TI-Boy CE Progress Thread

[calc84maniac]

I just made a minor bugfix release to support the changed hardware in new calculator models (Revision M). If you have a new calculator and have been experiencing a hang when loading ROMs, please update to this version.

Edit: Made a fix to the bugfix thanks to jacobly, TI-Boy was behaving oddly when it was run after running the Python app. Please redownload if you've encountered this issue.

Check it out here: https://calc84maniac.github.io/tiboyce/releases/2019/08/24/alpha-v0-1-3-released.html

[calc84maniac]

Sorry, but this isn't an actual progress post (though there is unreleased stuff on the dev branch if anyone wants to build it themselves and widen the test coverage, wink wink).

What I'm actually posting about is that I made my first blog post about the emulator design! It's just setting up the ideas for now, but hopefully I can provide some more in-depth brain dumps in the future.

As for actual emulator progress, I've been super distracted but there is stuff going on in the background, still on emulation accuracy/stability issues. Just extremely slowly. Hopefully I can pick up the pace properly someday soon.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Do you plan to add Wii and Wii U emulation to TI-Boy CE?












More seriously, I really need to give this a try at some point. I only tried the TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition version and the CE version looks blazing fast. Good job on this

[NonstickAtom785]

When did you plan on adding GBA and GBC support?

[Eeems]

When did you plan on adding GBA and GBC support?

https://github.com/calc84maniac/tiboyce/issues/54
Not sure GBA is in the plans, or even possible.

[NonstickAtom785]

When did you plan on adding GBA and GBC support?

https://github.com/calc84maniac/tiboyce/issues/54
Not sure GBA is in the plans, or even possible.

But GBC should be possible with double buffering.

[Eeems]

When did you plan on adding GBA and GBC support?

https://github.com/calc84maniac/tiboyce/issues/54
Not sure GBA is in the plans, or even possible.

But GBC should be possible with double buffering.

Yes, that's why the issue I linked is the issue for tracking development of that GBC support

[calc84maniac]

After two years of development, I've finally released TI-Boy CE Alpha v0.2.0! This brings many performance and accuracy improvements to Game Boy emulation, along with support for game-specific configs. Check it out here!

I also made a performance comparison video of the opening cutscene of Pokémon Gold:

[Xeda112358]

That is amazing :0

[DJ Omnimaga]

I should give this a try at some point. Does it run at full speed on older hardware revisions?

[calc84maniac]

I should give this a try at some point. Does it run at full speed on older hardware revisions?

It runs about the same speed on all hardware revisions, because the only Flash-based execution is for things like the menu system and saving/loading. During actual emulation, the only Flash accesses are to the Game Boy ROM, and because the JIT basically caches Game Boy opcodes in RAM, that means mostly just the game's cartridge reads end up hitting Flash.

[calc84maniac]

I've just made a small bugfix release, fixing an issue someone found which could cause auto save state loading to occasionally fail in games which use a clock (such as Pokémon Gold and Silver). More info on the release here.

The funny thing is this bug seems to have existed since before even the first release, but I guess nobody discovered it because the games it affects had such poor performance! The bug was related to reading uninitialized SafeRAM, so I never encountered the issue myself due to generally not running any other programs in my test environment...

[calc84maniac]

I made another bugfix release, addressing game freeze issues in some games like Donkey Kong Land. More info on the release here.

In the meantime, I've made some decent progress on my first step toward rewriting the emulator core to support a dynamic memory map, which will be essential for supporting both GB and GBC at the same time (and this rewrite also has a goal of improving the overall performance). Hopefully with the holidays coming up, I can get in some extra coding time, too!

[Eeems]

Awesome progress!

Thank you for keeping us up to date!

[DJ Omnimaga]

Nintendo 64 emulation when... er I mean very good work. I must confess that I never actually tried TI-Boy CE, though, as the first versions came out when I was out of calc stuff almost entirely, but I'm glad to see those performances that were already very impressive become even more impressive with the new update. Keep up the good work.