PC Engine Dev

Another one. Yup - more time wasted hacking another NES game for PCE ;). It’s fairly far along but with only a few days of work into it. Looks like the backend code from Megaman is starting to paying off :). Download here

Yes, yes, yes. Megaman. This is a NES conversion project. How’s it work? By running the game code natively, but emulating the PPU and other hardware. While the PCE is fast, it’s not fast enough to poll the address locations for the PPU and APU read/writes. So…you replace sta $2001 with jsr $xxxx, etc. Simple. Sort of. Maybe not. Anyway you can read about updates here

Did some LFO testing this week. Seems there is some incorrect info in the psg docs and the patent as well. Read about it here. Will be doing some more tests tomorrow.

Been working on the new BMP converter. This little app is special in that it uses two BMP files :D. One BMP is a complete image made from some tiles. The second BMP is a palette map. It uses 16 different colors in 8×8 squares to tell the app which set of tiles in the picture of the other BMP belong to which 16 color sub palette. It doesn’t sound extremely helpful until you see it in action. The app currently builds the complete 16 sub palettes from the two pics, orders them so they all have the same ‘base’ color 0 of 16, makes sure no tiles exceed 16 colors, etc. I originally designed this method for working on the Street Fighter 2 hack. I’m hoping to see the new replacement BGs in action very soon.

Here’s some pics of the project:

MooZ’s released a new version of his PCE disassembler - source - win32. This is an awesome PCE disassembler with address label creation. I used it to rip the custom CD read routines from Seiya Monogatari.

Cosmic Fantasy 1: I did some work with Dave Shadoff on this one. The new replacement ascii print routine is finished and Dave is working on translating the items and enemy names currently. Despite being a really old CD title, this one is actually pretty fun to play. I love the chip tunes in this one.

Some misc info. It seems quite a few PCE CD games have CD audio in the unused parts of the data tracks. The audio is in 44khz 16bit PCM. You can load the data tracks/iso files into a audio editor as “raw” and listen to them - just be careful of the raw data . The funny thing is that the game and the “left over audio” don’t seem to have a direct relation. The audio is almost always from another game. CD audio data isn’t the only thing that’s in between the data on the data tracks. Sometimes there’s source code (either ASM or C), programmer notes, japanese “command.com”, and other development text from the CD emulation kits. Other times it’s leftover data from other game’s ISO tracks. You can see tiles and text from those games. Strange stuff indeed.

Check out Mike Dailly’s blog. He was an official PCE programmer back in the day. Really cool stuff.

I’ve updated the main site to point to here. All updates, news, info, and such will be posted here. It’s just much easier to manage.

On to some actual news. I purchased a rom programmer recently and received a TubroRom board from Dave Shadoff (along with a 512k flash rom). Now I just need a get a ZIF socket and I’m set. I already have a tototek card, but with this turborom card I can make modifications and more easily add additional hardware. I have plans to make an extended SF2 mapper to handle 64megabit roms and also add audio hardware for future projects.

I’ve updated the PCE decrunch routine for pucrunch files. The addition of a ring buffer makes it so you can decompress directly to an I/O port (VDC, VCE, etc). I’ve also implemented it into HuC Clib. So far I have the ring buffer set at 8k, but I’ll implement 4k and 2k versions for hucard projects in the future. The ring buffer size is dependent on the -r option in the pucrunch command line.

New? Yup.