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Post by elmer on Dec 11, 2018 1:48:39 GMT
After a 2-year gap, I've finally updated my customized "no-eyestrain" version of the Mednafen emulator to the latest version 1.21.3. For anyone that doesn't remember this from the PCEFX forums, it increases the size of Mednafen's debugging displays and fonts so that they are more pleasant to use while developing homebrew or translation patches. In addition, the PCE emulation has 480KB of SCD RAM (banks $44-$7F), plus the 2MB ACD RAM (banks $40-$43), and the PC-FX emulation has 8MB RAM. The extra RAM can be useful during homebrew development as a place to store debugging-info. It might also be useful for someone that needs some extra memory for a translation, especially since the Turbo Everdrive2 provides that extra memory. Prebuilt downloads for Win32 and Win64 can be found in the Elmer's PC Engine Programming Resource Links thread at the top of this forum, as can the build script and patches if someone wants to build their own version for linux (debian has been tested and confirmed to work). The prebuilt versions only support the PC Engine, PC-FX, VirtualBoy, PlayStation and WonderSwan, but you can compile your own version with other console platforms if you wish. The new debugging screen looks something like this ... Rather than the headache-inducing original ...
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 11, 2018 2:16:08 GMT
Nice.. it does look much nicer ! (I hadn't noticed how hard the old one is on the eyes until I saw the side-by-side)
Where can I fond this ? I think I'll be building the linux one on Ubuntu.
Oh... The Flag register still isn't broken out by bits... (minor grumble)
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Post by elmer on Dec 11, 2018 2:55:35 GMT
Where can I fond this ? I think I'll be building the linux one on Ubuntu. I've edited my post to explicitely link to the stickied thread with all of my PCE programming stuff in it. Or you can go directly to github since you're just going to build it yourself (please pay attention to the list of prerequisite libs that mednafen needs). Oh... The Flag register still isn't broken out by bits... (minor grumble) Nope, not in the main display, sorry. I presume that you know that you can move your cursor over to the flags register and see the individual bits listed. You can make that a quick operation if you just use the TAB key to bounce back-n-forth between the disassembly and the registers.
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Post by Mathius on Dec 11, 2018 3:31:16 GMT
You weren't kidding. That's horrible on the eyes!
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Post by ccovell on Dec 11, 2018 15:10:15 GMT
Thanks for doing this. I'm liking the disassembly window, but unfortunately the hex view causes more eyestrain than I was used to before...
Old Medafen:
New Mednafen:
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Post by elmer on Dec 12, 2018 2:35:37 GMT
Thanks for doing this. I'm liking the disassembly window, but unfortunately the hex view causes more eyestrain than I was used to before... I would dispute the use of the term "eyestrain" when applied to the memory display, especiailly since it uses the same 6x13 font that is used in the disassembly window that you like ... but I certainly do understand that the huge wall of numbers may not be to your taste, especially in comparison to the "5x7 font scaled up to 10x14" in the old display. I can definitely see that it is easy to get lost with the large wall of numbers ... in fact, I remember finding that when looking at the LoX and Anearth games. But, personally, there's no way that I'm going to lose the ability to see 3x the memory data in that window compared to the original ... it would be just too limiting to me. I'll both see what can be done to make that screen easier to read, and I'll seperate out the patches for the disassembly screen and the memory screen so that you can keep the original memory screen if you wish to compile your own version (which is something that I encourage any serious programmer to be capable of doing). As it is, I completely forgot to migrate over a couple of memory-screen things from the old patches to the new patches, so I'll be releasing a new version soon, anyway. Just to let folks know ... there's a guy on the PlanetVB forums that is going to try to hook the GNU Debugger into Mednafen somehow so that we can have full C source-level-debugging on the PC-FX and VirtualBoy. That's something that's been on my (rather long) list of things to do for ages, and it would be absolutely wonderful to have that capability!!! If we can do it for the PC-FX and VirtualBoy, then there's no reason (that I can think of) why we couldn't expand that to Mednafen's PlayStation and Saturn modules ... which would be an absolute boon to homebrew developers far outside our little community.
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touko
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 106
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Post by touko on Dec 12, 2018 10:20:48 GMT
My eyes say you, thanks sir ..
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Post by elmer on Dec 15, 2018 19:41:14 GMT
Thanks to Chris's input, I've taken another look at the memory debugger display and modified it to make it easier read (IMHO). The patch for the memory debugger has been separated into its own file so that anyone compiling from source can keep the original version, if they wish. The pre-built Windows downloads have been updated (the links are the same ... just download the files again), and so has github for anyone that wants to compile it themselves. The memory debugger display now looks like this, instead of the unbroken wall-of-text that's shown in Chris's earlier post ...
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 16, 2018 0:51:49 GMT
Looks nice ! Just wondering... does it have support for a custom encodings (i.e. non-ASCII, non-SJIS) ? I'm pretty sure that wasn't baked-in, but it's the kind of thing that might come in handy...
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Post by Mathius on Dec 16, 2018 1:01:39 GMT
I'm still getting some eye strain with your latest update. I think it has more to do with the way the font colors are alternating than the font itself. It's not like I'm personally ever going to be staring at this screen anytime soon, however. I'm probably not the only one though.
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Post by elmer on Dec 16, 2018 19:52:12 GMT
Looks nice ! Just wondering... does it have support for a custom encodings (i.e. non-ASCII, non-SJIS) ? I'm pretty sure that wasn't baked-in, but it's the kind of thing that might come in handy... Nope, Mednafen doesn't have that capability built-in, and the memory display doesn't really have room to display kanji glyphs on the right side. Displaying custom-coded kanji at the bottom (where it already has selectable text-encoding) might be a possible addition ... if someone wanted to add the capability. Mednafen's source code mostly C-in-C++ and is pretty easy to modify. It's not the unreadable STL-template-and-poorly-designed-fragile-class-structure that some developers come up with. I'm still getting some eye strain with your latest update. I think it has more to do with the way the font colors are alternating than the font itself. I spent some time making trying more alternatives with larger blocks of color, but have come away still preferring the current scheme (for the moment). The problem (for me) is that visually, the mind tends to group things of the same color together ... which is why the colors are the way that they are now. It makes it easier (for me) to skip forward/backward to similar colors on 4/8/12 bytes boundaries. Once you start using bigger blocks of color, the mind starts seeing the colored-blocks as logically-connected entities, even when they aren't, which can make things *harder* to read. The zero-page display on the main debugger page is an example of that ... I always get lost when trying to quickly find values in that display, and it uses a lot of concentration to focus beyond the 4x4 byte colored blocks and down into the row of values. You may find that your eye/mind responds differently to mine, and you're welcome to propose/implement your own version of the display. That's the beauty of Open Source software. If you do so, and I like it, then I'll be happy to use it myself!
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Post by Mathius on Dec 16, 2018 23:00:20 GMT
I can see your point there definitely with the alternating colored blocks.
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Post by Arkhan on Dec 19, 2018 20:25:42 GMT
Can we change the font? I hate that font. I always have.
I'm pretty partial to Microsoft's FixedSys one. There's a TTF version now instead of the raster one.
Other than that, coolcool. I personally never had problems with the old one (yet), but it's either because I got used to it, or my eyes aren't fucked yet.
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Post by spenoza on Dec 19, 2018 20:52:47 GMT
Honestly, the white text on black background is probably harder on the eyes (for contrast related reasons) than the actual design of the screen.
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 22, 2018 1:09:06 GMT
Quick question: The "TS" (time signature) value... what units is it in ? is it something like master clock cycles (i.e. 21.48 MHz) ?
I'm doing some debugging and wanted to use that as a yardstick, but I'm hoping to move from "relative time" to "absolute time".
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