Sunday, November 30, 2008

Download the free PC games

A lot of people are looking for more and more games sites in order to download them in their PC for free.


The numerous search engines display millions of such sites which offer superb games without any cost. But downloading those free online games at times looks a bit difficult. People wonder if actually any online site allows the free downloading of the computer games on their PC’s.
PC games
Before any gamer decide to download any game from different portals, he should know which site he should consider for downloading. Yet, before you start to download any game, you need to look at various aspects. One such aspect is the way through which you download. The most common way of downloading the computer games is the file sharing networks. A lot of people are now taking up this form of downloading as it the most apt and easy way of downloading the games. People have taken up the P2P file sharing method. The people have some license number which allows them to download the computer games without any cost.

In the recent times, loads and loads new portals have come up which offers superb and great computer games which are huge fun. People from the kids to the old age group love to play these computer games as having it is very easy. Therefore, downloading the computer games free of cost is just a click away.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Vista x64 upload working!

I've managed to get the upload program working once more with the x64 driver, however I now need to press F8 whenever the machine is booting up so I can disable driver signing. Stupid stupid stupid vista! I wonder how much it costs to sign a driver. This is a VERY popular driver, so it may be possible for everyone to club together and pay for it.

There used to be a work around where you could just switch it off, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom disabled it. Its thing like this which will drive folk to other operating systems. (Course... MAC doesn't HAVE a parallel port...)

I think one of the things on my to-do list should be a simple USB to parallel wire. Now I know there ARE some, but I'd love to have a proper one that acts EXACTLY like a parallel port and does all the crap for you. I imagine this would sell pretty well, particually if it could get signed properly. Oh well... another one to add to the list.

Still, for now its working and means I can now test Plus4 code again. The original uploader hasn't changed, but I now have a new DLL and SYS file that I use on VISTA.

So what else is new; well I've added basic SID support to Minus4j but its a bit pooh to say the least. The lack of filter support really sucks and since most music/fx uses them, they just dont sound right at all.Attila has kindly sent me the core of the SID emulator from YAPE and I'll see if I can wedge that in. It's very much like trying to put a square peg in a round whole though as YAPE and Minus4j are not only very different langauges, but have very different design philosophies. Still, its worth a go! With any luck I'll get it added and we can get some good sounds playing in demos.

Speaking of demos, I noticed that many appear to over run their rasters, and I think I've finally figured out why. I dont think Minus4j (or Minus4w) are letting them have a whole scanline. Basically the "newline" function is being called at the start/end of a scanline (HBLANK) but thats not where the timing is working from. The horizontal dot clock is being reset by the newline function and losing clock ticks. This means you dont get all your processing cycles, and would also be the cause of my inability to load tapes. Tape loading is in fact VERY easy (once you have a good sample), all you do is set a bit on/off as it plays, and at the right time. But if the CPU timing is out, it'll never work - explains a few things.

It may however be a nightmare to fix, so I'll have to look into it. It would be great to be able to load PRGs, D64s and TAPs into Minus4j, but I'll wait and see how everything else goes. I really really don't want to get sucked wasting all my time on emulators again...I have bigger fish to fry.

EDIT: Oh, and if anyone else does want to use the uploader on Vista64, then let me know and post a ZIP with the new drivers and installation instructions.

Thursday, November 27, 2008

A sound idea and Vista kicking you when you're down.

I was fixing some sound issues with Minus4j last night, as I suddenly discovered it was actually pretty broken. If both channels went quite loud and high frequency, it all started to break up - samples too in point of fact. So I spent some time fixing this and its all much nicer, samples sound pretty clean and music in Commando and Monty on the Run are much much nicer.

This then lead me to look at D64 support. I was trying to load TerraNova and it started to work, then didn't. It gets stuck in some odd loop which i think is sample based, but I'm not sure, and I think I have my interrupt flagging wrong. Currently I flag them only when $FF0A is also set, but I believe this is wrong. I think you should always flag them, they just dont kick off an interrupt!

So i thought I'd do some test code on the real machine and see what happens. It was at this point I realised I haven't downloaded anything since I've upgraded (and I use that term losely) to Vista x64. Parallel port access requires a system driver, and under x64 all system drivers must be x64 based. This means my great little 32bit dll which gives me raw access to a parallel port under windows, now no longer works, which in turn means I can no longer download directly to the plus4 - OR carry on with my debugger. FEK!

So I've managed to find a 64bit version of the driver, but its just not working, and now I dont know if thats because the driver isn't working, isn't being found or simply because the parallel port on my machine is set up wrongly. FEK.

So tonight I hope to fix this and test out the interrupt registers a bit more. At the same time, I've started adding D64 support via the Commodore 1551 parallel port registers. This is why turbo loaders dont work on Minus4 as I assume its one of these devices. I used to just intercept calls to the LOAD command, but this is a little better. Anyway, I hope to get basic D64 support in soon although with all the disk turbo loaders around I'm not sure how much use it'll be.

As a little aside.. I was looking at the Minus4sim I started years back. This was a cycle perfect version of Minus4, but I got bored with emulation and mechanic was a little too messy for my likeing. However... C# has some really, REALLY cool constructs for pausing code mid execution, and i think if I ported it over to C#, it would all become VERY elegent and simple to follow. No longer would you have to hold partial states etc. You just pause and resume. So I may play with this at a later date as it would give some very simple code but yield some amazing results. It would also allow me to finally do a fully emulated 1541, which I've been meaning to do for years.

Still mustn't get too side tracked. I have to finish up with Minus4j, then the debugger, then back on to Xeo3.

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Cool Electronics things....

So first a couple of links:-


http://www.belogic.com/uzebox/index.htm
http://www.ladyada.net/make/fuzebox/


Now whats this got to do with anything? Well have a look at these videos




Very cool indeed, more so because its not a particually expensive chip. So I was wondering what more you could do with it, and I've been having a look at some videos, and the specs. Now I've always used PIC Microchips, but I've noticed an increasing number of projects using these ATmega things and after looking at the datasheets, I can see why. The assembler is actually pretty nice! It looks normal! PIC stuff is okay, but I'm not a fan where as the ATmega has 32 registers, hardware multiplys, and most instructions take a single cycle! Now that IS interesting! Now have a look at this video....





This guy does various demos with it, and he gets some pretty cool results for such a small little device. So, I've ordered myself a little kit to playwith, and I might try hooking it up to a VGA monitor (I'm still struggling with PAL colour output, this phase shift stuff is a tad confusing). The other thing this little chip can do that PIC's simply can't, is address external RAM without having to do all the work yourself! Thats awesome! It means you could have megs of addressable SRAM (in the same way a Plus/4 could) without any speed loss, where as a PIC would really struggle as you have to set address lines, read and write data lines et..

What I would really like to try is making a GPU for a plus4. If I use dual port RAM, I could get the plus4 to write into the ATmegas ram, then get it to use it as a frame buffer and render things. This means you could switch the plus4's screen off (saving lots of CPU time), and then output the signal from the cartridge's ATmega chip. You could then add sprites, sound and all the rest without too much effort. if you really wanted to, you could have multiple chips each doing a different job - one for 10 channel SID emulation (or something), another for pure sample playback, and perhaps one to deal with chatacter maps, and another could add sprites etc... kinda like an arcade machine does.

Course...that won't happen. but i'd love to try and hook one up to a Plus4 and see what it would be like. Having already done a RAM expansion without opening up the plus4, I don't see why something like this couldn't be done - it'd be neat!

Monday, November 24, 2008

Super Mario Games Mania

Super Mario Games are a very important section in the world of video games and has a royal name since the time of Nintendo.


Mario is among the most easily recognizable faces in the world of internet games. Surprisingly, the actual name of the games was the jump man but later the name was changed to Mario as it acts as the promotional name too.
Super Mario
At the time of the introduction of this game, it caught up a great success. The very initial games of Nintendo did not actually very different games from the other companies like Atari. But after the introduction of the Superb games Super Mario Games in the market, Nintendo captured the market and became the most popular and almost an icon in the video game world.

One of the most famous and played Super Mario Games in the recent time is Mario Kart Series. The best thing about the game is that it allows the players to play the game in a competitive manner. More than a single player can play this game which makes it more interesting and a great fun. It is an adventures game to play and have great clean fun while playing this game which leaves the friends still friends. The people from all age group have a great passion for the Super Mario Games these days which is spreading like fire. Thus, Super Mario Games are still rocking!

Ultimate Entertainer- Free Flash Games

The flash games have captured a great part in the world of internet. In the recent times, playing online games during free time have almost become a trend.

Free Flash Games
The arcade games are not always considered good with the school administrators or the employers. In order to add more to this existing mess, the free flash games played on the internet are not always very useful but surely helps in over coming the boredom as it Is a great fun and big time pass.

The flash based online games offered free by numerous portals are among the fastest growing and moving industries today. A lot of different kinds of flash games are offered free which are countless. Finding the best flash games on the websites might become a bit difficult but all flash games are fun.

The most excellent part of the free flash games is that all of them come in numerous types, genres and themes, whether you wish to play any adventures games or you are looking for any flying, shooting, puzzle, action, racing or any other kind of flash games. The online free flash games are not merely for the children. People of all age group especially people between 20 years to 40 years love to play this game. The free flash games help the players to come out of their all stress and tensions. Therefore, it helps to keep the players healthy too.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

JAR files.

I've been having a little trouble getting resources inside JAR files working, I took some code from my mobile phone days and used it inside Minus4j without any luck. The idea being that I could package the ROM and WAVE files up in the JAR file, and so I wouldn't have to do a slow load over HTTP.

I've now managed to get this working by using the main minus4j class rather than a java object. No idea why this matters, but it does, and it's now working. This means I can now package up ROMs and samples without having the extra paramaters or load commands, which it turn will spead up loading.

I'm also planing to add a virtual keyboard that will let you click keys rather than search for them - Saying I don't get bored of all this first of course....