After a marathon day yesterday I managed to get some audio into Minus4j, and it really does make a huge difference. For the moment its TED sound only, and I do still have a little bit to do yet before its really nice, for a start volume isn't used at all! I ported this code directly from Minus4w and have only just noticed that theres no volume control on it, doppy bugger that I am. Still, you now get 2 TED channels (tone and noise) and samples (using the TED). Samples are a bit crude to say the least, so I'll need to work on that a little - although I think I'm driving my wife mad listening to odd sounding beeps all day, oh well.
Once I have TED music in a better state, I'll port over my SID music player, and although its far from great (its a little rough and uses NO filters), it's still a good 1st step. After that, D64 support will almost bring it in line with Minus4w! Almost.... I'll need to see if its possible to save data to the local machine which would allow you to save games etc. other wise adventure games would be a pain. The solution to this I guess would be to port Minus4 to C# and Mono, this would allow it to run on any machine, AND on silverlight at a later date. It might also be a good time to use my cycle exact CPU I wrote about 6 years ago! It was designed to be more in line with YAPE than my scanline based one.
Still, thats a loooooooooooooooooooooong way off, and theres loads to do before that. Russell also pointed out that I could let Minus4j host my debug stub as well, meaning you could develop and debug Plus4 apps on Linux or Mac OS, which would be cool.
Anyway, head over to www.PlusWorld.com to see (and hear) the latest one in action! I've also started validating demos on Plus4 world, and although some just dont work, many work fine and its a much easier way of browsing them. We should really do an online demo page so you can have simple access to them.
2 comments:
This is great Mike, in case you need any help, just tell. Although I know that the greatest fun is in fact to do all this alone ;-)
About C#, not sure if you have heard of this but one guy from Australia has actually ported Frodo over to it:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sharp-c64
LOL.. You don't really want to look at the source, its a serious fudge in most places! :)
Id much rather have a nice clean C# version, but I suspect that won't happen either - I know how easy it is to get sucked into emulators again, and I have lots to do already!
I think I'll end up doing a source release sometime soon, and then see if anyone else picks it up. I'm kinda lucky as Minus4w is a port of the Java and not the other way round, which means I can copy code back almost verbatim. It also means theres very little pointer stuff going on that I have to convert back.
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