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SDL/n2DLib ports for TI Nspire

Started by gameblabla, August 19, 2015, 08:48:31 PM

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Dream of Omnimaga

I remember playing this game, but I don't remember if it was on my calc or Flash. Glad to see an update that improves the speed and size. :)

Quote from: gameblabla on September 17, 2015, 10:22:15 PM
Now, what happens next ?
Wii U emulator for the TI-Nspire? Some people once implied that its technical specs are inferior to the Gamecube :trollface:
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

gameblabla

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on September 17, 2015, 10:23:50 PM
Quote from: gameblabla on September 17, 2015, 10:22:15 PM
Now, what happens next ?
Wii U emulator for the TI-Nspire? Some people once implied that its technical specs are inferior to the Gamecube :trollface:
Lol, i wished they kept its old name (Project Café) because honestly, that's what it's only good for.

Speaking about the 3DO, i found one emulator that was using SDL like one year ago.
Yeah i know, a CD is bigger than the Nspire's NAND but some games are much smaller than that.
Obviously, it will not run fullspeed or even close.
I will into it and see what i can come up with.
  • Calculators owned: None (used to own an Nspire and TI-89)

novenary

To be fair, the Wii U is just an upgrade over the GC/Wii architecture. It's the exact same hardware with a new GPU, more RAM and 3 CPU cores than at higher clocks.

Dream of Omnimaga

Yeah I was kidding, but while it's an upgrade in graphics over the Wii/GC, they still don't stand up against PS4/XBone graphics. I only got the Wii U because of exclusives like MK8 and other Mario games.

Quote from: gameblabla on September 17, 2015, 10:31:32 PM
Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on September 17, 2015, 10:23:50 PM
Quote from: gameblabla on September 17, 2015, 10:22:15 PM
Now, what happens next ?
Wii U emulator for the TI-Nspire? Some people once implied that its technical specs are inferior to the Gamecube :trollface:
Lol, i wished they kept its old name (Project Café) because honestly, that's what it's only good for.

Speaking about the 3DO, i found one emulator that was using SDL like one year ago.
Yeah i know, a CD is bigger than the Nspire's NAND but some games are much smaller than that.
Obviously, it will not run fullspeed or even close.
I will into it and see what i can come up with.

CD size was my main concern. Aren't every CD-based game fixed at 700 MB or can the ISO or whatever they use in emulators be smaller?  On TI-z80 calc, all flash apps are multiple of 16 KB and even if you made Hello World as an app it would still take 16384 bytes of Flash. However, when saved on the computer, the app only takes the space it uses, but twice as much (for example a single page app that uses 234 bytes of the page would be 468 bytes on the computer).
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

novenary

Nintendo believes that staying a generation behind will get them more profit. They actually make more profit on the hardware while selling it at a lower price than the ps4 and Xbox.

Dream of Omnimaga

#95
Well I heard before that when Sony sold the PS3, they were barely making any money from each console and mostly made it from games and the like. As for staying 1 generation behind, it depends of what you have to offer. The Wii U launch lineup was terrible, except NSMBU and NSLU, which didn't bring enough new stuff to make the console attractive to NSMBWii/DS/2 players. Then it took over 2 years before we finally get big sellers like MK8 and SSB4. I heard that Splatoon and Windwaker HD sold pretty well too, though.


Anyway, back on topic, something that would be cool is a TI-84+, TI-84+CSE and TI-84+CE emulator for the TI-Nspire. The latter might be pushing things a little far, but in 2011 @jacobly made a TI-84+ emulator for the TI-Nspire CX, which was very promising until he lost the source. Calc84maniac had made one for the clickpad models back in 2010, but also lost the source.

I wonder if any SDL Z80 emulator exists?


Also, Sega Game Gear and Master System. Oh and Atari 2600. :P
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

novenary

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on September 18, 2015, 04:56:42 PM
I wonder if any SDL Z80 emulator exists?
z80e, the official KnightOS emulator, uses SDL. I think matref started porting it, the emulator itself is incomplete though and for performance it'd be better if it was ported to n2dlib of course.

Dream of Omnimaga

Ah I see. But it would be nice to see an emulator that can run the official TI-OSes as well. Clickpad and Touchpad models used to have one built-in by default, but sadly, TI got rid of it in color models.
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

novenary

That aside the emulator isn't very accurate (eg it lacks all the undocumented but widely used z80 instructions).

Dream of Omnimaga

It still was pretty handy, though. I kinda prefered having to have a broken emulator than nothing. I coded Illusiat 13 on my TI-Nspire almost the entire time. :P
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

gameblabla

#100
I have a SMS/GG emulator but guess what ?
It crashes.
I have an Atari 2600 emulator too but guess what ?
It crashes too...
I had (and still have) weird bugs with GCC, especially with optimisations turned on but even without them,
it still crashes for no reason other than bad code being generated by GCC.

Could Clang be used instead of GCC for Nspire dev ?
I heard Clang compiles better code for ARM and that was partly why Apple switched to it.
Anyways, this is the reason why we don't have thousands of emulators for Nspire.

As for z80e, i may give this a look but it looks like it is using cmake... Gee.
I guess i will have to make my own Makefile then.

One more thing : The cause for the slowdowns in Dgen was indeed gettimeday.
It runs much faster but it still is pretty slow (10FPS?) and most importantly,
input does not work on Nspire, even though it does on PC...
  • Calculators owned: None (used to own an Nspire and TI-89)

novenary

Apple has been using clang for much longer than the iphone existed.

Dream of Omnimaga

Sorry to hear about the GCC issues. I wonder if Clang support could be added easily to Ndless? That said, perhaps another Nspire C coder could help you as well, such as @Lionel Debroux , @critor , @ExtendeD or someone else (I forgot who is in charge of Ndless anymore)


The other solution would be to write your own emulators from scratch, like calc84maniac did with gbc4nspire, but that's obviously more work and requires a considerably higher amount of experience. (Also I think gbc4nspire was written in ASM, not in C)
  • Calculators owned: TI-82 Advanced Edition Python TI-84+ TI-84+CSE TI-84+CE TI-84+CEP TI-86 TI-89T cfx-9940GT fx-7400G+ fx 1.0+ fx-9750G+ fx-9860G fx-CG10 HP 49g+ HP 39g+ HP 39gs (bricked) HP 39gII HP Prime G1 HP Prime G2 Sharp EL-9600C
  • Consoles, mobile devices and vintage computers owned: Huawei P30 Lite, Moto G 5G, Nintendo 64 (broken), Playstation, Wii U

Lionel Debroux

The primary reason why Apple switched to the LLVM stack is licensing (avoidance of anything GPLv3). Clang's C/C++ support and LLVM's code generation abilities have become quite good, but definitely weren't when Apple switched to the LLVM stack.
I quite doubt using Clang as an alternative to GCC for Nspire code generation would either help much, or hinder much.
Member of the TI-Chess Team.
Co-maintainer of GCC4TI (GCC4TI online documentation), TIEmu and TILP.
Co-admin of TI-Planet.

gameblabla

#104
So i have fixed Hugo, a NEC PC-ENGINE emulator and it now works properly on Ti Nspire CX.
I suggest you overclock your calc for this one.
(I might look at the frameskipping options later)

You can download it here.
Github repo

Also, it could crash like PicoDrive or the early versions of PocketSNES
so there's no guarantee it will not work on your nspire.

EDIT: Just to warn you that i'll be unavailable from 20th September and this could take days or even weeks.
I'll move to france so i may or may not die in the plane.
In both cases, i have released some of the source code of my broken emulators :

https://github.com/gameblabla/stella-nspire
https://github.com/gameblabla/prosystem-nspire
https://github.com/gameblabla/dgen-nspire
https://github.com/gameblabla/sms-nspire
  • Calculators owned: None (used to own an Nspire and TI-89)

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