A sh2 version is approaching...

[Tux]

I've been thinking about the sh2 in raine for quite some years now, but I finally got a binary which starts to work.

The motivation is simple : there are quite a few modern arcade games which use this cpu, and it's an interesting one, what the 68k cpus could look like if they had evolved towards the risc family of cpus. For now my choice was to use the gens sh2 emulator from there : http://www.gens.me/downloads.shtml

It's a pure x86 asm emulator like in the old raine days, but the criteria of choice was that it's the only one which is open source and usable directly with some documentation and no need to extract the emulator from a big project, it's really the only one of its kind in this category. After a few expected problems I was able to add "gunbird 2" and "strikers 1945 iii", which are fully playable, but in 32 bits only then.

Now the surprise is that I have some serious bugs with some more sh2 games, like tetris grand master 2, no sound at all, and the game hangs when the music is supposed to start. At first I thought it was a problem with the sound chip emulation, but after a long investigation, it's not. In this case, it's a problem in the sh2 emulation. Fixing it would probably be impossible, or I'd have to be very lucky, the 1st big problem is to find the instruction causing this, and since it doesn't crash but just has a bad behavior it's not going to be easy at all.

So now I am wondering : should I release this 32 bits binary anyway now ? I think it's not a bad idea anyway, even if I later change the sh2 emulation used... There is a big heat wave here anyway for now, so I'll wait until the temperature cools down to decide, but comments welcome anyway !

If I change the sh2 emulation, my next choice would either be kronos, yabause (these 2 are actually related), or mame. 1st choice would probably be kronos, there is a "simple" sh2 emulator in it, with a more advanced one, the simple one would allow to at least test the games with problems. The version in mame might not be so hard to extract, not sure about it really, things can get really messy in mame.

Edited September 9, 2023 by Tux

[pmc2]

Voudriez-vous imiter Saturne ou Stv ?

 

What I'd really like is for someone to extract the system11/12 part (like zinc at the time) from mame to launch games with real graphics quality using acceleration. and the same with the neogeo64. Mame may have added shaders etc., but it's still far too limited graphically on this kind of system (I know it's not his goal, but God knows what it lacks)...

For kronos, you should ask the author, he's open-minded, and working with him would be a very good thing.

Edited September 9, 2023 by pmc2

[Tux]

38 minutes ago, pmc2 said:

Voudriez-vous imiter Saturne ou Stv ?

 

What I'd really like is for someone to extract the system11/12 part (like zinc at the time) from mame to launch games with real graphics quality using acceleration. and the same with the neogeo64. Mame may have added shaders etc., but it's still far too limited graphically on this kind of system (I know it's not his goal, but God knows what it lacks)...

For kronos, you should ask the author, he's open-minded, and working with him would be a very good thing.

Sorry not interested at all by 3d graphics, I leave that to others. For neogeo64 I don't know anything about that. For Kronos it might be worth sending a message, I know it's almost impossible for gens, the cpu emulator itself was released 20 years ago (!), so expecting a fast reply would be crazy. About extracting stuff from mame : mame is a good source of information about drivers, to see how a driver works, but for extracting the code... the author of musashi, the 68k emulator now used in raine for 64 bits re-released an old version he had on github from before its merge in mame rather than try to extract what his project had become from mame ! That tells quite a lot about how hard it can be ! (I contributed quite a few patches adapted from mame to improve this github version before merging it in raine).

[Benjamin Siskoo]

Hi Tux,

 

Let me introduce myself, I'm Benjamin, I'm working with Kronos dev (François Care). If you want to chat, you can join our Kronos discord. Some sega saturn technicals docs were fixed too.

 

We are a french team, but devs are speaking english very fluently

 

Have a nice day

Edited September 10, 2023 by Benjamin Siskoo

[Tux]

14 minutes ago, Benjamin Siskoo said:

Hi Tux,

 

Let me introduce myself, I'm Benjamin, I'm working with Kronos dev (François Care). If you want to chat, you can join our Kronos discord. Some sega saturn technicals docs were fixed too.

 

We are a french team, but devs are speaking english very fluently

 

Have a nice day

Ok thanks ! Notice I don't want to do anything about the saturn though, the idea is just to find a usable sh2 emulator...

By the way I am french too, and the author of gens sh2 is french too, Stéphane Dalongeville... so many french people attracted to emulation ! I'll probably go there soon !

[Augusto]

good work my friend.