Official TI-Boy CSE Alpha Thread

[calc84maniac]

List of releases from newest to oldest:
TI-Boy CSE Alpha 0.0.03
TI-Boy CSE Alpha 0.0.02
TI-Boy CSE Alpha 0.0.01

Let's start this off with a release of TI-Boy CSE Alpha 0.0.01! For the uninitiated, this is a Game Boy emulator for the TI-84+ C Silver Edition (Game Boy Color is not supported).

At least for now, this will be a forum-only release in case I've made any terrible mistakes. (Hopefully not, but you never know!) I'd greatly appreciate feedback on any issues you may encounter.

Advantages over TI-Boy SE:

• Displays the full 160x144 resolution of the Game Boy screen
• 12 custom color palettes selectable, based on the palettes available for Game Boy games when played on the Game Boy Color

Disadvantages against TI-Boy SE:

• A bit slower due to the 16-bit full-resolution graphics output.
• No audio output support.

Next on the to-do list is probably to implement a proper fullscreen scaling mode. It's currently only half-implemented, with horizontal scaling but no vertical scaling.

Edit: Whoops, I forgot to compile makeapp statically. Updated, so reportedly it works now.

[Spenceboy98]

Can someone convert Pokemon Red for me (or any others that can be tested for fun)? I wanna try this on wabbit and my computer is missing a .dll file to convert.

Nevermind. Doesn't work on Wabbit with Wabbit generated ROM.

[pimathbrainiac]

Nevermind. Doesn't work on Wabbit with Wabbit generated ROM.

Geez, calc84, it's like wabbit isn't a real calc or something

On a less-trollish note, nice job! Just fix the monochrome makeapp before you get too into this, okay?

[CalebHansberry]

That's excellent news!

[TIfanx1999]

I'll have to give it a go.

[Hayleia]

Great !
Is there official incompatibilities with some games like Pokemon or are all games supposed to work (obviously some games don't work, but the question is are there games you are sure they don't work) ?

[calc84maniac]

Great !
Is there official incompatibilities with some games like Pokemon or are all games supposed to work (obviously some games don't work, but the question is are there games you are sure they don't work) ?

I don't happen to have a list of non-working games, no. I generally only test the games that are popular or ones I'm interested in, so I guess it's up to the community to find those incompatible games.

[merthsoft]

Figured I'd post the video I took over here, too:
Here's a video of me playing Pokemon:

The quality isn't that great, and I had to record in portrait mode, but it gets the idea across. Something I noticed, though which is evident if you watch the video the whole way through, is that it seems to slow down a bit.

[rw24]

It's really good! I tried it with Pokemon. But the zoom isn't perfect, it is only sideways, and it doesn't save. Well, I thought I saved it...

[calc84maniac]

It's really good! I tried it with Pokemon. But the zoom isn't perfect, it is only sideways, and it doesn't save. Well, I thought I saved it...

It should be creating four appvars for the save file. (Just to make sure, you selected Save on the in-game menu before quitting?)

[Sorunome]

Looking awesome!
BTW, stickied

[Runer112]

Out of curiosity, how well does TI-Boy handle low RAM/ROM situations, particularly with regard to save variables?

EDIT: Also, I feel like I've asked this before, but why do you only let us use 7 characters for names of games that need 4 appvars? Can't you just overwrite the last letter of the name when creating save variables?

[rw24]

Well, I've tried saving it a couple times, and it creates appvars. But I'm not sure they're loading or something, because at the menu, all it says is "NEW GAME" and "OPTIONS"

It's really good! I tried it with Pokemon. But the zoom isn't perfect, it is only sideways, and it doesn't save. Well, I thought I saved it...

It should be creating four appvars for the save file. (Just to make sure, you selected Save on the in-game menu before quitting?)

[DJ Omnimaga]

Figured I'd post the video I took over here, too:
Here's a video of me playing Pokemon:

The quality isn't that great, and I had to record in portrait mode, but it gets the idea across. Something I noticed, though which is evident if you watch the video the whole way through, is that it seems to slow down a bit.

Looks very good. The slowdown is due to the limited hardware actually, plus since it's 16-bit color processing, it's even slower than the monochrome calc version.

[Runer112]

No, I hit the same slowdown he hit. For some reason, the game runs a fair amount more slowly in Oak's lab than in other areas.

EDIT: Also, rw24 is absolutely correct. At least in Pokemon games, saving doesn't appear to work. In Pokemon Red, I'm positive I saved my game a couple of times before closing the emulator, checked that the appvars were there when going to start it up again, and lo and behold, no continue option. In Pokemon Silver, I got the continue option, but it told me the save was corrupted.

EDIT 2: Should I be getting garbage/data printed to the screen when I exit? For the past few times I've exited, I've gotten mostly white with some strips of random black and white pixels that looks like data, as well as some rows that look like the tree-like structure you get of sending the raw bytes 0-255 in a pattern to the screen.

EDIT 3: Is there any way that key polling could be improved? Quick key presses are often ignored.

EDIT 4: Feature request: saving emulator settings in an appvar. I know I can set the zoom mode, pick the palette, and set the frameskip on startup myself, but having it do those all automatically just seems a lot cleaner and nicer, especially if you get confused like I do about which palette or frame skip setting you actually decided on the last time you spent a minute or two carefully comparing them. And hopefully, there will be more cool features to come and their settings could go in there as well.