Picodrive available for 9300 & 9500

Or check the front page 😉

Picodrive for S80/S90 v0.4 released. This version adds:

* Auto frame skip
* Some sound support

See http://picodrive.atspace.com

cheers,

Neil.

Great work as usual, Neil! Sonic 1 plays surprisingly well with sound. Too bad the sound emulation is supported in so few games...

Anyway, Neil, there's one thing I've been meaning to ask you; could you please add 8-way support for the joystick? It's hard to play any fighting games without it... Both the 9500 and 9300 have 8-way joysticks, but not the 7710 (AFAIK).

Thanks.

Raven wrote:Great work as usual, Neil! Sonic 1 plays surprisingly well with sound. Too bad the sound emulation is supported in so few games...

Yes, well that can't change until there is an ARM asm Z80 core available, and even then there's no guarantee that it will be up to speed on the current devices. It's already struggling in the stretched screen modes (especially on 7710) Would be nice to try though.

I tried to contact Reesy who did the DrMD emulator for GP32, since he wrote his own Z80 core in ARM asm, but haven't got a reply yet 😞

Anyway, Neil, there's one thing I've been meaning to ask you; could you please add 8-way support for the joystick? It's hard to play any fighting games without it... Both the 9500 and 9300 have 8-way joysticks, but not the 7710 (AFAIK).

Well, 8-way works just fine on the 7710, at least on the games I've tried (Xenon2, Speedball2) Picodrive uses the raw key up/down events for up/down/left/right. If more than one of these is held down at the same time (e.g. up+left) it should just work. Perhaps the joystick on the 9300/9500 delivers different events for the diagonals rather than two events for the direction either side? I may have to put in some debug code to find out what events are being sent by the OS. Next update is likely to be minor with a few fixes, so I'll try and get it in there.