.h)

Dvik, if you agree I will be pleased to help with the Spanish translation

Regards
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SapphiRe

SapphiRe, that would be great  :D  Feel free to do any changes you'd like.

I'm thinking of making especially the properties dialog a bit bigger so that longrer lines can be used. There are several translated lines (in most languages) that are shortened down too much just so they can fit  so I'd like to get some more space there so the translations can be more accurate.
 

Thanks Daniel, I'll do that, but now I've a big handicap: the LCD screen of my laptop is dead... :'(