ParaJVE : Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator   

Official Home of ParaJVE ... A travel through the programming of a freeware Vectrex emulator in java!

Monday, September 27, 2010  

0.7.0 still not released? WTF !!!

All right, it's been 8 months since the last post has been published, and still no release showing up... So what's up, you might wonder?

Right, I haven't worked that much on the emulator these last months. Some kind of coding break. I even forgot about it at some point, to be honest ;-)
Only lately did I come back again to ParaJVE development, so the release is now back on tracks.

Bank-switching, the last feature I wanted to add to this release is now nearly completed.

The ParaJVE memory model has been modified to fully support cartridges with a ROM bigger than 32Kb. It basically means that the emulator can now load and execute dual-banked cartridge (64K rom images), but also emulates multi-banked cartridges (Richard Hutchinson's VecFlash and VecMulti cartridges, for a start).

As a proof of concept, here is a picture of ParaJVE running the awesome Lineart demo (a demo made of 4 different banks, stored on a VecFlash cartridge) :


As for the games packaging, Protector + YASI (by Alex Herbert), as well as some other homebrews, have been added to the list of embedded games. For YASI to be properly displayed, a special "interlaced" mode has been added to the emulator's rendering engine. This mode suits well to these "raster" games, that often display half of the lines per frame (odd lines, then even ones).

I also created an original overlay for YASI (heavily based on the original Space Invaders overlay). Here is the result :


Ok, so what now? Well, I'm currently in the process of updating the configuration file loader, to make it support multi-banked games definitions, as well as zipped ROM files. Testing & fixing regressions here and there also keep me somewhat busy...

And as usual, no release date planned yet ;) 

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