DS2x86 News - EGA & Mode-X work, Team Cyclops iEvolution

December 20th, 2010, 23:58 Posted By: wraggster

More news from Pate concerning his Dos emulator for the DS:

EGA & Mode-X work
During the past week I have mainly been working on adding pretty much all the EGA opcodes, and then adding most of the Mode-X specific opcodes. Both are currently so far along that many of the games supported in the original DSx86 seem to at least start up also in DS2x86. I also tested a couple of game trainer intros that I happened to have on my SD card. Those use 386 opcodes in real mode, and after I added the 386 opcodes that those needed, they are also starting up. These obviously do not work at all in the original DSx86, so DS2x86 will bring a little bit of extra compatibility already in the first alpha version! Here are screen copies of those, "brun_it!" by Eternity and "HexxTrnr" by Qwerty.


It would be interesting trying to get some proper 386-game running, but I still have so much stuff missing from the hardware support. Also the features that exist still have bugs (for example, Wolfenstein 3D does not read the keyboard properly, and Supaplex has problems in the palette animation), so that I think I need to focus on those before working on the 386 features. But, it is starting to look that even the first DS2x86 alpha version, to be released in a week or two, will be able to run a few games!

Team Cyclops iEvolution
Team Cyclops last week announced that their new iEvolution flash cart will allow the use of DSi mode for homebrew development. That means that when running on Nintendo DSi, a homebrew software has access to a faster CPU (133MHz instead of 66MHz, I believe) and more RAM (16MB instead of 4MB). They also offered a free iEvolution cart for "legitimate" homebrew coders. I contacted them, and they accepted me as one such, and will send me an iEvo flash cart. So, after I have got DS2x86 working properly, I could start working on a DSix86 version. :-)

I am not sure yet what needs to be done in a homebrew software to enable DSi mode with iEvolution, but I assume they have some kind of an SDK (or at least instructions on enabling it when using the normal devkitARM). With a two times faster processor and more RAM, I think it might be possible to add 386-opcode support into DSix86 as well. It would still not run all that fast, perhaps at a speed of a 20MHz 386 machine, but it would have some advantages over the DS2x86 version (namely the ability to use my existing ARM7 code with the AdLib emulation). I assume it would be much faster and easier to do the DSix86 port than it has been to do the DS2x86 port to a completely different CPU architecture. Some of the current DSx86 architecture (which I had to rethink for DS2x86) is not very well suited to adding support to 32-bit registers, so coding the DSix86 version will still take some time to do, but it should not take half a year! Anyways, I'll let you know when I receive the iEvolution cart and can see how it works.

Happy Xmas to everyone of you celebrating it!

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

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