blueMSX 2.6

Early this morning version 2.6 of the BlueMSX emulator was released. BlueMSX now also supports the Game Reader, it requires the Game Reader hardware and official drivers. The support in BlueMSX is very different from MSXPLAYer which causes some cartridges not running as good as when using the MSXPLAYer.

Another surprising new feature is support for ObsoNET, the only Ethernet solution for MSX, developed by Daniel Berdugo. This feature requires WinPCap, the Windows Packet Capture Library, to be installed first.

After many requests from gamers, the emulator comes finally with input event logging, replay and AVI rendering. Conceived as enhanced save states, this great feature gives to the user a more complete MSX experience.

Furthermore BlueMSX 2.6 also supports Sega SC-3000 and SF-7000 computers, that were very close to the MSX1 system without being compatible.

Other changes in version 2.6 are:

Added support for low resolution in fullscreen mode
Added SVI printer support
Added selection of video in grabber
Added support for Sony Playball roms with digitized speech
Added support for MegaCart(R), a new type of Coleco rom
Added dutch version of the user manual
Fixed crash caused by video grabber card
Made video grabber unload if not selected (in 2.5, the grabber was always enabled)
Fixed NMI bug in z80 emulation causing some Coleco games to fail running
Fixed detection of Sega rom types in menus and dialogs
Fixed bug in screen 10 vertical border color
Fixed header of PNG screenshots
Fixed bug in the S1985 device that caused emulator to crash when debugger was open.
Fixed the joystick button triggers for the SVI joystick
Fixed bug in the I8250 UART used in SVI-328 that caused emulator to hang
Fixed SVI-328 PPI bug
Fixed default rom mapper handling
Changed default width of the memory window in the debugger to 16 bytes
Fixed some printer emulation bugs
Fixed save state in R-Type rom mapper so it doesn't crash the emulator
VDP timers are now saved correctly in save states
Updated MSX Printer emulation to include a static font
Fixed screen 6 sprites
Fixed CC sprite bug that made CC sprites visible even if no non CC sprite was present
Fixed sprite collision index in Status Register 0 for screen 5-8 sprites
Fixed bug related to CC sprites (having the attribute "Mix color with sprite that has next higher priority" )

Relevant link: BlueMSX website

Comments (26)

By Bart

Paragon (1422)

17-09-2006, 13:35

Pff... submitting at 5 pm in the morning? What's wrong with sleeping at that time?

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

17-09-2006, 13:38

It works!! It works!!

I'm currently connected to IRC through BlueMSX!!!

By only_69

Hero (565)

17-09-2006, 14:11

Great work, blueMSX team!!!! Congratulations. And Daniel, tks for the video feature. I will try some new things now

By konamiman

Paragon (1198)

17-09-2006, 15:26

Does Compass works in this version? In an older version I tried (I don't reember which one), it did not work.

Hum, by the way, ObsoNET support is really nice... could Dumas support be added as well? That would make life a lot easier for me...

By Sd-Snatcher

Hero (582)

17-09-2006, 16:00

Ethernet on MSX. Cant be real!!

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

17-09-2006, 18:21

Dumas support could definitely be added. The Obsonet documentation was really good which made it really easy to support. If you have similar docs for Dumas I can start working on supporting it.

By Prodatron

Paragon (1843)

17-09-2006, 20:52

Congratulation, really great work!! I am also very happy especially about the OsnoNet support!

By Samor

Prophet (2174)

17-09-2006, 21:02

I just tried the gamereader with bluemsx, and I did notice it had speed issues in games. What was interesting however, is that it starts eggerland mystery 2, which does not work in msx player.

By sunrise

Paragon (1091)

17-09-2006, 21:13

People who have already noticed more differences?
I reveal one , the INk of Matra !

By Samor

Prophet (2174)

17-09-2006, 21:32

the slowdown with the gamereader (slow games, or games being partly slow), do more people have it or could it be an issue with my usb ports?

By sunrise

Paragon (1091)

17-09-2006, 21:36

Read the intro I would say

By konamiman

Paragon (1198)

18-09-2006, 10:29

dvik: At this stage of development I would need a very low level emulation of the Dumas hardware. That is, I need SL811HS emulation, flash ROM emulation and EEPROM emulation. Is it still possible?

Anyway, emulation at the BIOS level would also be useful, so utility software could be developed in the mean time.

By Samor

Prophet (2174)

18-09-2006, 10:46

Does blueMSX run the gamereader cartridges "on the fly", btw?
Because, if that's the case you could get around that slowdown problem (for now) by dumping the entire rom first before running it....or is that already happening?

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

18-09-2006, 18:54

dvik: At this stage of development I would need a very low level emulation of the Dumas hardware. That is, I need SL811HS emulation, flash ROM emulation and EEPROM emulation. Is it still possible?
I think thats not too hard. I'll start collecting documentation. If you have some (which I'm sure you have) can you send it to me?

Does blueMSX run the gamereader cartridges "on the fly", btw?
It does, although it has a read cache which makes games that doesn't write too much to the cart run fine (writes currently invalidates the cache).

Because, if that's the case you could get around that slowdown problem (for now) by dumping the entire rom first before running it....or is that already happening?
This is how MSXPLAYer does it (or at least it looks like it if you check the activity led on the game reader).

By comparing blueMSX and MSXPLAYer its quite easy to say that both ways have advandages and disadvantages. blueMSX plays all carts correctly although in some cases extremely slow. MSXPLAYer runs many carts but not all. On the other hand all carts that can be played in MSXPLAYer runs great.

The problem with reading at startup is that some carts needs to be accessed when running the emulation (IDE, Moonsound, SRAM, ...) and only rom types supported by the emulator can be run, and the guessing of romtype is not 100% accurate which makes some roms fail.

So the best solution is most likely a combination of the two and thats what we are working on (and probably the MSXPLAYer crew as well).

By mars2000you

Enlighted (6480)

18-09-2006, 19:52

First Japanese reaction on Gigamix :

http://gigamix.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/

And another example of a cartridge that works with blueMSX, but not with MSXPLAYer :

http://www4.airnet.ne.jp/makuta/tagoo/s_check.cgi?LINE=574

By Samor

Prophet (2174)

18-09-2006, 20:03

>>This is how MSXPLAYer does it (or at least it looks like it if you check the activity led on the game reader).

I would think so - it would explain why beecard games keep running when you remove the beecard.

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

18-09-2006, 20:08

....continuing my last post...

The best theoretical solution is of course to read and write every byte directly to the real cart though the gamereader. But limitations, most likely in how USB works, makes this very slow. Reading one byte is not much faster than reading 1kB from the cart. To improve the performance, blueMSX uses cache lines so when an access to an uncached area is read, the surrounding bytes are also read, so when another access is done in the same memory area, the cached value is used.
In order to work well with all types of mappers we invalidate the cache on each write access because we don't know if a write to the cart changes the visible memory page.
This can of course be improved a lot. For example its quite easy to detect accesses to known memory regions, e.g. the SCC. It would also be possible to 'learn' what writes causes a page change.

But the problem is far from trivial and I don't expect us to find a fully working solution very soon. Hopefully we'll be able to at least improve it and make more carts playable without impacting other carts.

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

19-09-2006, 00:33

That is, I need SL811HS emulation
I guess emulating the USB controller may be a bit tricky. I took a quick look at some docs and emulating the controller itself looks quite easy. Not sure though how to interface the USB controller on the PC. Hopefully its easier than I think.
The other devices are easy. I just need the specs.

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

19-09-2006, 12:58

Mmmmm, it's strange: when I use Turbo-R emulation, DOS2 doesn't load and the ROM is in the path. I've also tried to insert a Sunrise's IDE interface in the second slot and Turbo-R works only with DOS1

Can anyone test it?

By Sd-Snatcher

Hero (582)

19-09-2006, 13:36

Same here, i have to add the DOS 2 rom manually.

By sunrise

Paragon (1091)

19-09-2006, 20:50

First of all Sunrise Gamereader differs from Japanse version.
Sunrise has taken into account that you can upgrade to a full cartridge slot support. At hte moment the readers functioning almost the same.
However I donot know how Japanese customers (3800) can get their upgrades ,so an appeal on them .
The full cartridigeslot use and the possibility to connect an external adaptor , since Moonsound,GFX ,ide ,cf need more power !
My personal copy already has it and have tested the moonsound already. The sound is worthless, maybe timing orso.
But I cannot do that with the msxplayer !

By Sonic_aka_T

Enlighted (4130)

20-09-2006, 16:43

Oh my yayness! \o/

A) I can't believe I didn't spot this post till now.
B) I can't believe we finally have obsonet support now!!!
C) I can't wait to try this soon as I'm back home!
D) I can't wait to finally finish my ANSI telnet client.
E) I can't wait to finally finish obsoNetSet.
F) I can't wait to start bothering Konamiman so he'll give me a crash-course in INL programming!

By Sd-Snatcher

Hero (582)

21-09-2006, 14:01

I can't believe we finally have obsonet support now!!!

XD I asked you (at IRC) some days ago if you have tried the ansi client in bluemsx.

By Sonic_aka_T

Enlighted (4130)

21-09-2006, 22:06

could be, I missed a few lines due to pingout. Hope I get to try it soon...

By Sd-Snatcher

Hero (582)

23-09-2006, 23:17