MAME on Chrome (the browser is the platform)

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This is… awesome! From gizmodo its a port of MAME, the multiple arcade emulator to google chrome via it’s NACL or ‘Native Client’ interface.  As we look at the year 2012 and what is around us, its pretty clear that the 80386 CPUs descendants have basically won out the world, with the ACORN ARM eating up the mobile world…

So click here with google chrome, and install this 30MB extension (thats how big it is standalone anyways) and get ready for some gaming!

From what I’ve found is that multizip files wont work… but single zip contained run great!

I’ve tested this with Altered Beast, which I actually own the system16 board for.. Although I’ve got to get around to cleaning it up (its dirty as hell) and converting it to a JAMMA and booting it up.. but thats for another retrohardware day.

Merry Christmas (belated)

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It’s been… a long day.

And the near end of 2011.  I’ve been busy this end of year so I must appologize for the lack of content this time of year.  I’ve succeeded in a goal of creating far more content this year, although I’m not all that sure just how… long lasting impact I guess that is left to be seen.

Looking at my top queries I can see that people being driven here are looking for things near & dear to me… such as

  • Qemu 1.0 MinGW on Windows
  • SegaCD on old school hardware (yeah!)
  • Resetting wifi passwords on MacOS … I’d assume its in the control panel, but now that I’m on AMD I’m Mac less. sorry.
  • Snoopy Calendars
  • C++ On Windows Penalty Box.. … LOL Windows isn’t OS/2 1.x there is no ‘pentaly’ box, but both NTVDM & DosBOS provide a pretty snazzy MS-DOS environment.
  • Windoom! (Yippie, add in Win32s!)
  • trade wars…
  • Qemu SCSI … touch & go…
  • NetBSD Qemu SPARC … if you had a real SPARC would you run NetBSD?  I wish I could load the 64bit stuff, but… talk about fringe of a fringe.
  • WAMP … Fun, free and FAST hosting on Windows

I suppose all in all these are good things, as I’ve touched on all of this stuff this year.

Now after the blogger failure of last year, I’m glad my superglobalmegacorp.com is going, and going strong! …

I’m not sure where 2012 will be taking me, but looking back last year to running Zork/Dungeon on the IBM 370 Mainframe, I can only hope in a nostalgic way that next year is filled with some good 68000 fun.

Best wishes to all, and to all a goooood night!

Jason

More on SONIC-CD for iOS

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So a little bit of googling around lead me to this great interview with Christian Whitehead, which lead to the discussion of his iPhone Retro Engine and Retro Engine Development Kit. Basically he took the PC port of Sonic-CD and was able to extract the levels, sprites, and also the scripted logic.  Then he was able to take all of that and build his own re implementation of Sonic-CD.

Which in its own is interesting as the PC version of Sonic was done via some translation as mentioned by Neil Harding here.

… I had to write a 68000 to C converter for Sonic 3D (from the Genesis to the Saturn & PC)….

I would imagine that the ‘unpacked’ work of the PC version would lead to something far easier to reverse, then say the original 68000 code, although that too has been done.

Sonic CD released for IOS (iPhone/iPad)

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Sonic CD

According to early reviews, it is simply awesome!  Simply put this is *not* just a bundled SEGA-CD emulator along with the CD-ROM, but instead the video has been greatly cleaned up, the game start is logically broken down like a good iOS (when I hear IOS I always think of cisco’s IOS but I know….) application for your iPhone/iPad with nice menus that just wouldn’t be the same for the old Sega CD platform.  Clearly Christian Whitehead has done some fantastic work here!

Friend to pixels and polys alike...

So first off this uses the Apple Game Centre.  I’ll never understand why so many games do *NOT* use this.  In our little ‘app connected’ world you’d think more things would be driven for the ‘achievements’ and ‘world wide leaderboards’ but the only two games I have that use this is angry birds & Sonic CD.

Sonic CD Achievements..

Sonic CD Leaderboard

So how does it look?  Pretty much just like the real thing, except it’s been rescaled so you see more of the screen, instead of squish o vision… For example here is the real Sonic CD:

Sonic CD on my TeeVee!

And under emulation:

Sonic CD under the Fusion emulator

And here is the start with the Sonic CD IOS application:

Christian's Sonic CD

As you can see things like the lives left have been moved to the top so you can actually see them, and the display screen is wider so you can see more of the scenery.  Clearly a lot more went into this than the 68000 emulation.

Another cool thing is that you can change soundtracs from the American & Japanese versions.

Choose soundtrack

So for those of you who love ‘Sonic Boom’ can relive the 1990’s.

I should add that in addition game play is GREAT.  Now don’t get me wrong I love having a physical Genesis along with a model 1 CD drive to play the ‘real thing’ but at the same time, this is the ‘hand held’ version to get!  And at $1.99 USD it is simply a STEAL.

The Sonic CD app page.

Some more retro hardware, the Sega CD model 1

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So while not emulation, its the real thing, I was really excited to buy some $50 worth of misc SEGA genesis bits, and to find there was a model 1 CD player in there!  It didn’t want to spin disks, and I hope I didn’t break the tray loader trying to look inside, but it now plays discs!!!

So I know it isn’t much but I’ve been busy getting killed in Sonic-CD.  Speaking of which I kept on hearing that its going to be released for iOS but I haven’t seen it yet.  But no matter, I have the real thing now!

Qemu 1.0 binaries for Windows (Win32)

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EDIT: Nobody should use these binaries, there was a critical error (well there still is) in how a core procedure is compiled, and it results in major instability, instead use Qemu 1.0.1).

Well after lots of fights, it finally built!  I booted MS-DOS and ran Quake (with sound!)…  I’ve added in my control+alt+d for a CAD, and control+alt+r for reset, and configured the sound for adlib, sound blaster & GUS.

The i386/x86_64 binaries are here.

All other systems are here.

For the most part this is completely untested, but it did boot MS-DOS….  All the DLL’s that you need should be in the archives.  7zip is what I used to keep them small.

Disk access seems to be still slower than hell, so instead of the typical

-hda bla.disk

You will want to do change it to:

 -drive file=bla.disk,if=ide,index=0,media=disk,cache=writeback

Although if it is a qcow2

 -drive file=bla.disk,if=ide,index=0,media=disk,cache=writethrough

Qemu 1.0 dependencies….

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So because of some circular dependancies, and me trashing my toolchain I have just re-installed MinGW.  I thought I’d share this little adventure to get Qemu 1.0 to actually configure… Naturally as time goes by these links will get stale and die. sorry about that.

First get

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/glib/2.28/glib-dev_2.28.8-1_win32.zip

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/glib/2.28/glib_2.28.8-1_win32.zip

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies/pkg-config_0.26-1_win32.zip

This will almost get you a working glib/pkg-config environment.  The catch is when you go to run it, you’ll get some error about not having intl.dll … Well, where the heck does that come from?

$ mingw-get install mingw-utils

After installing this package do *exactly* like this:

cd /mingw/lib
a2dll libintl.a -o intl.dll -liconv
mv -iv intl.dll /mingw/bin/

Special thanks to Fragrant Memories, I don’t think I’d have ever figured that out. Also don’t forget to build zlib/SDL with –prefix=/mingw …

I’ll just update this as the build continues….

Good news, it’s compiling!  I’ve even added in the easy reboot.

Super Mario for the Sega Genesis

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I recently came across this article which touched on this forum post.  Last year, Mairtrus had written a program that took the 6502 code from SMB on the NES, and generated 68000 instructions that would in turn run on the SEGA Megadrive/Genesis.

I”ve got to say it really is impressive!  If you search for MULS_1.4.2.BIN you will probably find it, as the original download links are long dead…

Mario on Sega

At the same time I’ve got to admit I’m really impress by Kega Fusion 3.64 which can play SMS, Genesis, Sega CD & 32x programs! From what I can tell it is derived from gens which is open source.

While I’m waiting for my SegaCD to show up, I am pretty sure that there is zero copy protection and some ways out there to homebrew the thing… So I can’t promise much but I sure hope to write something goofy for the Genesis.. From what I gather the CD unit gives you 512kb of ram to use.. And of course you can load more stuff from CD.  I’m sure it’ll be an interesting experience….

Forget your wifi password?

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it’s been a long and challenging 24 hours as I got back from Vacation to find my internet connection cut off from a ‘known outage’… And after all that fun, and actually walking thru some techsupport hell from Charter I found out two fun things….

Charter doesn’t like Belkin routers, and will mac filter them from time to time.. But it is easily fixed when they have you put in the MAC of a PC to connect, then just clone the thing.  The paranoid in me cannot help but think that they want to associate some MAC address with me, for some weird reason…

The other being that I could *NOT* remember my WAP password to save my life after having to disassociate myself from my wifi network.

Luckily there is Nirsoft’s “wireless_key”

Oh well such is life, I’m just glad I took an extra vacation day (like it matters….) but hell it sucks when the teleco is down hard.

So why would my ISP want to know a MAC of an inside machine?  I sure hope me running YaCy for a full 24 hours wasn’t some kind of driving reason behind this….