You wouldn't think so, but this is Zanac-Ex running on real MSX and 2 laptops with openMSX. And Alex Wulms is enjoying it.

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Comments (3)

Prophet (2435)

24-01-2017, 00:22

So I noticed Zanac-Ex on th VG-8250 (or 80) as this is one of my all-time favourite shmup, but did not get the intention here. Something like showing the game was running with the same speed, GFX & sounds on both openMSX & real MSX hardware?

By Manuel

Ascended (19227)

24-01-2017, 12:15

There was no real point. I just got an idea to see how good they sync, as I had the exact same image running on the emulator and the real machine. (But I didn't even have the exact same machine configuration.)
Also, Zanac appeared to be a bad test case, as it uses random input from the user to permanently influence the RNG, so once you're off sync, you can never get it back. And I tried to do an initial sync with user input

It would be really fun if someone would write a 'bot' (like NESbot): a piece of hardware controlled from a PC that can input the data from the openMSX OMR file into the real MSX. A bit of a challenge, especially to get a good initial syncpoint.

Who takes up that challenge?

By Louthrax

Prophet (2435)

24-01-2017, 14:57

So I already tried something like that with 2 real MSX machines, using an infra-red Sega controller (with 2 IR receivers on each MSX, but paired to the same unique joypad): things were going out of sync really fast in all games I tried! The video frequency was the same (60Hz), but the MSX machines were different (a VG-8235 and a Sony IIRC).