AKA emulating vintage displays on modern machines.  I know i’m super late to the party, but that is life as they say.  As you may be aware, when it comes to emulation, sometimes it simply is too perfect.

Mame 0.144 Galaxy Force II

Just look at how utterly pixel perfect it is.  The thing is back in the 1980’s LCD screens were amber only with 4 shades of amber at best.  Everyone else had CRT’s, and arcade machines sure were all about the CRT.  But now we live in a future where CRT’s are not only expensive and rare, but it’s easier to emulate the look and feel, although today I’m looking at shaders, I’m sure at some point there will be a Physics emulation of a CRT, but not yet.

Retro Arch & CRT Shaders

So I’m using RetroArch, as it supports a vast number of both video and audio plugins, and shaders, but more importantly you can stack them to get a more intracte look to take a pixel perfect version like above, and then translate it onto how it may have looked on an aging black & white TV set:

Black and White

Or evena colour CRT look and feel:

Custom CRT

While reading on the libretro forum, I found this great package that includes the following easy presets:

• 480p: Nice shader suitable for 480p content like Dreamcast games
• Component: High-quality signal look but not overly sharp like RGB
• B&W TV: Pretty self explanatory
• Vintage TV: This looks really good with low-res pixel games on systems like the Atari 2600
• Vintage LCD: Looks like an early gen LCD screen complete with ghosting
• Composite: Simulating a typical cheap CRT using composite cables
• S-video: Much the same but better quality video signal
• RGB-Shadowmask: This is more akin to a high quality CRT with RGB/SCART cables
• RGB-Scanlines: Like the previous but with thick bold scanlines like you’d find on a Sony PVM or other broadcast quality monitor, nice and bright

I would HIGHLY advise using the nightly builds of RetroArch, as I had really poor performance when using some of these stacked shaders that may go as many  as 12 deep, however nightly had no issues at all.  It does without saying that you’ll really want a powerful machine to do this kind of thing with a real GPU.  This flies in the face of the ARM stuff, but as they say that’s life.

I don’t have the youtube privleges to upload super high video, so this ended up looking like a smudgy mess, and I captured it with that Windows 10 “Game DVR”, which really isn’t that great, it clipped the bottom, and captured the menu bar.

But it got the basic job done.

If you have the CPU/GPU power, and want a more all around better looking emulation experence, I’d HIGHLY recommend it.  If anything it’ll remind you why CRT’s certainly may have had awesome refresh rates, but really terrible resolutions.

You can download the shader from either mega.nz here:

https://mega.nz/#!Qk1RVCJC!KAC127iD5wNw9GvLqKtnzJRcixDDzgb7UcjBQVIlDrY

or on my site (read the 404 page!):

Analog Shader Pack 1-23-16.zip

This is follow up to a previously posted challenge to virtualize VenturComm Venix/86 so that it can be run on a modern machine under an emulator. The competition was a huge success and the rest of this post is an entry by the winner – Jim Carpenter. Enjoy!

Install MAME/MESS 0.164 and get the “at386” machine running. Standard issue ROMs.

Create a new hard drive image with “chdman createhd -chs 615,4,17 -c none -o hd.chd“. This is only 20MB. You can certainly use larger drives but make them a standard type, something that is a defined drive type in the BIOS. I’d stay away from user defined types.

Start the emulator, configure the first floppy drive to be DD and the second to be HD. Restart so it takes effect. Attach XFER.IMG to the first floppy and your hard drive image to the hard drive. Restart again. (Venix uses the BIOS for *everything*. So if you attach without rebooting, chances are the BIOS missed your hard drive which means Venix won’t see it either.)

Go into the BIOS and configured the floppy and hard disk types. The command above creates a type 2 drive:Save and exit and let it reboot.

We wish to prepare the winchester hard disk:
We’ll let it come up the partition sizes:Now let it create the file system for /usr:
It now wants to restore something we don’t have. Let it try and then abort it (press ‘a’):
And now the file system for root:
Again, let it try to restore and error out. When it halts, reboot back into XFER:
Now for the fun part:

We want to get our partitions mounted and ready for a restore. Type:

mount /dev/w0.sys /usr
mmkdir /usr/usr
mount /dev/w0.usr /usr/usr
cd /usr

If your emulator can’t handle DD media in HD drives, type “tar xvf1 /dev/rf0“. When told to change floppies, attach fa_devs.img to the first floppy drive. Change back to XFER.img when told to.:
You’ll now have /usr/dev/rh1 which gives you access to your HD second floppy drive:
Time to restore the backup floppies. Type either “tar xvf9 /dev/rh0” if you’re able to do DD/HD with only one drive, or type “tar xvf9 dev/rh1” if you have to use my hack above. (Mind your slashes when typing the device paths!) Attach BACKUP1.IMG when asked for USER 1:
And then attach BACKUP2.IMG, etc. (Ignore those spurious unknown interrupts.):
Eventually all disks will be restored. When it asks for the XFER disk, put it back it and hit enter. (Two drive setups can just hit enter.)

You’re done restoring. Sync the disks and reboot:
Detach all floppies and it should boot off the hard drive:
That error at the bottom is just because it’s configured for a second hard drive that isn’t attached.

Root has no password:
Enjoy!

Jim

For those who want a ready mage disk image here

Original floppy disks provided by Frode van der Meeren here

For those hard core hackers and archaeologists, check out /usr/jr directory.

As I write this I don’t see anything outside of this twitter tweet (post?), along with this Gamasutra post.

The only ‘good’ part I see in there:

Milanovic tells Gamasutra. “Our aim is to help legal license owners in distributing their games based on MAME platform, and to make MAME become a learning tool for developers working on development boards.”

So I guess they want to do android and embedded Linux stuff?

Does anyone know anything more concrete?

It does sound exciting, especially for MAME’s chipset emulation which, let’s face it is superior, and being able to plug them into other emulators that are ‘good enough’ or even different purpose than full system emulation is a good thing.

Also from other sources, I hear that MAME/MESS are to be fully merged, and will be shipped simply as a single executable called MAME.

**EDIT

Well I should have checked the source.  Many things are going to a ,BSD-3-Clause license for example the MUSASHI 68000 processor emulation:

// license:BSD-3-Clause
// copyright-holders:Karl Stenerud
/* ======================================================================== */
/* ========================= LICENSING & COPYRIGHT ======================== */
/* ======================================================================== */

While others are going LGPL, or GPL.

Archive.org is now hosting 900+ arcade games that run under JavaScript port of MESS.

Game on!

3comB network card

What has long been a frustration with the beleaguered Xenix community is that although there was a TCP/IP package for Xenix (and a much required streams package…) it only worked with a handful of ethernet cards.  And all of them were early 3com’s.  While the world was using NE2000’s on just about everything, the most common ethernet board Xenix would talk to was the 3c503, which is getting harder and harder to find as the years go on by.

But right now none of this matters.

I was looking at this article on setting up Apollo Domain UNIX, on MESS.  And apparently it will do networking!  Which is cool, so I poke around MESS, and what do I see? 3c503.c. Could it be true?

Now I ended up having to download the source to mame 0.151 (mame0151s.zip) and building it on OS X.  Of course remembering to alter the makefile to include the ‘USE_NETWORK=1’ statement, and build for Mess.  And just as it looks like something out of SIMH, Mess makes use of libpcap which means that you are *unable* to send/receive on the host computer. (OS X & Win32 binaries).  And of course you’ll need a ROM & Xenix diskettes.

Installing Xenix is pretty straightforward as long as you know your system key, and how to navigate the mess UI without rebooting mess or exiting by mistake (scrolllock on the PC, function/Delete on OS X).

First create a hard disk, and as always it should be ~500MB max.

chdman.exe createhd -o xenix.chd -chs 1015,16,63
chdman – MAME Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD) manager 0.149u1 (Aug 10 2013)
Output CHD: xenix.chd
Compression: none
Cylinders: 1015
Heads: 16
Sectors: 63
Bytes/sector: 512
Sectors/hunk: 8
Logical size: 523,837,440

then with the disk in hand, I just setup a 486 like this:

./mess64 at486 -harddisk1 xenix.chd -isa2 3c503 -ramsize 8388608 -floppydisk1 xenix/n1.vfd

Naturally you’ll need to setup the CMOS, for your memory size, and the hard disk.  The BIOS I’m using didn’t autodetect the IDE drive, but it doesn’t matter as I know it’s characteristics as I created it.

From there Xenix was a pretty straight forward deal.  Mess has good floppy drive emulation so it just worked.  Adding TCP-IP was just as involved, and all went well.  When it came time to install TCP & the network driver, remember to use thinnet, as the thicknet transceiver isn’t connected (as it would seem).  The 3c503 is softset, so I went with IRQ 5, port 0x300, and thinnet, and it works fine for me!

Xenix TCP/IP in action, inside of MESS!

Remember you will not be able to attach to it from your computer.  Instead you must attach from another computer.

Also MESS tries to emulate true to hardware so it’ll be just as slow on MESS as it was on the real hardware.  I suppose you could go with the at386 driver, but yeah it’ll be slow.  The current at586 driver has issues booting from the hard disk, and I didn’t mess with it too much as Xenix is known to have issues with some Pentium systems.

Although I think the next place for adventure is the emulated Adaptec 1542CF.