DS2x86 0.09 released!

May 29th, 2011, 00:01 Posted By: wraggster

News via http://dsx86.patrickaalto.com/DSblog.html

A new release of the Dos Emulator for the Nintendo DS

This version has the following improvements:

Implemented screen scaling for all common graphics modes.
Fixed the DOS and BIOS date/time functions to return proper Real Time Clock values. This might fix some hanging games.
Fixed EGA Read Mode 1 handling (fixes EGATrek graphical issues).
Fixed EGA Read Mask initial value (fixes Ultima V hanging).
Added a warning message for games that need a Floating Point Unit.
Screen copies are saved to incrementally numbered files SCR00.BMP..SCR99.BMP. Previously they were always saved to SCR.BMP file.

Below are some examples for EGA screen scaling. Silpheed uses 640x200 mode, and it has used smooth scaling in DSx86 as well. EGATrek uses the highest resolution available on EGA displays, 640x350. Since the vertical resolution is not easily scalable to 192 vertical rows, I instead scale it 2:1 to 175 vertical rows. Thus, there are some black rows on the bottom of the screen. The mode used by Mahjong Fantasia (640x400) is not a proper graphics mode that the EGA/VGA BIOS support, instead the game initially switches to 640x200 mode, and then doubles the vertical resolution by directly accessing the EGA card registers. Finally, A-Train is an example of the VGA high resolution 640x480 mode.

I also debugged the Windows 3.00a crashing problem, but could not yet solve that issue. I worked also a little bit on Windows 3.1 support, which complained about there not being enough XMS memory. I found and fixed this problem, but it is using some new protected mode opcodes and features that I did not have time to code for this version, so it will crash with unsupported opcode errors. I'll see if I can make it run better in the next version. Making Windows 3.1 run should also help me in locating the problem in Windows 3.00a.

There are also other misbehaving games on my TODO list, and I'll continue debugging these and fixing the problems. Thanks again for all of you who have tested the games and sent me debug logs and other information to help me in fixing the problems in DS2x86!


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