DS2x86 progress

January 23rd, 2012, 00:25 Posted By: wraggster

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

The last week has again seen only some slow progress with DS2x86. There were a couple of snow storms, causing blackouts and the need to shovel snow again last week. That meant I only had two evenings where I was able to work on DS2x86 at all. I spent those fixing the mouse behaviour in the new transfer system, so that now both the D-Pad mouse and the Touchscreen mouse seem to work in DS2x86 just like they do in the original DSx86.
Currently I am attempting to improve the screen blitting in the high resolution modes (640x???). I will need to move some of the blitting code back to the MIPS side to be able to avoid sending unnecessary data via the slow card interface. This will cause a slight slowdown to the CPU emulation, but since most of the more CPU-hungry games will use the 256-color modes (where the 640x resolution is not available), this should not cause much of a problem.
There are still problems in the SoundBlaster emulation, but it looks like those will be very difficult to fix using my current transfer method. I think I will still need to rethink the SB digital audio transfer system one more time, to be able to handle all the different methods that the SB card can play digital audio. I have not yet figured out a system that would support all the needs, so I will probably leave this improvement for the later versions.
Thanks for your test reports about the problems in the previous version again! Sorry I probably won't get around to improving the specific problems in the various games before I get the new transfer system working better. This new transfer system was a major architectural change, so it will still take a few releases to get it working properly.

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