[Crush]

I don´t know much about ZN1&ZN2 emulation, but as I read this I was interested wether you all know about it or not:

http://www.emuverse.com/boards/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=24&t=000069

Are you all really not interested in adding ZN-support to your Emulators?

 

[Hairybudda]

What the hell is ZN1 & ZN2 support?????

 

[Crush]

ZN1 & ZN2

These are slightly differring mainboards of the PSX that have been sold to Arcade-Manufactors like Capcom, Data East and many others. Impact is the first ZNx-Emulator. The creator told in the upper shown link that it´s a work of only a few hours to change a PSX-Emulator in a ZN1 or ZN2-emulator. Same with FX-1 and some other unnamed systems. They are basically the same - perhaps only some port-adresses and memory-adresses are differenz .. it must be only some very simple diff. I´m now in contact with the Impact-coders and they told me that Capcom was the only one who didn´t built in ROM-Encryption. The other´s would do this - this is the only reason why we don´t have these great Arcade-games emulated till now. CPS2 was also utilitzing ROM-Encryption and CPS2Shock managed it to decrypt them all. I hope that other´s will make it one time to decrypt all ZN-roms.

 

[Pete Bernert]

http://boards.psxemu.com/showthread.php?threadid=4396

btw, it's very easy to make a psx2 emu... just take the source of a psx emu and add 2...

 

[Crush]

HAHAHA

This is no joke - it´s told from the one who made "Impact" and who shall know this better? This is the reason why I hope some Emu-Coders to answer this question. Perhaps they all know about it?!?! He said it wouldn´t be a big problem to make a PSX-emulator out of Impact with only a few changes - but he never wanted to do something like this and he never want to be famous or known officially. I also think that Bleem, FPSE and VGS cover this need good enough till now.

 

[kairi00]

Pete Bernert wasn't joking either... (well, except for that PSX+2 bit)... did you read the link to the thread that he posted in his reply? Pete Bernert, in case you don't know, is the author of Pete's plugin series (GPU, Sound, CDROM), and I'd say he knows what he's doing as well.

To summarize, it's probably easy, but not THAT easy!

 

[Pete Bernert]

Think about it: If it would be sooooo easy to make a ZN emu, there would be not one (impact) but half a dozen emus for ZN games...

Next time when you see a post from R.Belmont mentioning how easy it is, just reply with the following question: 'Hi RB, how long did you work on the music of Psychic Force, and do you think it is perfect right now?'

Oh well, so either all psx emu crews (epsxe, fpse, pcsx, adripsx) are totally unaware of ZN games (do you think they are deaf and blind? think again ), or they don't see a point to make just another ZN emu (hey, impact is working fine, isn't it? oh yeah, a few glitches... who cares), or they simply don't want to emulate boring 3d fighters... pick the answer you like best

 

[Shiori]

Whoa, if it isn't the great Pete Bernert himself! im a great fan of you dude, and I just wanna take this chance to say thanks to the MAN himself for giving us those plugins that give life to our fave PSX games in our PCs.

 

[lu_zero]

hmm

if you think that make a ZN emu is easy just grab the 0.08source, _ask_us_to_develop_on_it_ and make it =P

 

[Crush]

ZN-Emulation

I never said it´s easy - other people said this. No emulator is "as easy" to do. The joke with PSX2 is very bad - the hardware differs too much - it´s not comparable with PSX & ZN - more like Amiga500 and Amiga2000. I don´t have enough knowledge to lay my fingers on emu-codes till now but this was not the question. The question was:

Do the PSX-Emu-Coders know about the differences between PSX and ZN Emus and if it is not so big is really noone thinking about adding ZN support!

I don´t know the "real" differences between these systems. In fact I was very astonished as I saw some FAQs & Forums about the similarity of these systems. I only wanto know wether it´s real or impossible to built ZN into PSX-emus. Every code is big work - especially today with these complicate and differing computer-systems. No emulator can be done within some days - I was talking about changes to existing code!

Pete, you create impossible much of these great Emu-Plugins (my favorits), but this is no emulation as I was talking of. I was talking of the CPU-engine, the gfx-conversion, the sound-emulation and so on. And as I know the most plugins work like "wrappers". You have display- or sound-lists in a PC-usable format and the plugins only give the datas out to the system-drivers. This is very much - if not most important, but I wanted to ask the coders who work in the core-code of the emulators and know internals about the PSX system like no other. Don´t understand me false - I think you are one of the most genious coders in emu-scene and I have very high respect of your work!

Hope to see some of the real emu-coders (plugin coders are also very important and real but not the one I wanted to ask) answering this question in some time or giving more founded information about the differences or simliarities of ZN & PSX.

 

[Pete Bernert]

The main difference between an 'usual' psx emu and a zn emu is the bigger ram size of the arcade psx and that there is no cdrom support, but loading of roms.

So a main emu team _could_ add the zn support.

Still there is the problem with the 'unimportant' gfx and sound output: there are no zn gpu plugins but the impact renderers, so the main emu team would need to use that renderers, or they would have to develop a nice hw/accel. gpu themselves... that would only take them a year or so...

If they would decide to use the original impact renderers, I don't see a point in making the new emu at all... they only could try to improve the speed or sound output that way... speedwise impact would be hard to beat, I think, and the sound...

well, there are some problems with the current impact sound (missing music in Psychic Force, screwed voices in SFEXP2), but because the zn machines are using a z80 to produce qsound , the new team would have to do a new spu on their own (no existing psx spu plugin cares about qsound, of course), also not an easy task.

Conclusion: a main emu team can add zn support, but as long as they are not experts in gpu/spu coding as well, they would only have a (more or less useless) zn main emu core... great stuff

But to answer the orginal question "Are you all really not interested in adding ZN-support to your Emulators?"... I think the answer is "yes", unless some team gets very bored and does it

Btw, every gpu/spu plugin is a small emulator on its own... the plugins get the same information as the small chips on the real psx, not 'special commands' produced by the main emus... we are talking about psx emulation, not N64 HLE stuff :yawn:

 

[Crush]

Thanx!

Thank you, Pete!

These were answers I was searching for. You are right. I was only informed about N64 (HLE) emulation and nothing about PSX ones. I always thought these PSX-emus work like that the same way. (I wondered why it wasn´t possible to exchange plugins between these emus with some small changes).

But now I see clear! I hope that someone will crack the ZN-encryption in the future, because the Impact-coder told me now he would support all other Roms if they could be decrypted in the future.

You are right - Impact is one of the fastest emulators out there and I also agree it´ll be hard to get it faster.

I think now all important is said.

See you (or your great Plugins - hehe)

Bye!

 

[Eddy]

impact could use more supported games, it cant get faster, but soundwise, and compability, hell yeah. Netplay is kind of bad, that can improve, but crush, dont worry bout this, because someone (smf) is coding a impact driver for mame :-D

 

[Pete Bernert]

impact could use more supported games, it cant get faster, but soundwise, and compability, hell yeah. Netplay is kind of bad, that can improve, but crush, dont worry bout this, because someone (smf) is coding a impact driver for mame :-D

"impact could use more supported games":
There are just two games I know which are not included in the public available impact versions... both of them are relative 'new' games (the 'youngest' one is from 12/99), and as far as I remember there is some (unwritten?) emu-scene law not to support arcade games which are younger than two years (but I could be wrong here... I've never cared too much for arcade emulation).

"but soundwise, and compability, hell yeah":
soundwise... mmm... missing music in Psychic Force and sometimes the wrong samples in one of the Street Fighter games... ok, there is some room for little improvements... but not much
compatibility... bigger mmm... a few garbage backgrounds in Psychic Force (damaged roms?), and one screwed character in SFEX2... compatibility is great, imho.

"Netplay is kind of bad"
Dunno... never tried netplay (with any emu )...

"dont worry bout this, because someone (smf) is coding a impact driver for mame"
Oh my... that's something I really want to see... zn games in mame... do you expect improved sound, graphics, compatibility, speed and netplay in a mame driver? well, strange things can happen in this weird world

 

[Eddy]

Of course, i cant expect better things from M.A.ME. than impact, mame is one of the best emulators ever created. It has everything, and ported to almost all OS's. Sound is bad in Impact, and so is compability, there are much more ZN games out than just the 5+ it supports, it can do better, But since it was discountinued there is no "impact" anymore, i am waitin for M.A.M.E to support ZN1 and ZN2, M.A.M.E wont be discontinued. So pete, to wrap it up, yes i expect mame to have real good robust support, because when the Mamedev team releases a newer version, all the new games are FULLY supported, not partially.

 

[Pete Bernert]

Well, you can correct me if I am wrong, but to reach the impact level the mame driver will need an hw/accel. zn gpu for all ports, right? A driver running (at least) in Dos, Windows and Linux, right? D3D is Win only... well, OpenGL can be used in Windows and Linux... which means: bye, Dos (will that happen? Isn't the main mame emu Dos-based?)... or they could use Glide... which means: bye to all non-3dfx owners (will that happen? The user base of 3dfx cards is getting smaller)... or they can do a software gpu... which means: bye to nice hires gfx (well, that can happen... I dunno if somebody really wants to play the games that way, though)

none of the above choices does sound very promising to me...

As for the "there are much more ZN games out than just the 5+ it supports"...Well, Impact supports 12 games (including the various asian/us versions, of course), and there are just 2 more currently not supported games... we are talking about the not crypted games, of course... but if you are thinking that a new zn emu will 'magically' add support for crypted games... mmm... better take the blue pill, and welcome to the real world

And I still can't see why you are thinking that impact's compatibility is bad... can you give an example?

 

[Eddy]

Na, i understand all you are saying, and all is true. The DOS version will have to use software mode, which is not the best gfx :-( and 3dfx users are short, the only DOS rendering API is glide, and like you said, me being a voodoo 3 user atm, the numbers are getting shorter, and moving to kyros, ati's, and nvidias, as well as the cheap clones that come with hp's and dell's, compaq's, ect. The compability isnt bad, the game it supports are real good, the only thing that noticably kills the emu is sound, because when you lets say hit ruy, chun li screams instead of Ryu.

The authors of impact did a real good job. I dont see M.A.M.E porting to windows anytime soon, but i think when XP becomes the standard, sicne it doesnt support VM, they will be forced to use 32bit sources. While DOS is a very extensive base, Windows has soo much more, soo much can be done with windows than with DOS.

But yes, the graphics will be kind of sad, i think SMF should (if he's not developing it there already) develop it on a 32bit based M.A.M.E source code. Compability can increase, but its real good, there's a few cool games still not emulated (tech romancer) which would be cool. Impact will have superior GFX than M.A.M.E if the next release WOULD add ZN-based board support. But if it comes out on one of the win ports, i doubt. Its a shame that the authors discontinued it. It looked like it had a future.


Let's take modeler, The authors (R. Belmont, and Farfetch'd) said, when they achive perfection with the emulated systems, they plan to make it a mame driver.

My point is that, yes the GRAPHICS will be incomparable to Impact, at the moment of course. When M.A.M.E is ported to Windows, which will be needed in a matter of a year or months, M.A.M.E graphics will be superior, if Hardware Acceleration is used. The sound will be better than impact, and controller config (which is good in impact) will be better, with things like rumble support, ect.

But Pete, i understand your point, and they are all right. My point is that, when M.A.M.E is ported to a Windows based source code, M.A.M.E will have superior ZN graphics, and functionality, but until then, software mode (which is no eye candy) is gonna be, well ***.

 

[Crush]

Why no Mame?!?!

@Pete

As I remember OpenGL is supported at ALL systems that are capable to run 3D-cards. The change from one system to the other is not as big as from D3D to anything strange else. Nearly every game supporting OpenGL comes out very fast on different systems - you only have to use the system-specific GL-library. And all problems with screen-size are solved. D3D is not so fast as hardware specific drivers like 3DFX. Even with the fastest D3D-wrappers you have to use at least double the CPU power to run a 3DFX game at the same speed. I´m very sorry about what happened to 3DFX - they were really big and had kick-ass hardware for that time.

OpenGL would be the first choice for a Mame-Driver.

 

[Pete Bernert]

OpenGL would be the first choice for a Mame-Driver.

Sure... if they don't care for the DOS port, that's it.

Well, personally I don't expect a ZN mame driver in the near future (that means everything below 24 months), but who knows?

More likely a new impact version will get released in 2002 (in that year all not encrypted zn games will be older than two years), so who cares?