Dwedit's Board

Enjoy the board

You are not logged in.

Announcement

Welcome, fellow visitors from other websites!
Whenever you download a file, I'd appreciate it if you posted a nice "Thank You" message, then tell me which site you came from. Thanks.
- Dwedit

#1 2015-02-26 3:41:23 pm

apoptygma
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 21

3 Quick/easy questsions

Just setup a whole bunch of games on Goomba, using an EZ Flash IV
Works great!
Just have three (hopefully simple) questions :

1) Why does my GBA run the GB & GBC roms at 100% speed with vsync on and way too fast with vsync off but my DS lite plays the games at 100% with vsync off and too slow with vsync on?

2) What have I done wrong that everything works except the 'save state' and 'load state' - they just do nothing at all when I hover on them and push A, what's supposed to happen?

3) Is there any way to force GBC instead of SGB? One issue I'm seeing is that on Donkey Kong, pauline's scream is missing (indicating that the game is running in SGB mode) no matter if I set "prefer SGB over GBC" "prefer GBC over SGB" or "SGB+GBC" modes. GB works but then I lose the increased palette from all the other modes.

Offline

#2 2015-02-26 5:49:35 pm

Dwedit
Administrator
From: Chicago
Registered: 2004-12-12
Posts: 1,017
Website

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

Have you tried the really new beta yet?  Savestates actually work in that version, and it also picks color palettes for monochrome games like a real GBC would.
Game Boy Donkey Kong had no enhancements for the Game Boy Color at all, so you'd want to run it in GB mode if you want to force Pauline's scream sound to work.

As for the speed question, Goomba color is a really fast emulator, mainly because it uses the GBA's 2D hardware (tilemaps and sprites) to draw the graphics, all it has to emulate is the CPU and other stuff.  When you turn Vsync off, it removes any speed limiters.  Maybe the DS emulators just aren't as fast.


"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."

Offline

#3 2015-02-26 8:08:42 pm

apoptygma
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 21

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

No I just saw that after I posted. I don't know that I'll bother rebuilding all of my roms with the new version just to get savestates (maybe one or two that really need it) but that's good to know that it wasn't me that just did something wrong, so savestates simply do not work on the latest 'stable' release is that correct?
When you say it had no enhancements, you might be slightly incorrect. I believe that it shifts palettes automatically between stages (I could be wrong)
Re-thinking the speed thing I think it's possible I used two different versions of Goomba, I can test again soon. When you say 'the DS emulators' do you mean that Goomba does actually run different code on a DS to what it would on a GBA?

Offline

#4 2015-02-26 9:20:11 pm

Dwedit
Administrator
From: Chicago
Registered: 2004-12-12
Posts: 1,017
Website

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

You are wrong, it's the super gameboy enhancements that do that.  There are no enhancements running it on a game boy color at all.


"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."

Offline

#5 2015-02-26 9:26:08 pm

apoptygma
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 21

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

Cool, I must have been thinking of when I was using SGB mode. While you're here can you comment on the speed thing? Does the emu run differently on a DS vs a GBA? I suspect it doesn't and I was doing my testing on two different versions of the emulator. It would make sense because the DS should (when running in GBA mode) be identical to a real GBA right?

Last edited by apoptygma (2015-02-26 10:02:17 pm)

Offline

#6 2015-02-27 6:32:50 am

Dwedit
Administrator
From: Chicago
Registered: 2004-12-12
Posts: 1,017
Website

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

When Goomba Color (GBA) runs on a DS, it's identical to a GBA.
There are other GB emulators that run on a DS in DS mode, I was just a little confused by your question initially.

In the newest version of the emulator, I added some special speedhacks and stuff to make it run really really fast without compromising accuracy.  Maybe I need to add a better speed limiter for non 100% speeds.


"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."

Offline

#7 2015-03-02 11:26:36 pm

apoptygma
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 21

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

Yea I'm pretty sure I was using the older version without the speedhacks. Built the roms again with a copy of 3_31_2008 and they all run super fast which is great. The other one I used had an md5 of DE15AE0636883ABDDEC89F55588F7113 and I'm not sure where I got it but someone had bundled it in with newbie's goombafront v1.8
Anyway that all makes sense now, Coming back to DK I'm still a bit confused about what's going on here. I have the emu set to prefer SGB and it appears to be working, ie. the auto palette swaps occur and pauline's scream is missing (as I understand the SNES code doesn't run, that's expected. This album shows the colors I'm seeing and what it's cycling through without me manually changing any settings.
http://imgur.com/a/c3E1E

Seems good, till you look at  this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2riOj_NXb6s

So what's going on? does the SGB module in goomba not handle higher palettes properly? To be more specific compare the title screens, the score/lives counters at the top etc.

So that's why I thought maybe it was actually running as GBC instead of SGB, because I'm not getting the full palette. But then the fact that we don't hear pauline's scream contradicts this.

Last edited by apoptygma (2015-03-02 11:27:40 pm)

Offline

#8 2015-03-02 11:40:11 pm

apoptygma
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 21

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

The other thing I'm seeing is that when I set the preferance to prefer SGB over GBC when I exit and the re-load goomba it's not saved
I just tried the 12_12_2014 version to see if it changed it and both the not saving preference and not displaying SGB colors problems exist.
I guess they weren't all simple questions after all sorry!

Offline

#9 2015-03-03 2:39:42 pm

Dwedit
Administrator
From: Chicago
Registered: 2004-12-12
Posts: 1,017
Website

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

Super Game Boy works by assigning colors to 8x8 squares of the final LCD image.  But the GBA hardware doesn't work like that, it assigns palettes to the tiles themselves.  Currently, Goomba Color just makes the entire screen use one of the SGB palettes, but you can select which one.

Out of concern for speed, I'm not tracing down the screen to see where the tiles came from and reassigning palettes.


"We are merely sprites that dance at the beck and call of our button pressing overlord."

Offline

#10 2015-03-03 4:06:25 pm

apoptygma
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 21

Re: 3 Quick/easy questsions

Makes sense, I figured it was to do with the way in which the SGB presented the tiles. I'd seen a screenshot (http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldp3c0Vkej1qzvs0a.png) which broke down the tiles and that kinda got me thinking along those lines. That's a really interesting hack now that I look at it! Thanks for explaining :)

Offline

Registered users online in this topic: 0, guests: 1
[Bot] claudebot

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB
Modified by Visman