W.I.P.

All right, it's been nearly two months without any update to this development log, so it's time to keep you informed...

I've worked on three major axes in the last few months : the startup code, the Mac-OS X packaging, and the integration of the controllers physically connected to the computer.

Startup Code

I've had several reports of people experiencing an emulator freezing upon startup. Although I failed to reproduce this behaviour on any of the computers I could perform tests on, this bug is likely to be related to race conditions between the threads during initialisation ; hence I've rewritten the launching code.

It is now much more synchronized (which means a tad slower), thus robust. Also, you'll be greeted with a (*ahem*) nice loading screen while te overlay texture is being read and initialised.

As I cannot check whether it fixes the hangs or not, I can only hope that it will do the trick!

Mac-OS X Packaging

Thanks to RayXambeR's feedback and support, I've finally managed to come up with a proper Mac-OS X packaging.

The previous releases for Mac were merely made of a ZIP archive (much like the other platforms distributions), that wasn't very Mac-friendly, and that usually needed the user to be confident with the terminal console to be launched successfully.

From now on, the Mac version will be distributed as a TGZ archive holding a true Mac-OS X application ; thus it can be run by simply clicking its icon!

Controllers Mapping

Due to popular request ("popular" meaning at least 3 different person ;o) I'm adding support for the physical controllers within ParaJVE.

Any controller supported/recognized by the computer should appear in the list of devices that can be (virtually) plugged into the two emulated game ports. This will let you use your favorite joystick or gamepad to play with ParaJVE (as if it was a real Vectrex joystick).

At the time being, the code that handles the controller mapping is completed and fully functional. I'm currently working on some kind of calibration dialog that would let the user tweak the response of the analog controllers (I'm not sure if it will make it into the final release).

This is it, the next release is not too far away now ; more information and snapshot should be posted soon anyway.

Now also available for Linux, MacOS X and Solaris

Well, hopefully, that is... :)

Here are the native libraries for these platforms ; with that you should be able to run the emulator on these targets too. As I have none of these systems available for testing, I can't check that it works properly. If you have a chance to try it, please tell me if it's ok or not.

To install the native libraries, download the right archive, unzip it directly into the emulator's directory, and you're nearly done!

Of course, as you can't launch the emulator with the vectrex.bat script, you'll have to write your own script to run the java command line (if you write one, I'd be very grateful if you could send me a copy, so that I can include it in the next distrib)

JOGL native libraries for Mac OS X 10.3+
JOGL native libraries for Linux/x86
JOGL native libraries for Solaris/SPARC 2.8+
JOGL native libraries for Solaris/x86 2.9+

Alternatively, you can get these files (as a JAR archive) from the JOGL 1.1.1 download page.