Disney is closing its first virtual reality attraction

July 12th, 2015, 14:12 Posted By: wraggster

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The BBC is Giving Every 11-Year-Old in the UK a Micro Computer

July 8th, 2015, 22:16 Posted By: wraggster

Back in the 1980s the BBC Micro spawned a whole generation of bedroom coders. The aim of the project was to provide a rugged, simple to use computer that was cheap enough for most schools to own at least one. The Micro was a huge success, with 80 per cent of state schools buying one of the machines, introducing many children to programming for the first time.
The BBC is trying to do something similar with the BBC Micro Bit. The organisation is giving away a Raspberry Pi-like micro computer to every Year 7 child in the UK. The Micro Bit's main feature is a panel of 25 LEDs which can be programmed to light up in animated patterns. The BBC has now revealed the full specifications of the micro computer and it's a little bit awesome.
Along with its LED panel, the Micro Bit has an accelerometer, compass, and Bluetooth transmitter. It also has two on-board buttons and a micro USB port.
In theory, this means that you can use the Micro Bit as a simple two-button game controller, one that you can connect to a device either by USB or with Bluetooth. You could also program a game where you control it by shaking the Micro Bit.
The BBC is putting together a full set of tutorials and lesson plans that will launch with the Micro Bit in October.
“It’s an entry-level device that will enable kids to code and program, and if they enjoy that, clearly they’ll move on to devices like the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi,” industry verteran Ian Livingstone told the Guardian.
You could connect the Micro Bit to a Raspberry Pi and use it as a controller, light up score board, or any number of canny things.
The first prototype of the Micro Bit had a built in watch battery making it easy for the device to be pinned to your clothes. Unfortunately, the BBC worried that someone might end up swallowing the battery so it's now powered by a separate AAA battery pack but that can be discretely hidden away.
For those of us who aren't in Year 7, the Micro Bit will go on sale at the end of the year. I, for one, am definitely going to pick on up. The idea of being able to code a little piece of hardware makes me feel all tingly inside.

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/07/08/t...micro-computer

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YouTube reveals top 10 "trending" games for June

July 8th, 2015, 22:12 Posted By: wraggster

YouTube has announced the top 10 “trending” games on its network for June, with Batman: Arkham Knight claiming first place.
The game finished ahead of Lego Jurassic World – undoubtedly enjoying the runner-up spot thanks to the popularity of the non-Lego major motion picture – and Fallout 4.
Warner Bros also scored a second Lego title in the top five for the period, with Lego Worlds finishing fifth behind Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
Different from NewZoo's montly Top Game Franchises on YouTube chart, YouTube's “trending” games are determined through a combination of number of video uploads and watchtime.
Here's the full list:

1. Batman: Arkham Knight
2. Lego Jurassic World
3. Fallout 4
4. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
5. Lego Worlds
6. The Elder Scrolls Online
7. Skylanders: SuperChargers
8. Star Wars Battlefront
9. Final Fantasy VII
10. Heroes of the Storm

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Fire Emblem clings on for a second top spot in Japan as Persona 4: Dancing All Night

July 8th, 2015, 22:08 Posted By: wraggster

The latest Fire Emblem title for 3DS has remained at the number spot in Japan, with returning Top Ten entry Splatoon seeing resilient sales figures.
Fire Emblem Fates’ two SKUs – White Kingdom and Black Kingdom – easily spot to the top of the retail charts the week previous, shifting over 350,000 units, according to the latest data from Famitsu.
This number fell to just above 71,000 last week, which was still far more than enough to see it through to a second chart-topping performance.
Helped by the 3DS title’s success, the New Nintendo 3DS XL remained at the top of the hardware rankings, selling over 23,000 units.
Meanwhile, Persona 4: Dancing All Night, which propelled Vita sales in its debut week, slipped two spaces to fourth as sales dropped by almost 90 per cent to just shy of 11 per cent.
This opened the hardware charts back up, allowing the bigger sibling of Sony’s Vita to creep back up to second place and Nintendo’s Wii U to ride its slipstream to third.
Back in the software charts, returning Top Ten presence Splatoon held on well for a second week back in the Top Five, rising to third in lieu of Dancing All Night. Sales of the squid-based shooter were resilient, dropping by a mere 7,000 units.
Meanwhile, the greatest hits title for the Rhythm Heaven franchise, The Best+, jumped up to second place, despite sales dropping by around 20,000 units.

Here is the software Top Ten for the week ending July 5th:

1. Fire Emblem Fates: White Kingdom / Black Kingdom (Nintendo) 3D – 71,550
2. Rhythm Heaven: The Best+ (Nintendo) 3DS – 32,580
3. Splatoon (Nintendo) Wii U – 31,494
4. Persona 4: Dancing All Night (Atlus) Vita – 10,614
5. Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition (Sony) Vita –10,411
6. Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo) Wii U – 9,110
7. Dragon Ball Z: Extreme Butoden (Bandai Namco) 3DS – 7,573
8. Tobidase Dobutsu no Mori (Animal Crossing: New Leaf) (Nintendo) 3DS – 5,918
9. Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition (Capcom) PS4 – 4,946
10. Return to PoPoLoCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytale (Marvelous) 3DS – 4,882

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Capcom is making a light-up 'Mega Man' helmet

July 8th, 2015, 22:02 Posted By: wraggster

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NME to introduce video games coverage as it goes free

July 6th, 2015, 21:12 Posted By: wraggster

Weekly music magazine NME is to become free in September, with video games joining a number of new topics being introduced to its pages.
The switch will see 300k copies of the magazine handed out at stations, universities and retailers each week. The magazine’s circulation fro the latter half of 2014 stood at just under 14k, a decline of 23 per cent year-on-year.
NME says that while music is "firmly at the heart of the brand" other subjects including "film, fashion, television, politics, gaming and technology" will also begin to feature. Its website will also undergo a revamp.
“For the past few months we’ve been working in secret here at NME on the next phase of our evolution,” editor Mike Williams said. “The goal, throughout all of our research and development, has been to find new and inventive ways to connect with you, our audience, better than ever.
“In the 63 years since NME launched we have evolved and transformed plenty of times. The evolution of 2015 is our boldest ever move, and I’m delighted to be able to share the news with you at last."
Time UK chief executive Marcus Rich added: “This famous 63-year-old brand was an early leader in digital and has been growing its global audience successfully for the best part of 20 years. It has been able to do so because music is such an important passion and now is the right time to invest in bringing NME to an even bigger community for our commercial partners.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/nme-t...s-free/0152209

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Nvidia Details 'Gameworks VR', Aims To Boost Virtual Reality Render Performance

July 4th, 2015, 23:12 Posted By: wraggster

In a guest article published to Road to VR, Nvidia graphics programmer Nathan Reed details Nvidia's 'Gameworks VR' initiative which the company says is designed to boost virtual reality render performance, including support for 'VR SLI' which will render one eye view per GPU for low latency stereoscopy. While many Gameworks VR features will be supported as far back as GeForce 6xx cards, the company's latest 'Maxwell' (9xx and Titan X) GPUs offer 'Multi-projection' which Reed says, 'enables us to very efficiently rasterize geometry into multiple viewports within a single render target at once... This better approximates the shading rate of the warped image that will eventually be displayed—in other words, it avoids rendering a ton of extra pixels that weren't going to make it to the display anyway, and gives you a substantial performance boost for no perceptible reduction in image quality.'

http://developers.slashdot.org/story...er-performance

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Someone Will Die Playing a Game In Virtual Reality

July 4th, 2015, 22:50 Posted By: wraggster

Grab It has detailed a hands-on session with horror VR title Kitchen — from Resident Evil creator Capcom — and argues how the physical reaction to the experience could lead to death. The site also believes that classifying VR games will be a challenge and many titles could be banned. Virtual Reality has a big year ahead, with the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus all set to release, while Microsoft is working on the HoloLens, which the site argues adds a further challenge to traditional gaming.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/15/0...irtual-reality

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Chinese PS4 and Xbox One sales are 'disappointing', report says

July 4th, 2015, 22:25 Posted By: wraggster

Next-gen console fever has yet to infect Chinese gamers, it seems.
Games Industry reports that numbers from analyst Niko Partners suggest that between them PS4 and Xbox One will by the end of the year reach a combined unit sales number of just 550k.
The Chinese government lifted the ban on sales of foreign games consoles in January 2014, although a strict set of rules closely controls what content can and cannot be released for such devices. Xbox One arrived in the region in September 2014 and the PS4 in March of this year.
Both machines (Xbox and PlayStation) were subject to delays prior to their arrival, however. Nintendo has reportedly abandoned its own plans to follow its rival into the region.
The best hope of an improvement to the current struggles, Niko says, is for the cost of the hardware to be lowered and for China’s cultural office to approve more triple-A games for release.
The best numbers, it says, will come from the set-top box and Smart TV sector, which it predicts will overtake consoles by 2019 thanks to its lower cost barrier and more family-orientated software offer. It predicts that combined the two sectors could generate revenues of $654m by the end of the year and climb to $3bn by 2019.
"Despite China being a predominantly PC online gaming culture, Chinese who are now 26-35 years old grew up in the days of Nintendo Super Famicom consoles and are accustomed to playing games with a controller via a TV,” Niko MD Lisa Cosmas Hanson said.
“These gamers will drive adoption of games played on Smart TVs as well as the use of game consoles, and thus will begin the transformation of the living room to entertainment centre."

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/chine...t-says/0152070

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Politician against violent games pleads guilty in gun-running case

July 4th, 2015, 22:03 Posted By: wraggster

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Google's 'GG1' teases a new version of Glass

July 4th, 2015, 21:52 Posted By: wraggster

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OnePlus is giving away Google Cardboard for $0 plus shipping

July 4th, 2015, 21:50 Posted By: wraggster

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Sony: VR is not the next 3D TV; Spector: VR is a fad

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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The new console war has finally begun - but can Xbox do enough in six months?

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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VR was battling for acceptance at this year's E3 - but was it victorious?

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

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At E3, I saw the missing pieces of the VR puzzle

June 28th, 2015, 20:56 Posted By: wraggster

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Building a high-end racing sim setup with $1,800 in gaming accessories

June 28th, 2015, 20:55 Posted By: wraggster

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What did E3 2015 mean for the future of PC gaming?

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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rpix86 0.18 released!

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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Received my Raspberry Pi 2!

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.

1. 
   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.
2. 
   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
3. 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.
   
4. 
   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
5. 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.
   
6. 
   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.

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