olaf

vbSMS+, my Sega Mark III/Master System/Game Gear emulator for Microsoft Windows, gets another bug fix release today. Below are the changes in this release (version 2.2)... You can visit the official homepage of vbSMS+ here, or simply download it here.

I lost them for certain reasons a while back, and GameCop has expressed feelings against the idea of having them again.

Can someone please move this thread to the site news/updates?

Two days ago I released a version of vbSMS+, my Sega Mark III/Master System/Game Gear emulator, prematurely. This version (2.1) is just a simple bug fix and clean up of me being lazy. Below are the release notes... You can visit the official homepage of vbSMS+ here, or simply download it here.

After a little bit of work between brom and I on vbSMS+, I've decided we've done enough work for another release. Now that brom is back working on his/this project, changes made by him/I will be marked as appropriate. Below are the changes in version 2.0 of my Sega Mark III/Master System/Game Gear emulator. It is recommended you reconfigure your inputs before playing, shared mapping may have occurred with the addition of support for the Sega Master System's Pause button. It is also recommended that you audit your ROMs with Maxim's SMS Checker. You can visit the official homepage of vbSMS+ here, or simply download the latest version here.

It's a set of instructions that your CPU knows how to execute. Later AMD and Intel processors support this instruction set. Also, no, this is not something you just download. CPU-Z will tell you what your processor can handle... http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php

I, personally, love this emulator. To me SSF is what Nestopia is to NES, Gens+ is to Sega Genesis, bsnes is to Super NES, etc. I love being able to play Castlevania: Nocturne in the Moonlight.

Thanks for the compliment on the memory editor, I worked very hard on it. Today, brom ironed out a timing bug that was causing speed ups and (more than likely) causing slow downs for people. Tomorrow (or in a few minutes), I'll be working on adding in Zip compression support for ROM files.

Well, it was John Casey's goal to get as many games working as possible first -- and I would like to do that and other things at the same time.

I've been hard at work -- working on vbSMS+, my continuation of John "brom" Casey's Sega Master System emulator written in Microsoft Visual Basic. I'm happy to announce that brom is now helping me work on vbSMS+. The main focus at the moment has been getting rid of compatibility issues (I know most of you would rather we work on sound, but at the moment, it doesn't strike me as more important). This was done by introducing support for header recognition and general per-game "hacks". brom has wanted to fix a problem with Spider-Man - Return of the Sinister Six for quite some time, and he's achieved that goal as of, the yet released, version 2.0 of vbSMS+. You may be asking: why did you go from 0.1.1 to 2.0? I think vbSMS+ deserves a larger version number -- mostly because of it's vast improvements over the original vbSMS and because of the addition of more of the features I'm about disclose. Among our "hacks" we introduced (a VDP interrupt "hack") to fix Spider-Man - Return of the Sinister Six, we've also fixed a few other games by use of MEKA's patches (it only applies patches to about 10 more games, but hey, that's a few more games that are playable or prevents problems in the future). In the release of version 2.0, users will be able to enjoy a very snazzy new memory editor. Below is a screen capture of it in action. The memory editor includes bookmarking, searching, and save state abilities. Users will be able to sort through the Sega Master System's RAM with ease. Double click a bookmark or search result will automatically take you to the address in the memory editor's viewer to avoid having to manually search for it. Right clicking in the bookmarks or search results will also allow you to use the address in question in the "edit (value)" text box to avoid having to copying/pasting or typing. Bookmarks will automatically be loaded/saved for each game. The grayscale palette was put into question for relevance... and I never used it, so, I removed it and palette switching. I also added support for the missing Z80 I/O port mirrors. Input detection (and Game Gear input detection) has been improved -- and I added support for the Sega Master System's Pause button... finally. Sprite collision detection and sprite limit toggling has also been introduced. That's all for now, I'll post more as I continue working!

other stuff like razor blades and needles i put in your candy

Today sees the second release of my new Sega Mark III/Master System/Game Gear emulator vbSMS+ (based off vbSMS by John "brom" Casey). Below are the changes in this version 0.1.1. You can visit the official homepage of vbSMS+ here or simply download it here.

I imagine a home-brew application wouldn't be too far-fetched. I'm sure you can find some people in the NintendoDS community willing to work on something along those lines. A notepad, calendar, alarm, planner, address book, etc... Not a big task if you ask me.

i did it for like... 5 seconds and felt better. interesting.

IE7 is like... FF0.1 and less...

Mozilla Thunderbird is a lot better than Microsoft Outlook in my opinion.

I once heard about a fan e-mailing Matt Stone and Trey Parker about Kenny's mumblings. He/she asked what Kenny was singing in the original theme song. Apparently, what he's singing in the theme song is: I like p*ssy and big fat titties. Had to edit my reply, got censored.

Even my crappy emulators are open source. The emulation scene should be used to share as much information as possible. The best emulation scene to date is the NES emulation one, everything is open source. Everyone tries to share as much information as possible. Wikis, open source emulators, documentation, there's crazy amounts of NES developing information available. I just don't see why the rest of the emulation world doesn't follow the great example that the NES emulation world is.

That single player arcade stick is pretty badass, I should get one of those for SFA and the likes.

The emulator is UPX compressed. The blinking every 5 seconds or so is not my doing (and it's later than that on my PC). I removed drag and dropping of ROM files. Using over 2x zoom size on my PC causes slowness (1.9ghz/1gig RAM) -- I just use full screen at 320x240 or 640x480. I'll see what's going on with the 4x zoom. The overall slowness is because of video stretching. I'll make sure to put an OCX/DLL package up on the site or include them.

In related news, I finally heard from the original author of vbSMS today...

I've officially released the first public version of vbSMS+ (it was named "olafsms", but some people had some problems with that, which is okay). Here's a little about vbSMS+ (taken from its new homepage)... Below are the changes done to the original vbSMS project. You can visit the official vbSMS+ homepage here or download it here (version 0.1.0).

Had to rename "olafsms" (even though it wasn't the final name anyway) to vbSMS+. A lot of people in the SMS emulation/gaming scene didn't like that I completely renamed the project and put my name in the emulator title. I can see where they wouldn't like that, and I don't want to make anyone mad at me. vbSMS+ makes a good mid-point in between renaming and not using the original name.

Actually, the full screen toggling is done with the Esc key (like Project64, an emulator I use very often). Also, I just fixed background layer disabling (the column on the left won't show anymore when that layer is disabled. The difference can be seen below when compared to older screenshots.

I broke my Neo Geo Pocket Color at the end of last year, I miss it dearly. I played the flock out of Cardfighters Clash: SNK Vs. Capcom (SNK Edition) -- had well over 90% of the cards collected. Also, my original Sega Genesis finally broke about 2 years ago -- had it since I got it for Christmas when I was a kid. I got it in the Sonic 2 bundle, and also got X-Men and Bart's Nightmare.