So, a small progress update. Since the first post, I've made the following changes/additions:

• Changed: App is now built with makeapp
• Changed: cmdPixelShadow is now saved/restored, home screen is redrawn properly on exit
• Changed: Exit sequence now draws the homescreen at the very start (minus the status bar)
• Changed: Crash recovery now seems to actually work properly. It also no longer requires pressing ON twice.
• Added: Power-saving mode (CLEAR button)
• Added: Backlight control (* and / buttons)
• Added: Changeable color palettes (the 12 palettes available on the GBC for GB games)
• Added: Zoomed-in mode (scales horizontally only, still need to implement vertical scaling)

Now I suppose the main things I need to do before a public release are:

• Add some sort of splash/loading screen
• Port my "release-build" makeapp which uses librabbitsign and has no external dependencies
• Make a readme!

At some point, I'd like to add proper fullscreen scaling, but that would probably cause too much delay if I want to get this released soon. I think at first I'll release only on the forums, anyway, so I can work out any unforeseen issues.

Nice job on the progress. Has any research been done into the late-era Game Boy games that try to provide their own limited form of palette color data (of course we're talking about Pokemon)? It's entirely possible that the palettization they do only looks simple and is in fact much more complicated under the hood, but I'm pretty sure that a large portion of TI-Boy users use it to play that (especially now with the guaranteed ROM and RAM space).

If you're not that interested in researching it to support it, I could offer to try.

Actually, how it works is that there is a list of games hardcoded into the GBC boot code (or rather, checksums of the names of those games), which indexes a list of predefined palettes. I think I may try to replicate this behavior, but perhaps not for the first release (it would require a good bit of reverse engineering).

Nice to hear. Btw for vertical zoom, will you just draw every 2 row of pixel like this to save speed? Not sure how this would look like on the CSE, but on the HP Prime it actually looks fine.

You mean leaving rows blank? I suppose that could be possible, but keep in mind that the image will be scaled by something less than 2x, so it won't be evenly spaced and might not look great. Another thing is that I'm using the window wrapping to move from line to line after outputting each set of 8 pixels from a tile, so it's a choice between outputting the same 8 pixels again (which doesn't have much overhead with my rendering algorithm) or manually changing the position to output after each 8 pixels (which perhaps takes the same amount of effort as outputting 3-4 pixels as a rough estimate).

It's getting closer...!

That new splash screen looks really great!

Also, it would be cool if while you are playing, since it isn't full screen, it could show like a little Game boy shell?

You can't see it, but behind the scenes, the 80 pixels of black on left and right sides of the game window (160 in total) are used as a buffer to render the next frame to. So the full horizontal width of the screen is actually used up already. The black parts directly above and below the game (each 160x48) are available for use, though, so that's possibly worth considering. Although I'm really waiting for the fullscreen emulation mode which, while a bit slower, won't have any black space anywhere.

Oh, and would Pokemon Gold and Silver be in color? Because they work on the Game boy, but they are in color.

Those are Game Boy Color games. The Game Boy color is not supported for emulation due to a number of increased technical difficulties in emulating it.

Quote from: Runer112 on February 15, 2014, 03:55:48 pm

Quote from: rw24 on February 15, 2014, 01:00:06 pm

Oh, and would Pokemon Gold and Silver be in color? Because they work on the Game boy, but they are in color.

Those are Game Boy Color games. The Game Boy color is not supported for emulation due to a number of increased technical difficulties in emulating it.

Correction: Those games ARE Gameboy games. They were released right when the Gameboy Color was first released and so retained backwards compatibality with the Gameboy. I can prove this because I have a Gameboy original that can play Pokemon Silver. When run on a Gameboy, it simply uses monochrome textures.

Really? I always knew they were shaped like Game Boy cartridges, so I guess it isn't that surprising. Maybe with some work, they could function in full color, but I certainly wouldn't hold my breath for this. I guess we'd have to wait to hear what calc84maniac thinks of its feasibility/infeasibility.

EDIT: Confirmed that Pokemon Silver does indeed run, although it suffers from the inability to save properly like the other Pokemon games currently. A note to anyone who does want to load up a generation 2 game, though: they seem in general to run more slowly. Regardless of the frameskip setting I was using, it took about 2 seconds longer to walk 8 squares in Silver than in Red in their respective starting towns.