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June 28th, 2015, 21:52 Posted By: wraggster
It seems that for every critic declaring virtual reality to be the next major entertainment development, there’s another dismissing it as a flash in the pan.
Who is right? It will be several years before we know for sure, but Sony studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has dismissed those who predict that VR will suffer the same demise as one of entertainment recent high-profile failures – 3D TV.
"This is not the next 3D. This is totally different,” Shuhei Yoshida told Polygon. "The difference is very easy to see if you try the Morpheus experience and compare it to the 3D TV gaming experience. The 3D TV gaming experience is basically the same as the 2D TV gaming experience. You just add the depth in the world, but you're pretty much seeing the same game. And that's all that we could do. It's not like we are able to go behind the TV to view a different scene or something like that.
"[With VR] you are totally inside the game. You are in a virtual environment. That level of, quality of experience will convince people. You cannot get that experience in any other way. So that's a clear difference."
As stated, however, option is divided.
Take Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, for instance, who told Games Industry that he remains thoroughly unconvinced about the technology’s mass-market potential.
“I've been pretty consistent in my belief that VR is a fad,” he said. “I think it'll generate some interest among the hardcore gamers. And I see amazing possibilities in VR for social media and virtual meetings and training and crazy stuff like dealing with phobias. But for entertainment? I'm just not seeing it.
“I don't think most humans want to look stupid (everyone looks stupid in a VR headset) and they don't want to isolate themselves from the world. I mean, if someone's sneaking up behind me with a baseball bat, I want to know about it, you know what I mean? And let's not talk about nausea.”
Nintendo America boss Reggie Fils-Aime last week also questioned the current VR hype.
"We have knowledge of the technical space, and we've been experimenting with this for a long, long time," he said. "What we believe is that, in order for this technology to move forward, you need to make it fun and you need to make it social. I haven't walked the floor, so I can't say in terms of what's on the floor today, but at least based on what I've seen to date, it's not fun, and it's not social. It's just tech."
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/sony-...-a-fad/0151651
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June 28th, 2015, 21:46 Posted By: wraggster
You can’t win E3.
You can lose it, of course. It was Xbox that ‘lost’ E3 in 2013 after it mismanaged the reveal of Xbox One. Meanwhile, Ubisoft had a few PR fires to put out last year, which saw it suffer a somewhat disappointing expo.
So it’s with some sitting-on-the-fence delight I can declare that no one lost E3 this year.
Sony’s conference was a cacophony of roaring fans delighting at each reveal, while it was hard to disagree with Microsoft’s assertion that its release slate is ‘the greatest line-up in Xbox history’.
It was the latter that has the most immediate potential. Over the next six months Xbox will launch a new game in every single one of its biggest first-party franchises: Gears of War, Fable, Forza and Halo. And that’s not even mentioning an exclusive Tomb Raider game.
Compare that to Sony’s first-party slate – which consists primarily of remakes or updates – and there’s just no competition.
Couple this with the recent news of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility, plus the fact that Xbox will have the run of Gamescom in Sony’s absence, and Microsoft has an opportunity here to chip away at Sony’s lead.
But it’s just an opportunity. It’s no sure thing. The team at PlayStation has done a great job of making third-party releases feel like their home is on PS4. Just look at the success it has had with its partnership with Destiny, or even some games it didn’t have partnerships with – such as The Witcher 3. These games didn’t just sell better on PS4, they had a huge impact on the hardware numbers, too.
So Sony’s partnerships with Star Wars: Battlefront, Disney Infinity 3, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and – most significantly – Call of Duty: Black Ops III, should not be underestimated. PlayStation has done a fine job of making PS4 No.1 around the world with a relatively lean line-up, so if Xbox wants to capitalise on its 2015 opportunity, it might have to spend time talking up the third-party slate as much as it does its exclusives.
Because once 2015 has ended, Microsoft’s window of opportunity closes. Next year PlayStation has Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, Horizon, Project Morpheus and a whole lot more on its release schedule.
It may be 18 months old, but really this new generation console battle is just getting started.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/the-n...months/0151803
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June 28th, 2015, 21:43 Posted By: wraggster
Last week marked the final E3 before virtual reality would be made available to consumers.
Valve’s Vive VR headset arrives this year, while Oculus Rift and PlayStation’s Morpheus are set to launch in early 2016.
The tech is in place, but there remains a question mark over the content. Sony had a number of VR titles at E3, while there was a plethora of independently-developed projects from the likes of Rebellion, Crytek, Frontier, CCP and nDreams. But most of the titles on show at E3 were little more than tech demos.
“It’s easy to be sceptical of any new tech, and I’m usually the first,” says development legend Tim Schafer, who isn’t building a VR title.
“I credit a lot of (the VR hype) to novels like Snow Crash or Ready Player One. People have created... not necessarily positive visions of VR, but they have come up with an idea of what it could be like. I don’t think anyone ever wrote a book about how great it’s going to be when we have second screens.
“Whether it’s with VR in those books, or [Star Trek’s] holodeck, these are things we can imagine and that we can aim for, because we already know they’ll be pretty awesome.”
Developer Cliff Bleszinski, famous for creating Gears of War, adds: “One of VR’s enemies is that people are jumping on the bandwagon and some folks are coming out with some mediocre VR titles.
“But if you play some of the really good experiences, using the latest Oculus stuff or the new Valve kit... that’s pretty magical. And anyone who hasn’t seen it and is criticising VR, needs to see it and re-evaluate.”
"Sci-fi has created a vision for virtual reality. No-one ever wrote a book talking about how great second screens will be." Tim Schafer, Double Fine
Most of the companies that are backing VR today are smaller developers. Indeed, the big guns like Take-Two and EA are optimistic about VR, but have adopted a ‘wait and see’ approach.
“Well, that’s fair enough,” says EA COO Peter Moore. “There is a lot of work to be done to commercialise VR, to make it at a competitive consumer price point, to get it through launch and develop long-term strategies. We are looking at it very closely, and all the teams want to experiment with it. We have the development kits, as I am sure all the big publishers do.
“Our sports teams are looking at this because we do have the tagline: ‘It’s in the game’. And to put you in the game, which you have the opportunity to do with VR, is something to get excited about. Everybody has to get this right, it is still a ways away, but when it is there, EA will be ready.”
Jim Ryan, European head of PlayStation, is sympathetic towards nervous publishers. “It’s an unproven area. You can’t just take a regular game and stick it on Morpheus. That doesn’t work, we know that. So they have to figure out what the experience is. The unfortunate commercial realities of a publisher means it needs to get comfortable in terms of business model and install base and all of these things, and how do they make money for their shareholders?
“It will take a little time. One of the roles of a first-party company is to have our own studios driving that process in terms of demonstrating what a great Morpheus experience looks like. Then as a platform holder we have to demonstrate that it’s a worthwhile thing to invest in. We’re just a little bit away from a point where we can go wide with firm dates, price points, and quantities. But when these things start to drop into place, we are confident that any publisher with an eye on what’s next can see this is going to be part of the future. And anybody who gets left behind does so at their peril.”
There was one big publisher that did back VR at E3: Ubisoft. The firm is yet to announce a single VR project, but it demonstrated a number of tech demos at E3, and promises announcements in the coming months.
“It’s a real investment from our part in terms of time, focus and research,” explains Alain Corre, Ubisoft’s EMEA executive director. “We’re still at the beginning of the VR adventure. But we are dedicating our best talent to develop for it.”
He adds: “VR is here to stay and we are really investing in trying to find new ways to bring something innovative to our brands.”
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/vr-wa...ucceed/0151805
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June 28th, 2015, 20:56 Posted By: wraggster
The excitement around virtual reality may have started when Sony unveiledProject Morpheus last year, but last week's E3 was its coming out party. The thing is, I've been around long enough to remember the hype and subsequent commercial flatline over gaming in stereoscopic 3D. So going into this year's grand gaming gala, I was skeptical -- I had that awkward tech history footnote in mind -- and to a point, I still am. But Oculus helped me get over that a bit. All it took was a game from a trusted developer -- Insomniac Games -- and an input solution that makes VR feel less isolating.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/25/o...ouch-hands-on/
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June 28th, 2015, 20:55 Posted By: wraggster
When it comes to racing games, and especially simulator-style titles, using a standard controller is fine for casual, laid-back play. But the genre really comes into its own with a dedicated wheel/pedal setup. There are a number of affordable options out there, as well as higher-end wheels like theThrustmaster T300RS we checked out earlier this year. Meanwhile Logitech recently announced the $400 G29 and G920 (for the PS3/4 and Xbox One/PC, respectively). But if those wheels just aren't quite high-end enough for you,Fanatec is happy to help you out. I've been using the company's modular ClubSport line to see if it can help me tame the vehicles on offer in the racing sim Project CARS. It's about as top-of-the-line as racing wheels get, but I'm warning you right now: The best doesn't come cheap.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/25/fanatec-clubsport/
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June 22nd, 2015, 20:09 Posted By: wraggster
Last week the entire games industry descended on the LA Convention Center for E3 - the annual industry conference and expo dedicated to everything video games.
You know the score by now - it all kicks of with The Big Press Conferences, in which the hardware and software giants (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, EA, UbiSoft, etc) showcase their upcoming wares and induce much pant wetting in the fanboy/girl community.
Then the show itself starts and it’s a mad scramble as every man and his dog issue press releases in an attempt to get heard amid the cacophony of noise.
In short, there was a lot going on, and this year was considered a big year in term of the number and importance of the announcements.
But what were the key takeaways from a PC gaming perspective? Well, you’ll notice that the title of this article is ‘What did E3 2015 mean for the future of PC gaming?’.
That’s because there was an awful lot of positioning going on among the major players to set themselves up in emerging areas, where battle lines are only just being drawn.
Take Microsoft, for example. It’s E3 statements show the company is now actively looking to blur the distinction between its Xbox brand and the Windows 10 operating system - when we talk about Xbox, it wants us to be thinking about console, PC, tablet and smartphone.
As such, Microsoft used E3 to put its gaming eggs into the Xbox basket, while simultaneously pushing Windows 10 as a games platform.
It confirmed that Killer Instinct and Gears of War: Ultimate Edition will both be rolled out for PC, while its Elite Controller will be available for both Xbox One and Windows 10.
In terms of the wider ecosystem, Windows 10 comes with DirectX 12, which means developers will be able to ‘easily’ create cross-platform Xbox One-PC games - something that Microsoft was keen to talk up at the show.
The company has also partnered with ValveVR and Oculus to bring VR to Windows 10. In terms of the latter, it will bundle Xbox One controllers with the Oculus Rift headsets, so that games running on the console can be streamed to said headsets via a Windows 10 PC.
It’s all very interesting stuff, but the feeling is that the success of a pervasive Xbox brand across both console and PC will depend greatly on Microsoft throwing more first party titles into the mix, plus the appetite of third party publishers to support the endeavour.
Of course, the ‘PC as games console’ narrative is also being pursued by Valve with its SteamOS initiative - though the company chose not to attend E3, presumably so it could concentrate on getting the software and hardware ready for launch later this year.
In terms of PC hardware, AMD was the other company making the most noise at E3, with reveals for both a compact gaming PC and next-gen GPUs.
The former, Project Quantum, has a form factor just 10 inches wide by 10 inches deep, but enough grunt to run a 4k game at 60 frames per second.
There’s no release date for the device yet, but it’s the kind of product that fits nicely into the ‘under the TV’ zeitgeist that’s fuelling much PC game thinking right now.
In the here and now, the company’s newly unveiled Radeon R9 Fury X GPU boasts some eye-watering memory bandwidth - delivering 60 per cent more memory bandwidth than GDDR5 and a 4096-bit memory interface.
Why does that mean? It means 4K and VR gaming at an affordable price and a nice little contest between plucky GPU underdog AMD and its nemesis Nvida’s 980Ti GPU.
The overall picture post-E3, then, is of a PC games market that’s about to enter a very interesting phase of development, as OS providers battle to ‘own’ the device and hardware vendors lay the groundwork for a rich 4K landscape and immersive VR worlds.
All of this is great news for the channel, as it not’s just the next-gen PC components that will be in demand - those 4K games will require displays capable of rendering at such resolutions, while the peripherals segment is going to see an influx of headsets and specialist controllers to support everything VR has to offer. Exciting times.
http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...-gaming/036430
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June 21st, 2015, 21:55 Posted By: wraggster
Here finally is the latest version of rpix86! Some pretty big internal changes in this version, so I hope I did not break any games that used to run in the previous version of rpix86.
1. Implemented FPU support in real mode (TradeWars 2002)
I already mentioned this change on my previous blog post. At that point the TradeWars 2002 game did not start up, as it complained that SHARE.EXE was not loaded or was unresponsive. I was able to use DOSBox to determine that the same problem happens there as well, and it is caused by an unsupported INT 21 AH=5C: FLOCK - RECORD LOCKING DOS call. I changed my code to not report an error (but it still does not actually perform any record locking) and that allowed TradeWars 2002 to progress further. However my version seems to miss a file (or I have not set it up correctly) so I don't know if the game actually runs in rpix86 yet.
But in any case, if there are other real-mode programs that need FPU support to run, those should now run properly in this version of rpix86.
2. Implemented support for Borland RTM (Jazz Jackrabbit, Tyrian 2000)
I described this change pretty thoroughly in my previous blog post. After that post I spent some time debugging a timer I/O port problem I had, which caused Tyrian 2000 to hang intermittently. The timer input port 0x40 MSB/LSB toggle got out of sync, and the game got larger values than it expected and went into a never-ending loop. The problem turned out to be my using the same temp variable both for port 0x40 input and output. I changed the temp variable to be different, and this problem seemed to go away. Tyrian 2000 still seems to hang at launch occasionally, but I haven't been able to determine what causes this. If it gets past the launch time, it seems to run fine (but pretty slow).
3. Implemented new -noems command line parameter (Ultima VII)
After those fixes I still had some time to implement further features, so I decide to add the -noems command line switch to disable EMS memory (and emulation of EMM386 memory manager features) in rpix86. This seemed to fix Ultima VII, as it checks whether EMM386 is loaded at startup, and fails to start if it is loaded.
4. Changed the GPIO RS-232 port handling to emulate a null modem cable connection
I have not heard from rpix86 users having success using the GPIO serial pins to connect serial devices to their Raspberry Pi and controlling them from rpix86. As this should work but I have not been able to test this myself, I thought that maybe my emulation is not quite as good as it should be. In this version I decided to experiment adding loop-back handshaking to my GPIO serial port emulation. For USB-to-RS232 device this is not needed, as the device should take care of the handshaking. However, since there are no RS-232 handshake pins in the GPIO connector, I thought that it might be a good idea to fake the handshake signals in this situation. At least my Telix communications program now thinks that my GPIO serial port is already connected when I start it up. Let me know if you can test this out and see any improvements in the behavior or compatibility. Or if it now works worse than before.
That's it for the changes in this version! I hope you find this new version useful, and again let me know of any bugs you encounter. Thanks again for your interest in rpix86!
May 24th, 2015 - rpix86 work continues!
Okay, after a break of about a year, I am back working on my emulators! For the past several weeks I have been working either on my Windows Phone version of pax86 or on rpix86. I returned to working on my emulators in the beginning of April, when I got an email describing problems running TradeWars 2002 on Raspberry Pi. I have received various bug reports during the past year, and have been adding them to my todo-list, but this bug report was slightly different as it looked like the game should actually already work on rpix86. So, I thought I would spend some time looking into what is going on with this game.
Work on supporting TradeWars 2002
TradeWars 2002 has two versions, one running under DPMI DOS extender and one running without it. The problem was that the DPMI one exited with "Cannot enable A20" and the non-DPMI version with "Numeric co-processor required". What bothered me was that rpix86 should already support enabling/disbling the A20 line, and it also has support for the numeric co-processor. So why does the game not detect them?
I started with the numeric co-processor problem, as there are several ways the game could attempt to enable the A20 line, and I thought it might be difficult to determine which method the game attempts to use. After some looking into the rpix86 code, I remembered that I had only coded complete FPU support for 32-bit protected mode, as all the games I have encountered so far have only needed FPU support in that mode. The real-mode FPU code simply silently skipped all operations. Perhaps the game tried to use FPU opcodes in real mode, and when the results were not correct, it exited?
I disabled the real mode FPU opcode skipping code, and indeed, the game encountered an FPU opcode in real mode:
-----------------------[TW2002]------------------------
TW2002: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x42788000
CPU: REAL, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=00000000 EBX=00003D38 ECX=00007FBD EDX=00001E6E
ESP=00009FFA EBP=00000000 ESI=00000264 EDI=00000042
ES=02D3 CS=1E6E SS=2494 DS=20BF FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP EI PL ZR NA PO NC VM=0 IOPL=3
1E6E:09EB D93F fstcw [bx]
That looks like the game attempts to store the FPU control word into memory in real mode. I checked the game code further, and noticed that it does indeed do some floating point calculations in real mode. I decided to spend my Easter vacation working on implementing the real-mode FPU opcodes, as now I had a game to use for testing them. This work mainly consisted of adding the real-mode opcode tables, as the main FPU operations are the same between the real and protected modes. It took several days, though.
After I had implemented the FPU opcodes, the game progressed further, but then exited with the following message:
File Error (1) - TWNODE.DAT : Invalid Function
05/24/27 00:00:08 AM Game Halted:
SHARE.EXE not loaded or unresponsive.
c:\games\2002v309>
I have spent several days trying to debug the game and see how it determines that SHARE.EXE is not loaded (well, it isn't loaded, but I would like to fool the game into thinking it is), but have not yet been able to determine this. I recently tested the game in DOSBox, and it gets the exact same error, so I can not even use DOSBox to debug the game behaviour. Perhaps I will look into FreeDOS implementation of SHARE.EXE to determine the possible detection routines that the game uses. However, I got a bit bored with working on this game so I switched to working on my Windows Phone version of pax86 instead. I wrote a blog post about my work there a couple of weeks back.
Implementing support for Borland RTM DOS Extender
I recently got an email with a debug log from Tyrian 2000. The game crashed in the IRET opcode, which in principle should be supported in both real and protected modes. So, I decided to switch back to working on rpix86 for a while.
-----------------------[RTM]------------------------
RTM: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x7387c000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=000002A8 EBX=00000FFC ECX=000000B7 EDX=00003000
ESP=00000F94 EBP=00000F8C ESI=00000F9E EDI=00001000
ES=005B CS=0020 SS=0018 DS=0018 FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
0020:000015EC CF iret
Since the game runs in protected mode, there are several possible reasons why rpix86 would exit at that point. I improved my error logging so that instead of the generic "Unsupported opcode" rpix86 would report the unsupported situation with IRET that it encountered. Running with the enhanced logging resulted in this log: -----------------------[RTM]------------------------
RTM: Unsupported IRET to outer level!
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=000002A8 EBX=00000FFC ECX=000000B7 EDX=00003000
ESP=00000F94 EBP=00000F8C ESI=00000F9E EDI=00001000
ES=005B CS=0020 SS=0018 DS=0018 FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
0020:000015EC CF iret
Okay, now that is pretty clear, as I had not yet added support for interrupt return to outer (less privileged) protection level. The fact that the running program is called RTM made me remember that I actually worked on similar issues when I added support for Jazz Jackrabbit into my zerox86 emulator. Since zerox86 runs on MIPS architecture instead of ARM as in Raspberry Pi, the assembler code is very different and thus I had not added similar support to my ARM emulators at that time. However, I had written several blog posts about supporting Jazz Jackrabbit in both my DS2x86 and zerox86 blog posts, so I thought that using those blog posts and taking the ideas and algorithms from my MIPS emulator code would make it reasonably straight forward to implement the same support to my ARM emulators.
1. Interestingly, when I started up Jazz Jackrabbit, it exited with "Cannot Enable A20". The same problem that the DPMI -version of TradeWars 2002 had. At this point I thought it would help me quite a bit if I got my debug-version of DOSBox running again. I had switched to a new hard drive and installed Windows 8.1 since I last ran Visual C++ 2008 Express for DOSBox, but luckily I still had the install program for that old Visual C++ on my old hard drive. It installed fine, and pretty soon I was able to run Jazz in DOSBox. I noticed that it uses the keyboard controller method of setting the A20 line, and somewhat to my surprise I noticed that I did not have a proper handler for that yet in rpix86. I implemented that, and then got Jazz go drop into debugger in rpix86 at the same point as where Tyrian 2000 drops. Thus, I switched to working on Jazz Jackrabbit, so I could follow my old blog posts step by step.
2. The first step was adding that IRET return to outer priority level case. This was not terribly difficult, as I was able to simply look at my implementation for zerox86, mentally convert the MIPS asm to ARM asm code line by code line. I had to be careful to use the correct CPU registers in my new ASM code, by comparing this code to the normal IRET code I already had implemented, though.
3. After I had implemented the IRET opcode, the game not surprisingly encountered the priority level jump to the opposite direction. This is done using an INT opcode.
-----------------------[RTM]------------------------
RTM: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x42840000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=00000300 EBX=00000021 ECX=00000000 EDX=000002A8
ESP=00000F9E EBP=00000FD4 ESI=00000F9E EDI=00000FA2
ES=005B CS=00B7 SS=005B DS=0000 FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
00B7:000001F7 CD31 int 31
Very similar approach worked here, I implemented the new code based on my zerox86 code.
4. Next, the game encountered a HLT (halt) opcode in protected mode. This opcode is not allowed in any other priority level except 0 (the most privileged), otherwise it will cause a General Protection Fault Exception.
-----------------------[RTM]------------------------
RTM: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x428b0000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=00000303 EBX=00000735 ECX=00000000 EDX=000000F4
ESP=00000FCE EBP=00000FFA ESI=00002258 EDI=00002195
ES=0000 CS=0113 SS=005B DS=00B7 FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP DI PL NZ NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
0113:0000000C F4 hlt
The game was running in priority level 3 at that point, so it was actually supposed to cause a GPF. However, I had not implemented any exception handling in rpix86 yet, so that was the next step in my work on supporting the RTM DOS Extender.
5. At this point I had to spend some time hunting down a bug I had typed into the new INT handling code. Such bugs are pretty difficult to hunt down, even when I know the bug is very probably in the code I just added. When staring at the code you have written, you always see it as you meant it, not as you accidentally typed it in. :-) Anyways, after fixing that bug I was back on track (as I kept following my prior blog posts for those MIPS emulators), the next problem was the LES opcode that encountered a segment that was not present.
-----------------------[RTM]------------------------
RTM: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x42830000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=00000100 EBX=000003F4 ECX=000004AA EDX=00002000
ESP=000003D2 EBP=000003D4 ESI=0000396C EDI=00000000
ES=009F CS=00DF SS=009F DS=00E7 FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP DI PL ZR NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
00DF:0000C391 C47E06 les di,[bp+06]
Here I added the Page Fault handling using my new exception handling mechanism, and again was able to progress further.
6. There had been several additional steps at this point that I had had to do for my MIPS emulators. However, since those enhancements were done into the C code, I had already implemented them also for my ARM emulators. The MIPS and ARM emulators share most of the C code, but the ASM code is obviously separate. Thus I was able to skip any new changes for reporting no extended memory for the Borland RTM, adding the "last fit" memory allocation strategy, and returning the proper return value from DOS call INT 21 AH=4D.
7. The next step was to handle opcode 0x8E, which loads a segment selector register. This also needed page fault handling, much like the LES opcode above. As you may notice from the debug log, at this point the actual game [JAZZ] is already running, while in the previous log entries rpix86 was still running the [RTM] loader program.
-----------------------[JAZZ]------------------------
JAZZ: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x427d8000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=00000000 EBX=000003EE ECX=00000540 EDX=00000000
ESP=000003EE EBP=000003F0 ESI=00002386 EDI=000023C7
ES=009F CS=00E7 SS=009F DS=00EF FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP DI PL ZR NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
00E7:00000593 8E46FE mov es,[bp+FE]
8. Then I had to implementation the Page Fault handling also to the RETF opcode handler...
-----------------------[JAZZ]------------------------
JAZZ: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x427f0000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=0000FB43 EBX=00000000 ECX=000001C7 EDX=00000000
ESP=00001FFC EBP=00000000 ESI=00000282 EDI=000023C6
ES=01AF CS=00E7 SS=028F DS=01AF FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP EI PL ZR NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
00E7:000003A6 CB retf
9. ... and next the corresponding Page Fault in the CALL opcode.
-----------------------[JAZZ]------------------------
JAZZ: Unsupported opcode! INTVectors=0x42810000
CPU: PROT, 16, 0000FFFF
EAX=00000000 EBX=00000277 ECX=0000078A EDX=00000277
ESP=00002000 EBP=00000000 ESI=0000028B EDI=0000EA32
ES=0287 CS=01D7 SS=028F DS=0287 FS=0000 GS=0000
NV UP EI PL ZR NA PO CY VM=0 IOPL=3
01D7:0000000C 9AA4395702 call 0257:39A4
10. At this point the game started up, but then dropped to the debugger with an "Unsupported SB DSP command FF!". As I mentioned in the DS2x86 blog post, the game seems to have a bug where it attempts to send the DMA length as parameters to SB DSP command 0x1C (start 8-bit autoinit DMA). Since this command does not actually take any parameters, those extra bytes are interpreted as additional (undocumented) commands.
0417:25DE cmp word [22ED],0200
jbe 25F8 Jump if SoundBlaster DSP version <= 2.00
mov al,1C
call 22F5 Send DSP command 0x1C (start 8-bit autoinit DMA)
mov ax,[22F1] ax = 0x0800
dec ax ax = 0x07FF
call 22F5 Send DSP command 0xFF (undocumented!)
mov al,ah
call 22F5 Send DSP command 0x07 (undocumented!)
0417:25F7 ret
I had hacked these unsupported commands 0xFF and 0x07 to be silently ignored in my MIPS code, so I added a similar hack to the ARM code.
11. At this point the game started into graphics mode, but it kept crashing almost immediately with "Unhandled exception 0008 at 3042 0020" followed by differing ErrCodes. At times this happened even before the game went into graphics mode, but usually during the intro graphics. The game immediately dropped back to DOS at that point, and usually the whole rpix86 went unresponsive after a few key presses. To be sure I also tested Tyrian 2000, and it crashed similarly, so this was obviously caused by some bug in my code. This never happened in my MIPS emulators, so it looked like this was something specific to my ARM implementation.
I googled for that Exception 0008, and it seems to mean "Double fault", which occurs when the processor detects an exception while trying to invoke the handler for a prior exception. I never generate that exception in my code, so it looks like the Borland RTM generates that by itself when it encounters that situation. But how do I find out where and why that happens?
I assumed that RTM considers exceptions and hardware interrupts to be equivalent in that situation, so the most likely cause was that my hardware IRQ emulation interrupts an exception handler. I began looking at how I disable hardware interrupts when an exception occurs. The code seemed fine, the interrupts are disabled as soon as the exception handler starts. I added logging for every situation where the Disable Interrupts flag changes value, but that did not seem to show anything out of the ordinary. Finally I added also logging for whenever an interrupt or exception handler starts, and that produced this interesting code snippet:
0277:000001C0 EAX=00003F60 EBX=05AF0005 ECX=00000060 EDX=00000000 ESP=000016DA Enable interrupts
EBP=000016E4 ESI=00001A0B EDI=00001B3E DS=05FF ES=028F SS=028F 1 1 = interrupts are now enabled
FB9C sti
0020:00000C7A EAX=00000006 EBX=05AF05FF ECX=00000060 EDX=00000000 ESP=00000FEC GPF Exception Handler starts
EBP=000016AA ESI=00001A0B EDI=00001B3E DS=00BF ES=028F SS=0018 0 0 = interrupts are now disabled
558B push bp
0020:00000B52 EAX=00000006 EBX=05AF05FF ECX=00000060 EDX=00000000 ESP=00000FE6 Timer IRQ Handler starts
EBP=000016AA ESI=00001A0B EDI=00001B3E DS=00BF ES=028F SS=0018 0 0 = interrupts are now disabled
558B push bp
It looked like the GPF Exception handler had just started and turned the interrupts off, but then immediately the timer interrupt handler started, even though the interrupts should have been disabled!
I looked into my code that disables the interrupts, and found a potential race condition. If an interrupt happened while the exception was being generated, it was possible for the interrupt code to mark that the next opcode to run needs to be the interrupt handler. The exception handler did not reset that mark when it turned the interrupts off, only the hardware interrupt handler handled this situation correctly. I made the exception handler behave similarly to how the hardware interrupt handler behaves, and after that change the game no longer encountered that Exception 0008 problem.
12. The next step was to add code to read data from file directly to Mode-X VRAM memory. This reading from file directly to graphics RAM is only done in two games that I have encountered, Heimdall which uses this in the EGA graphics mode, and Jazz Jackrabbit in Mode-X. The C call for this routine already existed but was commented out, as I had not implemented the actuall handler in the ASM code yet. Without this code the Jazz character in the 3D intro game did not have any textures and was black, as in this screen copy:
Adding the code was pretty simple, as I had commented the MIPS code pretty well in my zerox86 source code. It took only a few minutes to add the same code to the ARM Mode-X ASM code.
13. My zerox86 blog post was also very useful in implementing the enhancements for the few Mode-X opcode handlers that Jazz Jackrabbit uses in the game menu selector drawing. These images from my zerox86 blog show the problem on the left and the fixed code on the right:
14. I had spent considerable time debugging the Jazz audio problems in zerox86, so I added the same code enhancements to my ARM SoundBlaster emulation code. Thus Jazz Jackrabbit sounded pretty good even the first time I ran it.
Okay, now Jazz Jackrabbit was running fine, so I switched back to checking Tyrian 2000. It too seemed to run otherwise fine, but it did not play any audio. I will need to look into this a bit further.
I have not yet had time to test the new rpix86 properly, so I did not want to release the new version today. However, if nothing major happens, I should be able to release version 0.18 next Sunday! I am still checking my todo-list for additional improvements I might have time to implement, but at least Jazz Jackrabbit will run in the next release. Thanks again for your interest in my emulators!
http://rpix86.patrickaalto.com/rblog.html
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June 21st, 2015, 21:55 Posted By: wraggster
[h=4]Setting up a Raspberry Pi for compiling rpix86[/h] I had ordered a Raspberry Pi 2 about a week before, and on Friday the 5th of June it arrived! I spent that weekend setting it up, with a goal of switching my rpix86 programming work over to the newer and faster Pi. Almost since my original Raspberry Pi was new, I have been having some SD card related problems with it. It runs for a couple of hours, then it suddenly starts failing with "Journal has aborted" and "journal commit I/O error" messages, after which I can only turn it off and back on. After the restart it again works for a couple of hours. I have been worrying that it will eventually corrupt my SD card, and I would have a hard time restoring my rpix86 build system back to working order.
So, when I got my new RPi 2, I copied all my rpix86 sources over, and then just began trying to compile it. For future reference I'll log here all the compile and linking errors I encountered and how I solved them. This should help me in the future if I need to reinstall everything at some point.
The first problem was
/usr/include/interface/vmcs_host/vcgencmd.h:33:27: fatal error: vchost_config.h: No such file or directory I googled for solutions to this problem, and according to this forum post one (if perhaps not the best) way to solve this is to simply edit the vcgencmd.h file to have the correct path to that include file. I did that, which fixed this problem.
Next I encountered
fatal error: X11/Xlib.h: No such file or directory This got solved by installing the X11 development environment:
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev- The next step was to build the libilclient.a library, which was missing. This was done by running make in the /opt/vc/src/hello_pi/libs/ilclient directory.
The next problem was that the curses libraries were missing. I use the ncurses library when rpix86 is launched from the terminal window. To fix this I just needed to install the ncurses development package.
sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev- Somewhat strangely, next I needed to add -ldl -lm to my Makefile. I did not need to have these libraries specifically included in my original Raspberry Pi Makefile, for some reason.
Finally, I wanted to access my Raspberry Pi 2 rpix86 folder from my Windows 8.1 PC, similarly to how I had shared the corresponding folder on my original Raspberry Pi. I used the instructions in this post for the basic Samba configuration, and then just copied the relevant /etc/samba/smb.conf sections from my old Pi over to the new Pi 2:
[rpix86] comment = rpix86 share path = /home/pi/rpix86 valid users = @users force group = users create mask = 0666 directory mask = 0777 read only = no [ipc$] valid users = nobody @users I remember having some problems when I tried to configure samba on my original Pi, but this time it began working immediately. I think it was that last [ipc$] section that was originally missing, and it seems to be required for Windows access to Raspberry Pi.
[h=4]Work on supporting TradeWars 2002 continues[/h]
Since my last blog post I received some additional information about how to properly install and set up TradeWars 2002 (thanks for that!), and found out that I still had some FPU opcodes unimplemented. I implemented the missing FPU opcodes, which made the game progress further. I am currently looking into the problem where the game exits back to DOS with the following error message:
Opening Planet File TW2002 has ended in error. The errorcode is 205 EC=205 LF=StrTable.D8A L1= L2=ReadAt_STRING_TABLE Addr=11F6:7E33 I have managed to use the built-in debugger to run up to the top level routine (that calls some subroutines where this error happens), and am currently in the process of digging deeper into those routines to determine the actual cause. [h=4]Tyrian SoundBlaster audio fails on Raspberry Pi 2[/h] I was also told that the SB digitized audio crashes Tyrian 2000 in rpix86 running on a Raspberry Pi 2, but on my old original Raspberry Pi it works fine. I am looking also into this problem now that I have my own Raspberry Pi 2. This looks like some timing or thread synchronization problem. The original Pi only has a single CPU core, so it does not need as much thread synchronization as a proper multi-core CPU that the newer Raspberry Pi 2 has. It seems that the problem is a non-present SB buffer table segment, but determining why the buffer is not present when the first SB IRQ occurs still needs further digging into.
Thanks again for your interest in my work on rpix86, I plan to release a new version after I get at least these two games working properly in rpix86.
http://rpix86.patrickaalto.com/rblog.html
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June 20th, 2015, 23:43 Posted By: wraggster
The Raspberry Pi mini computer has now got its own official case, making the device even more friendly to use in schools.
While there have been unofficial cases made for the Pi in the past, like the Pi-Top laptop case, this is the first developed closely with the creators.
"We thought that it would be great to create something affordable, but with the kind of real beauty and design that our products try to encompass," said Raspberry Pi director of engineering Gordon Hollingworth on the Raspberry Pi blog.
"So to this end we began the search for a design company who were capable of understanding our requirements and had their eyes firmly fixated on creating a product that achieved those aims."
Raspberry Pi teamed up with T-Zero to develop the case, which is priced at £5.99 and is designed to protect both the Pi B+ and Pi 2 B.
It boasts a red and white colour scheme, cut-outs for all the connection points, including microSD, as well as a plastic LED light protector and stick-on rubber feet for case stability.
The case is available from Raspberry Pi's own Swag Store, element14 and RS Electronics.
http://www.pcr-online.biz/news/read/...al-case/036388
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June 20th, 2015, 23:18 Posted By: wraggster
Nintendo was the first games company to do 3D and the first to do augmented reality, but it looks highly unlikely it will be joining the virtual reality party.
Whether it was the new AR ventures of Microsoft’s Hololens or the blossoming VR movement driven by Oculus Rift and Steam VR (and to a lesser extent Project Morpheus), new technologies were all the talk of E3 2015.
Yet Nintendo remains conspicuous by its willingness to sit back and be left out of the party.
"We have knowledge of the technical space, and we've been experimenting with this for a long, long time," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Polygon.
"What we believe is that, in order for this technology to move forward, you need to make it fun and you need to make it social. I haven't walked the floor, so I can't say in terms of what's on the floor today, but at least based on what I've seen to date, it's not fun, and it's not social. It's just tech."
In 1995 Nintendo broke new ground with the launch of the Virtual Boy. Despite the name, it wasn’t a VR headset, but it was the first to offer parallax 3D graphics. Then in 2011 the company pioneered again, integrating a number of AR games with its new 3DS handheld.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/fils-...social/0151470
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June 20th, 2015, 22:58 Posted By: wraggster
There are plenty of ergonomic keyboards, but the creators of Keyboardio believe that theirs is the only one that a serious typist should buy. It's been created by Jesse Vincent, a name familiar to anyone involved with the Perl community, who has spent more than two years researching the most comfortable way to type words. That's why the hardware comes in this exaggerated butterfly-style layout with heavily customized keycaps covering mechanical keys. Surrounding the outside is a maple wood exterior that, Vincent believes, makes it the first computer accessory made to "heirloom grade."
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/15/k...o-kickstarter/
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June 19th, 2015, 22:40 Posted By: wraggster
If virtual reality takes off like its backers hope, it'll create a whole new market for panoramic content -- 2D photos and video aren't going to cut it. That's why Getty has just launched 360° View for the Oculus Platform to offer an "engaging virtual reality experience of enchanting creative stills." Rather than smiling people doing ridiculous things, Getty said it's new library is about "transporting viewers to... the world's glitziest events, sports' major games and exotic locations around the world." Images now available in the Oculus Storeinclude scenes from the Cannes Film Festival and 2014 World Cup.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/19/g...s-oculus-rift/
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June 12th, 2015, 17:28 Posted By: wraggster
It seems the UK remains bewitched by Bandai Namco’s latest effort.
The Witcher 3 was once again the biggest-selling game of last week, according to the latest UK retail charts from Ukie and GfK Chart-Track.
This is despite the title, which saw the largest game launch of 2015 upon release, experiencing a 44 per cent drop in sales week-on-week.
Meanwhile, Nintendo’s quirky squid-shooter Splatoon saw its sales halve during its second week, falling two spots to fourth place.
Splatoon’s decline opened up a space for long-running chart success Grand Theft Auto V to sneak back up to second place after three weeks sat in third position, despite a slightly 16 per cent drop in sales.
Rockstar’s record-breaking crime epic has been a constant force in the rankings during 2015, consistently remaining in the Top Five for the year to date.
Fellow stalwart FIFA 15 similarly climbed back up the charts, rising one place to third – regardless of sales slipping by almost a quarter (23 per cent).
In a reasonably slow week for the games industry, the only new release in the entire Top 40 last week was the Japanese sci-fi adventure title Steins;Gate for PS3 and Vita. The PQube-published game debuted at number 18.
Here is the All Formats Top Ten in full, for the week ending June 6th:
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Bandai Namco)
- Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar)
- FIFA 15 (EA)
- Splatoon (Nintendo)
- Battlefield Hardline (EA)
- Project CARS (Bandai Namco)
- Farming Simulator 15 (Focus Home Interactive)
- Destiny (Activision)
- Minecraft: Xbox Edition (Microsoft)
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Activision)
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/the-w...charts/0150616
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June 12th, 2015, 17:17 Posted By: wraggster
It seems that Nintendo’s latest shooter still has legs (tentacles?) in Japan, as it outdoes a slew of new releases to remain top of the retail charts.
According to the latest data from Famitsu, despite Splatoon’s sales nearly halving from its launch week, Wii U hardware sales actually went up, increasing by almost 2,000 units week-on-week.
The console remained the best-selling machine for the week, as Nintendo’s handheld the New 3DS XL continued to climb back up the rankings, knocking Sony’s Vita down to third as it retook second place.
Splatoon’s second consecutive number one comes despite competition from a number of new releases, including Stella Glow for 3DS and Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 5 Plus - Fortune Tower to Unmei no Dice for Vita, which claimed second and third in the software charts, respectively.
The new titles’ high charting saw The Witcher 3 fall to number four, a clear contrast to its continued chart-topping triumph here in the UK.
Another new entry to make the Top Ten (twice) last week was the generously-titled Natsuiro High School Seishun Hakusho: Tenko Shonichi no Ore ga Osananajimi to Saikai-shitara Hodobuin ni Sareteite Gekisha Shonen no Hibi wa Scoop Dairenpatsu de Igai to MoteMote nanoni Nazeka My Memo, the PS4 and PS3 editions of which respectively took fifth and ninth place in their first week on sale.
Filling out the Top Ten was the only other new release, Koei Tecmo's Atelier Rorona Plus: The Alchemist of Arland.
Here’s the software Top Ten for the week ending June 7th:
- Splatoon (Nintendo) Wii U – 81,764
- Stella Glow (Sega) 3DS – 16,875 (New)
- Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer 5 Plus - Fortune Tower to Unmei no Dice (Spike Chunsoft) Vita – 13,353 (New)
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Spike Chunsoft) PS4 – 11,850
- Natsuiro High School Seishun Hakusho: Tenko Shonichi no Ore ga Osananajimi to Saikai-shitara Hodobuin ni Sareteite Gekisha Shonen no Hibi wa Scoop Dairenpatsu de Igai to MoteMote nanoni Nazeka My Memo (D3 Publisher) PS4 – 11,717
- Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo) Wii U – 11,485
- Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition (Sony) Vita – 9,531
- Hatsune Miku: Project Mirai Deluxe (Sega) 3DS – 7,763
- Natsuiro High School Seishun Hakusho: Tenko Shonichi no Ore ga Osananajimi to Saikai-shitara Hodobuin ni Sareteite Gekisha Shonen no Hibi wa Scoop Dairenpatsu de Igai to MoteMote nanoni Nazeka My Memo (D3 Publisher) PS3 – 7,501 (New)
- Atelier Rorona Plus: The Alchemist of Arland (Koei Tecmo) 3DS – 7,049 (New)
And here are the weekly hardware rankings:
- Wii U – 17,104
- New Nintendo 3DS LL – 12,655
- PS Vita – 11,072
- PS4 – 10,137
- New Nintendo 3DS – 3,109
- PS3 – 2,444
- Nintendo 3DS LL – 956
- Nintendo 3DS – 784
- PS Vita TV – 522
- Xbox One – 248
- http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/splat...s-rise/0150769
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June 12th, 2015, 17:14 Posted By: wraggster
A new report has seemingly confirmed a long-running assumption of the industry – boxed games are on the way out.
The latest GamePulse report from research outlet EEDAR estimates that the number of physical titles released for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo's machines has more than halved over the last six years, plummeting from 383 in 2008 to just 145 last year.
Simulatenously, the number of digital-only games (EEDAR defines 'digital-only' as not receiving an accompanying boxed release within 90 days) has almost tripled during the same time span.
In 2008, 102 exclusively digital titles hit the PlayStation Store, Xbox Live Marketplace and Nintendo eShop. By 2014, the number of digital titles launched on the three platforms reached 279.
This wasn't solely the result of the same publishers releasing more digital titles – EEDAR states that last year saw the greatest diversity in the digital publishing space yet, with more than 146 different publishers launching at least one digital-only game.
The number of digital-only games released per publisher has fallen by an average of one from 2008 to 2014, versus a slight average growth in the number of traditional (boxed and digital) games brought to market each year over the same period.
Overall, physical-only titles accounted for just three per cent of the games market last year, in contrast to almost half (44 per cent) of the sector in 2008.
Comparatively, digital-only games have risen from comprised two fifths of the space seven years ago to two thirds in 2014.
Products launched simulatenously via both channels made up just under a third (31 per cent) of total releases.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/two-t...l-only/0150853
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June 12th, 2015, 17:07 Posted By: wraggster
Sitting in the cockpit of a spacecraft, trapped in an underwater cage surrounded by sharks or trapped in a dark house with a silent pursuer.
It’s not hard to conjure a list of experiences that when coupled with virtual reality will become almost magical. Anyone who has tried VR will tell you that it offers something that traditional games, or indeed any form of traditional media, simply cannot match. It’s certainly very exciting.
These experiences, whether it’s EVE Valkyrie or any of the as of yet unannounced or unconceived titles that are to come, are going to be what sells the technology to the increasingly hungry and affluent tech consumer.
But as much as many of the specialist press continue to enjoy and evangelise the potential VR revolution, many still look on with commercial scepticism.
VR has a lot of very significant barriers to overcome.
The looming menace of 3D TV’s spectacular demise hangs heavy. The need to wear 3D glasses was enough to pop that bubble before it even formed. What on earth are consumers going to make of the need to strap themselves into a headset?
It’s not only the bulk and inconvenience of the headset that’s the problem, either. Once headphoned up the user will be effectively isolated from their surrounding environment. The calls of spouses and kids will go unanswered, phone calls forgotten, Twitter updates on celebrity deaths missed and expensive tech deliveries from the postman left with the dodgy neighbour with all those cats.
Then there’s simply the hassle the strapping yourself in and setting up to play a VR game. I can just about be bothered to get my phone out of my pocket to play You Must Build A Boat. Sometimes switching the channel on my HDMI box to play PS4 can seem too much. I’ve been known to play games without sound as I can’t be arsed to plug in the headphones.
People will undergo this inconvenience, however, for experiences that reward you for it. Experiences that the easier options cannot provide. But will they do the same for experiences that will offer no benefit over playing traditionally? Will users really go through the hassle of setting up their equipment to play a console game being streamed to a virtual screen in a virtual room when it’s easier – and from a technical viewpoint, also better – just to turn on your real screen and play it in your real room?
The same argument can be applied to many of the world-changing social experiences promised by Facebook in the days following its acquisition of Oculus. Are you really going to go through the pre-VR set-up ritual so you can experience sitting in your room with your friends watching a movie? I suspect that people would always much rather sit an actual room with their friends without a plastic helmet. Or even in an actual room on their own, provided it take less effort.
None of this touches on the cost, either, which was conspicuous in its absence from Oculus’ E3 presentation yesterday. These things are going to cost a shitload. Particularly when you factor in additional controllers (which, incidentally, will ensure that the Oculus Rift audience is fragmented from a very early stage, but that’s another discussion entirely).
As I said, none of this is designed to question the potential of the VR experience. Or to argue that VR is the next 3D. With the right content, at the right price and with fewer compromises required, VR can in my opinion very much succeed.
But the timescales we’re looking at here are huge.
2016 is not going to be the year of VR for anyone other than those few who have the disposable cash and want to be the first to experience this new frontier of entertainment. If VR is to be measured by its mass-market penetration, then get comfy because all the players involved had best be ready for a long, long game.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/opini...ew-one/0150983
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June 12th, 2015, 16:56 Posted By: wraggster
Oculus' top brass showed a slew of new VR games at a special event today -- including a closer look at the badass-looking EVE Valkyrie -- but they need more than big-name developers if they want the Rift to be a hit. That's why the company is earmarking $10 million to fund indie game makers who want to build the new big thing in virtual reality content. Coders, you'd better get crackin'.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/11/o...ie-developers/
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June 12th, 2015, 16:55 Posted By: wraggster
Microsoft and Oculus are leaping into the future of virtual reality hand-in-hand. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe today announced that the Rift will be packaged with a wireless Xbox One controller, native support on Windows 10 and the ability to play Xbox One games inside the headset itself, in a sort of virtual cinema, via Xbox-to-Windows streaming. Microsoft's Head of Xbox Phil Spencer took to the Oculus stage to lay out his plans for the Rift and Windows gaming going forward -- and there's a reason he looked so happy while doing so. In fact, there are a few reasons the Microsoft-Oculus deal should be gangbusters for both companies.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/11/o...icrosoft-love/
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