Quote:

About the problems with the save states -- does the problem appear when you launch the emulation with a save state or when you pause the emulator and load a save state from the pause menu or in both cases?

Both cases for me (not 110% percent sure about when launching the emulator though, only about 99).

Quote:

About the Disk ROM issue, does the amount of free RAM change at all whether you keep the Ctrl pressed or not?

No, for me it doesn't. However, I did notice that the CTRL key works in basic (I think CTRL+M or something makes the cursor jump to the lower right corner, just like on MSX), so I'm kind of stumped with this.

Quote:

When does it crash? When you press the 0 key when doing the keyboard mapping or when you launch the emulation or at some other point?

It seems the crash is related to resetting the controls somehow as it always and only happened when I reset the controls and remapped a key before starting emulation. But my setup seemed to have been screwed because fmsx/s60 compained at one point about a corrupt config. I reinstalled and I didn't experience the crashes anymore. But still, booting with CTRL doesn't work for me...

Yep... I asked because in the emulator code I can see a possible problem when the save state is loaded directly when the emulation is launched. So if the state loading would always work from the pause menu but not always work from the main menu when launching the emulation I could have a solution for the problem. But if this is not the case then I suppose further investigations are needed... too bad I still haven't been able to make it lock up yet. Next time you do, don't delete the saved state but send it to me. I can then try to see what is happening when the emulator opens the state.

Really odd behavior with the Ctrl I must admit... again I've never seen this myself, I've tested the emulator on several phone models and this has always worked. One possible solution to this issue might be to add an option in the emulator to directly patch the disk ROM so that it would always work as if Ctrl would have been pressed during boot. I don't know if all disk ROMs have a common place or piece of code to do this so that it would be easily patchable...

Anyways, happy(?) news for you all E61 users: I just found a workaround for the display problem today, the emulator is now working fine on E61 as well! I'll try to put things together for an 1.14d release soon so you'll be able to use the emulator. The downside is that to achieve this I had implement double buffering for the display -- this is now under an option which you must enable for E61. Other phones (so far) don't need to enable double buffering. The emulator works a bit slower when double buffering is used but it was very much still playable on E61 as well, MSX1 games were working fine with 60Hz refresh rate and PSG+SCC sounds with zero frameskip. For MSX2+ you need to add some frameskip to get sound working properly (if you want to hear sound that is).

As far as I can recall all this: save state lock ups always happened when initially loading a game/save state. So it didn't lock up when I paused the emulator.

Well in that case it makes a whole lot of sense I was about to release 1.14d today but I think I'll hold that back a bit and try to fix the state loading when launching the emu or at least disabling it if I cannot find a solution "quickly".

Ok I just uploaded v1.14d to my web page. I believe I implemented all recently suggested features except for the multiple save state slots per game, I'll see about that in the next version. But state quick save&load is there, alternate keyboard/joystick mapping quick swapping, phone memory / memory card selection and of course support for E61 via display double buffering. I also fixed a bug in the state loading routine when launching the emulator directly with a saved state, it should work better now so I hope it addresses some of the issues you've had with the save states.

Some new stuff which wasn't asked for but I thought would be nice: support for .zip file format and "archive as disk" virtual disk image format support for .zip archives, i.e. you can just drop the MSX files as is on a .zip file (named blabla.dsk.zip) and the emulator will automatically construct a disk image in RAM containing the files in the zip. I was about to include support for lzh/lha file format as there are quite many games floating around in lzh archives but decided to postpone that to the next version to get this version out now...

Remember that MSX2+ emulation now requires that the msx2pext.rom has both the MSX2+ sub ROM and Kanji BASIC concatenated together forming a single 48kB ROM image.

I've also rewritten some 50,000 lines of code for the display emulation so watch out for bugs But when it works at least the MSX1 VDP emulation should be faster than before. Also a little bit more complete V9938 and V9958 emulation.

Hi, I have a Nokia N80 and I install Fmsf/S60 1,14d successfuly. But I can't create a sis file to install in this version. I'd like to know how I configure the toolsroms to do that?

If You can help me, I appreciate much!

Thank's

The SIS tools on my page don't work for the 3rd edition of S60 (i.e. the "d" version of the emulator) due to the added level of security in the OS. This is also the main reason I changed the location of the data files in the "d" version of the emulator. You should be able to put all system ROMs and game files to your phone without any special tools since the emulator's data files are located under a folder which is visible through the phone's PC Suite software or USB mass storage. In other words, you don't need to create separate SIS files for the system ROMs and MSX game files -- instead, just copy the necessary files directly to your phone to the correct location. I'll try to outline what, where and how below:

- An example of what to do if you're using Bluetooth and PC Suite:
1. Connect your phone to the PC Suite over Bluetooth normally
2. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to your mobile phone, open either Phone memory or Memory card depending on which location you wish to use for storing the MSX files
3. Locate a folder called "Games" and inside you should find a folder named "fmsx" if you have launched the emulator at least once
4. Copy all your system ROMs to a folder named "systemroms" inside the "fmsx" folder (create the subfolder if it does not already exist)
5. Copy all your MSX game files to the "fmsx" folder
6. Now you're all set, just launch the emulator on your phone

- Another example of what to do if you're using USB without PC Suite:
1. Connect your phone to your PC with the USB cable
2. Select USB mass storage from your phone when it asks for connection type
3. You should now have your phone's memory card visible in Windows Explorer as a removable drive, just navigate there and follow the instructions above from point 3 onwards

I'll try to put up a new version (1.15d) of the emulator for download soon with some new features and a bug fix for a nasty fault in the V9938/V9958 search command emulation.

jr: will #1.10b also be upgraded, feature-wise? I just bought a new N72, I like this phone ^_^. Too bad it's still just Symbian Series 60 2nd ed.
BTW, I still have to copy the ROM files onto my phone. And of course, games

Umm... I was originally planning to keep the b version up to date along with the d version but haven't done so as you probably have noticed. Main reasons for this are that

i) I had to write a completely new launcher UI for the d version and I felt it was unnecessary work to port that code to the b version which already has a working launcher UI but as a side effect of this the b and d versions are rather different because the launcher code also contains the code which acts as the emulation core's interface towards OS services, and
ii) as many recent phone models have more processing power, I also added some level of complexity to the emulator architecture in the d version allowing a bit nicer internal architecture and thus enabling some things which would have been very tedious to implement previously - while I believe these architectural changes shouldn't cause too big performance hits they nevertheless do have an impact and on some older phone models this might not be worth the extra features the new architecture brings.

The S80 port of the emulator is very close to the d version of fMSX/S60 so it is definetely not impossible to have all the same stuff running on older Symbian OS. I'll think about it -- of course releasing v1.15 as d and b versions would mean delaying the release for some time to allow porting of the d version code to the b version and along that the b version would need to adopt the not-so-nice-looking launcher UI of the d version. Anyway I still have some new stuff to develop for v1.15 which I have been thinking about but have not yet had the time to implement. It would naturally be nice to update the b version to 1.15 to include some bug fixes which have only been done to the d version branch such as the save/load state fix and the upcoming VDP search command fix.

Just uploaded MSX80 release 3 AND fMSX/S60 v1.15d to my webpage. I'll try to look at "porting" v1.15d to v1.15b next, perhaps with some new things to make it v1.16d/b then. Thanks to NYYRIKKI for helping with the VDP bug fix. Oh and if you use the new possibility to use several save states per game, note that the quick load/save state commands always use the first state "slot" (thus labeled with 'Q' instead of a number).

Allright D-Tail (and others), v1.16b and v1.16d are available now. If you experience too much slowdowns with the 1.16b version you can always switch back to 1.10b. It is important to note that the two versions are now identical in features otherwise except for the display resolution support: 1.16b only supports the "legacy" 176x208 resolution whereas 1.16d supports also the double resolution 352x416 and QVGA, both in landscape and portrait orientation. In practice this means for example that you need to move your game files and system ROMs to the new location if you're upgrading from 1.10b and switch to using a 48kB MSX2+ sub ROM.

To justify the d release, I made some small bug fixes in the launcher UI and added support for cheating -- you can access it through the MSX state menu while the emulator is paused. Being the lazy guy I am, I didn't implement any possibility to manually enter cheats (yet) but instead the emulator is able to import blueMSX's .mcf cheat files and trainer procedures from openMSX's trainers.tcl file. The parser is rather simple so there may be cases where it does not recognize the cheat data correctly, especially for the TCL file I am only supporting straight poke's, no for-loops or other "advanced" things I also had to make some (educated?) guesses about the .mcf file format as there appears to be no explanation for it in blueMSX help -- especially the first and fourth digits which seem to be always zero so at the moment those fields are simply ignored. Just place the .mcf files or trainers.tcl in the same folder with your game files and the emulator should find them.

Something that I already did in v1.15 or v1.14 (I forgot which one) for my emulator that I would really like to see support for in openMSX which I use on my Mac: when using zipped files, it would help a lot if the emulator would see if there is a proper file inside instead of taking the first file in the archive. For example many of the MSXdev'06 entries do not have the actual .rom file inside the zip as the first file so the zip cannot be used as such with openMSX but instead you need to extract the .rom file from it to be able to use it. It would be rather simple to check the zip directory for a *.rom pattern and pick the correct file if one is found. Perhaps it's just my machine acting weird but I'm guessing this simply hasn't been implemented in openMSX. I realize this is not the correct place to for openMSX feature requests but since I started to write about it I decided to finish the text Thanks, over and out.

I moved my msx emulator web pages to a new host; the new URLs are www.elisanet.fi/portal/s60 and www.elisanet.fi/portal/s80 for the S60 and S80 based stuff respectively. No new emulator versions available though

jr, can you please say a couple of words in the Sansa/Rockbox topic ? Thank you in advance.

After a long time, I've finally got some spare time to install fMSX/S60 v1.16b! A great release, the new UI is very nice and the rewritten display emulation is great! And don't worrt about the emulation speed. On my 6630, it's still running at a great speed. So... thumbs up!
Unfortunately, I've noticed a issue with the ui. When selecting files, savesates, the lists appears garbled. At least, I can't recognize a reasonable text. (Could make a screenshot if you want one). Could you take a look at it, jr?

Does this happen in all file selector screens or just the save state list?