Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3575)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
hegyak wrote:
Will this get Genesis support? Gens doesn't like Windows Aero and having an emulator that does, would be welcome.
It is in the works for sure. Right now it has some M68000 opcodes still in need of implementing, and has no sound core. But it is coming a long, and when it is complete, it will definitely be a superior choice (in terms of accuracy) than GENS
It really is awesome that you guys have created a new emulator with lots of awesome features.
I kind of wonder about some things... Why C#? Portability has never been a big priority for Microsoft... Considering the way their scaling back on XNA these days I'm kind of all-together wary of them, but I digress.
Are you working from all new emulation cores or using some from open licenses?
Why try to build a good multi-system emulator from scratch instead of trying to build better tools into existing projects that have a lot more momentum? I just learned about MESS. Now there's an ambitious emulation project. Can you imagine if something like what it hopes to be having all these awesome TAS tools built into it?
I dunno, it just seems a little odd to me having an emulator "for" the TAS community. I would think it makes better sense for the emulation community as whole to pool its efforts into projects that multi-purpose so that resources can be shared. Man, I'd love to see one big, glorious, all-encompassing emulator good for ripping, and rom hacking, and cheating, and movies, and network play, and encoding, and TASs, and that runs on everything from Windows, to OSX, to Linux, to Android. Sure, kind of a pipe dream, a big bloated pipe dream, but it could happen if the community pooled it's efforts.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3575)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
All your questions are answered somewhere in this thread (or maybe the bizhawk forum in general), but I will reiterate some
Why C#? Because the 3 of us can get far more work done in less time and have a better time doing it. That's our preference. For me, it is the use of the .net framework for the multiclient, that allowed me to put in all the usual tools and make them better in a fraction of the time.
Why do this instead of adding tools to existing emulators? Because I've done that. I've added the same tools to 10+ emulators, each one with its own flavor of crusty code, bad UI, bugs, and other things that turn me off to dealing with them. Not to mention politics with the emudevs. Why do that when I can code everything once? Not to mention the advantage of having a unified UI.
Why an emulator for TASVideos? It isn't. It is an emulator for everybody. It just so happens I admin tasvideos and have a primary focus of good TASing, so it just so happens bizhawk has the most ideal tools and set up for TASing.
Are we using brand new emulation cores? Yes. But the door is open to using other cores, but the MIT license is going to be an issue (I think we could release GPU cores with an MIT client though). But so far we've been preferring new cores, as it is a chance to improve upon existing emulators, and because we prefer to write C#, and other emulators tend to be C++. However, the original concept behind bizhawk was a C#/.NET UI running a c++ emulator core. So the door is open to importing cores.
As for MESS, that's alot on the lines of what we are doing, but with an architecture that makes is easy to have rerecording (and other stuff) on every core whereas MESS's structure is not condusive to this.
As for a baller emulator with all the best features, and all kinds of cores. That's exactly what this projects goals are!
As for portability, its possible, and being worked on right now thanks to sapphire and pcc.
I kind of wonder about some things... Why C#? Portability has never been a big priority for Microsoft... Considering the way their scaling back on XNA these days I'm kind of all-together wary of them, but I digress.
I don't think you really read this thread, or noticed the thread right below this one about the OS X port. I think the mono team has done a really great job bringing C# to other platforms. Aside from platform specific code and some minor bugs in their WinForms implementation (which were easy to work around) the non-windows ports run great. I get full speed performance on all of the systems I've actually tested, and that's not even using hardware accelerated video.
adelikat wrote:
As for portability, its possible, and being worked on right now thanks to sapphire and pcc.
I'm actually in "maintenance mode" right now, merging the latest changes down about every two weeks. (I started porting an XNA game to OS X about two weeks ago, so that's a temporary distraction for me because it's more fun.) But as-is, anyone can build and run the code themselves and it's playable so it's not a big deal. I'll resume work on my wrapper in a couple of weeks.
I don't think you really read this thread, or noticed the thread right below this one about the OS X port.
You're quite right. It's not often that I read great novels cover to cover let alone forums and entries. I just saw that BizHawk was THE preferred emulator on the "Emulator Resources" page (which has been changed to A preferred emulator?) and I was like, "Whoah, what's this wicked emulator that the good people at TAS videos feel replaces FCEUX? Wait, it's preferred for multiple systems? It's multi-platform? Man, must be pretty awesome, let's see what Google has to say about it... And nothing in the search results... You can understand my confusion. This page: http://tasvideos.org/BizHawk.html certainly wasn't any help. Even the code project page was a little blank on the "What exactly is this thing" when I finally found it. It was long time before I so much as figured out it was Adelikat's project...
Given the time I'd already invested in just trying to get the slightest bit of information on this thing, I really didn't feel like I owed anyone any more hours of my life reading an entire forum. Questions asked. Questions answered. Maybe if I didn't have to go digging on TAS Videos forum of all places for information on what is apparently supposed to be "an emulator for everyone," I would not have felt the need to just ASK myself.
