A wrapper for TI's JavaScript-based z80/eZ80 emulators

u/Dream of Omnimaga December 02, 2015, 04:11:25 AM

What do you think is not working? File transfer/loading would definitively be a big plus for this emulator for those who have Smartview. I don't like TI-Smartview because it's too slow, but this JS wrapper lacks file sending, so it isn't very practical during ASM/C/BASIC testing and development. I didn't know adding file transfer would be possible at all. If you manage to (legally) add such feature successfully, then good job.

u/Adriweb December 02, 2015, 04:27:56 AM

It sure is fun, but I didn't add that myself because :
- Implementing transfers the right way is insanely complex, let alone on an obfuscated (well, minified) codebase
- implementing the "bad"/hacky way is not very hard on the contrary (as seen in his repo, it's not a whole lot of lines to get things started), but... it is extremely version-dependant: it will only work for a specific version (in this case, SV 5.1 with 84+CE, not the 83PCE and on any other versions)
- TI is probably watching my repo

- ... and they may not like such features as it would get closer and closer to SmartView (and less an emu "wrapper" as the name indicates)

For all those reasons, I can't/won't promote the fork on the upstream one, but oh well, have fun, after all it's not open-source for nothing

Last Edit: December 02, 2015, 04:29:27 AM by Adriweb

u/Dream of Omnimaga December 02, 2015, 04:43:50 AM

Good move I think. We don't want those features to be mainstream anyway. I guess it's just for the convenience of being able to use their emu without experiencing severe lag. Trust me, I tried First Fantady in it and not only it ran twice slower, but it also processed keypresses even slower and at one point I was about 1 minute behind in keypresses. Even the TI-OS is slow, which isn't very excusable when the software costs $150 (while HP offers theirs for free)

Perhaps TI need some development help to find a workaround?

u/Adriweb December 02, 2015, 04:44:54 AM

TI perfectly knows it's slow[er] in SmartView, but... it's "fast enough" for teachers and most usecases (which aren't ours

)

u/Snektron December 02, 2015, 04:50:43 PM

I found the error

It had something to do with loading the file and interpreting some characters as 2-byte characters.
I solved it by loading the file into an arraybuffer and making a string of it by first creating a Uint8Array, instead of reading the string in one go.

I'm not entirely sure if things like pictures work, but i tested some and it doesn't crash so thats good

Programs seem to work anyway.

Also more people might want this, so be sure to spread the news :3

Last Edit: December 02, 2015, 05:10:09 PM by Cumred_Snektron

u/Dream of Omnimaga December 02, 2015, 05:30:56 PM

Quote from: Adriweb on December 02, 2015, 04:44:54 AM
TI perfectly knows it's slow[er] in SmartView, but... it's "fast enough" for teachers and most usecases (which aren't ours )

So they adopted the 3 characters every second is super fast philosophy?

Quote from: Cumred_Snektron on December 02, 2015, 04:50:43 PM
I found the error It had something to do with loading the file and interpreting some characters as 2-byte characters.
I solved it by loading the file into an arraybuffer and making a string of it by first creating a Uint8Array, instead of reading the string in one go.

I'm not entirely sure if things like pictures work, but i tested some and it doesn't crash so thats good
Programs seem to work anyway.

Also more people might want this, so be sure to spread the news :3

Good to hear. If a news is made, it should specify that the js wrapper requires a working smartview install to be used, but is much faster.