SDL/n2DLib ports for TI Nspire

[DJ Omnimaga]

It was surprising indeed how long it took to get a SNES emu for the Nspire, considering how popular the console was, but I guess it was due to things partly out of our control. >.< (like with Atari emulation)

[gameblabla]

I'm sure someone like calc84maniac could have done it well before me if he wanted to but it seems that he left the Nspire scene quickly after Gpsp...
(probably because he got too many death threats :p)
Speaking of Gpsp, well, he violated the gplv2 because he never released the source code to it...

I never honestly thought i would reach that speed on a TI-Nspire.
I even said at one point on omnimaga that fast Super NES emulation would never happen.
The irony is that the SNES emulator is now faster than even Picodrive... lol

[Vogtinator]

I'm sure someone like calc84maniac could have done it well before me if he wanted to but it seems that he left the Nspire scene quickly after Gpsp...
(probably because he got too many death threats :p)
Speaking of Gpsp, well, he violated the gplv2 because he never released the source code to it...

He did: https://www.omnimaga.org/ti-nspire-projects/gpsp-nspire-(gba-emulator)/msg314055/#msg314055

[DJ Omnimaga]

I'm sure someone like calc84maniac could have done it well before me if he wanted to but it seems that he left the Nspire scene quickly after Gpsp...
(probably because he got too many death threats :p)
Speaking of Gpsp, well, he violated the gplv2 because he never released the source code to it...

I never honestly thought i would reach that speed on a TI-Nspire.
I even said at one point on omnimaga that fast Super NES emulation would never happen.
The irony is that the SNES emulator is now faster than even Picodrive... lol

IIRC it had something to do with the lack of SNES emulators available to port to the TI-Nspire CX and people were probably not willing to write a brand new emulator from scratch. Plus I think there was SNESAdvance, which gp-SP Nspire probably ran, so that was an alternate but broken way to play SNES games. As for Calc84 I think he still idles in #omnimaga, #cemetech, #ti and #ez80dev or something, but he is no longer really active in the TI scene and I don't think he is even aware that CodeWalrus exists, let alone what is it.

[gameblabla]

He did: https://www.omnimaga.org/ti-nspire-projects/gpsp-nspire-(gba-emulator)/msg314055/#msg314055

Oh my... well now i'm feel like an idiot. hahaha
After modifying Gpsp to work with the recent GCC, i got it to work... almost.
Once you exit the emulator, it would just flat out crash.
I remember that using the function exit sometimes crashes the nspire for no good reason and unfortunely, Gpsp seems to rely on it...
It does seem to run a little faster than before though.

Anyway, i'm still releasing the binaries (and source) if anyone wants to take a look.

IIRC it had something to do with the lack of SNES emulators available to port to the TI-Nspire CX and people were probably not willing to write a brand new emulator from scratch.

I think this may have to do with the immaturity of dev tools.
Remember when i said that sms_plus could not be ported because it was crashing on Nspire ?
After GCC 5.1 and a new version of Newlib was released, it finally worked as intended.
So yeah, you only got SNES emulation in 2015 and only one year after, it got significantly refined.

I remember the state of the Nspire scene after Gpsp... there was nothing.
Even critor was surprised to see me active when i released "Rainbow Dash Cloud Attack" for TI-Nspire CX.
People were suspecting that Gpsp killed the Nspire scene but it is obviously false since there was some interest in PocketSNES,
it's just that developer competant enough :
- Do not have a Linux environment. (which is much easier to work with for devs)
- Or they thought it was an impossible task and thus, they did not attempted it.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Hm that sucks that dev tools held you and other people back >.<.

As for the Nspire scene inactivity, there are many factors, @gameblabla , although some might be arguable:

-TI's constant actions against Ndless (alienated many Nspire dev)
-The TI-Planet vs Omnimaga conflict in 2014 (many Nspire devs left Omni afterwards and Nspire news cross-posting ended)
-Omnimaga vs CodeWalrus split (many people were unaware of CW existence until much later)
-Console emulator ports (someone will be less motivated to make an Illusiat or Zelda clone if it's gonna compete head-to-head with Chrono Trigger and A Link to the Past)
-The TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition and TI-84 Plus CE (The Nspire CX market share probably diminished after those calcs came out)
-The last two points you mentioned about Ndless environment setup difficulties

However, from what I notice, people are still interested in making Nspire programs nowadays. Not as much as when Ndless first came out, but there's WalrusRPG, your game ports, etc.I don't think console emulators killed the scene. They just made people less inclined to make brand new games.

I personally enjoy your releases when I get time to try them. They would definitively get more exposure if you uploaded copies on ticalc.org, though (somee are there already, but not all, IIRC).

Keep up the good work

[Vogtinator]

I remember that using the function exit sometimes crashes the nspire for no good reason and unfortunely, Gpsp seems to rely on it...

Code that behaves correctly should not crash the nspire. Most likely there's a buffer overflow somewhere or the emulator doesn't reset the hardware to the correct state.

It does seem to run a little faster than before though.

Yeah, newlib is much more optimized than the OS itself and GCC 6 has some more aggressive optimizations, although those may cause crashes non not quite standard compliant code.
See: "-fno-delete-null-pointer-checks", "-fno-lifetime-dse"

[gameblabla]

I finally switched the input code from SDL to native for Temper.
As a result, it is 1.5x faster than the previous version, which is nice, especially since it was pretty slow...
You can downlaod it here, as usual.

Code that behaves correctly should not crash the nspire. Most likely there's a buffer overflow somewhere or the emulator doesn't reset the hardware to the correct state.

It does look a lot like it is not reseting the hardware properly.
Why this used to work before but not now is beyond me but like you said, this may be due to agressive optimisations.

They would definitively get more exposure if you uploaded copies on ticalc.org, though (somee are there already, but not all, IIRC).

Thanks for the suggestion, i have updated some of my emulators and added some new ones. (Temper and SMS_Plus, not Pom1 cause it's pretty bad)

Thank you guys for your support.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yay! On a side note I just remembered after re-reading my suggestion above that a ticalc.org file upload is a requirement to participate to the POTY and make front page news there, so it's another good reason to upliad your files there too.

And good luck fixing the issues mentioned above. X.x

[gameblabla]

I'm back with another Artur Rojek game, Homing Fever.
Avoid the missiles coming at your ship and survive as long as possible !



Requires Ndless 3.1+, compatible with CR4.
Download is below, in the attachments.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Interesting. It looks like Asteroids on the VCS but without the asteroids.

[gameblabla]

Interesting. It looks like Asteroids on the VCS but without the asteroids.

Except you can't even shoot at the missiles, unlike steroids :p

EDIT: Critor reported some errors with the game so i had to fix that.
I patched the game and uploaded a new tns.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah I meant the graphical style.

[gameblabla]

Here's REMiniscene, a port of Flashback for the TI Nspire CX.
It runs decently enough on a non-overclock Ti-Nspire CX.



You need to own either the DOS port or the Amiga one.
Then place your games files in a data folder and add the ".tns" extension to all your game files.
Place rs.tns next to the folder and run it.

[DJ Omnimaga]

That looks cool. Thanks for the port

Wasn't there a crappy SNES version, btw?