Hi all,

I used to be an active MSX user (I was part of FAC and did development on FAC Soundtracker and did some demo music), and now I'm more into emulation using java.
My current emulation project 'JEmu2' (can be found on www.gagaplay.com) now only emulates arcades, but recently I started an MSX driver for it. It currently only emulates a bare MSX1, but so far it seems to work fine and it already benefits of the different rendering modes of JEmu2 (including the cool 'fishbowl effect').
Because there are plenty of good MSX emulators out there already, my goal is not to make the umpteenth MSX emulator, but to create dedicated drivers for some games which enhance the originals. Think for example smooth scrolling of otherwise jerky scrolling games like knightmare or nemesis, and of course online high scores.

Anyway, I hope this will be an interesting addition to MSX emulation and I'll keep you posted.

Erik Duijs

Hi Erik, welcome back to MSX world!

And thanks for your past MSX work, it's kinda famous

Federation Against Commodore good old times....

It's always cool to see 'oldies' return to their MSX passion... Welcome back, Erik...

Smooth scrolling in nemesis or knightmare - now there is a challenge!

Smooth scrolling in Nemesis and Knightmare was already done, by Fabio Schmidlin and Daniel Caetano, both were presented in Jau meetings.

Thanks everybody. MSX still has a warm place in my heart, although I'm not really doing any development on the real thing anymore :-)

The smooth scrolling thing will require some extra functionality in the vdp emulation, and some hackery of the roms (there should be some timer for example which could be translated to a pixel offset in the driver). In nemesis it will probably be harder, as some sprites scroll smoothly, and some do not (for example gunners that walk on the background scenery scroll jerkily together with the background, flying enemies scroll smoothly), and this might require some patching in the rom.

Quote:

Smooth scrolling in Nemesis and Knightmare was already done

craps, I thought I had a new idea :-/

Quote:

Smooth scrolling in Nemesis and Knightmare was already done, by Fabio Schmidlin and Daniel Caetano, both were presented in Jau meetings.

Is it possible to download a ROM image ? or was it not for MSX?

Sure, both run on MSX, Knightmare on MSX2, Nemesis on MSX2+.

Knightmare smooth has a site: http://www.caetano.eng.br/MSXPage/kmg/?p=&l=en

Nemesis smooth I don't know. I saw Nemesis Smooth in Jau 2004, Kuniji Ikeda from Japan was there too, I remember talking with him about this project.

Thanks for the link, it seems like a very cool project!
It looks like they upgraded the original program to make use of MSX2 capabilities, while I'm trying to run the original ROM and pull off the smooth scrolling by tweaks in the game driver in the emulator. Maybe I just need to start adding smooth scrolling in different games (maybe sky jaguar).

In the meantime, I'm struggling with one strange problem in my emulator:
I have hooked up just enough keys to play a game (the cursor keys and space bar). When I boot up in basic, this seems to work okay, but when I load a test game (yie ar kungfu 2), it doesn't react to any key presses... :-/

Oh, figured it out :-)
I didn't emulate the joystick yet. Well, I still don't, but at least now it reports the joysticks as inactive.

Now I tried 3 different games, and all seem to have problems :-(
HyperRally misses some sprites here and there, yie ar kung-fu 2 is playable but number of lives seems to be wrong (it displays an 8 with some weird character behind it), and knightmare locks up when you start a game :-(.
Maybe there's still some bug left in the Z80 emulator, although it works fine in the JEmu2 arcade drivers...

There is a program called ZEX (Z80 Exerciser), you can use it to check the emulation of your Z80 core. It can detect almost every error in the z80 emulation. I think it's easy to find it in the web, but fell free to contact me if you can't find it.

About your smooth driver, you can try Zanac. This one should be easy, since all the patterns on the background are fixed, the only moving elements are the sprites.

I'm excited about online high scores!!! Now real competition will be possible