On Thursday 06 June 2002 23:34, Sander Zuidema wrote: > The MSX Resource Center tested six popular MSX emulators for the Windows > platform and compared them to each other. Are emulators as good as the real > thing? Does all MSX software run on every emulator? Which of these > emulators is the best choice? This and more in the first MSX Resource > Center Emulator Comparison! URL? http://www.msx.org
That's a nice and thorough review. Compliments! Any chance of a similar review of MSX emulators running under Linux? About the speed test programs: could you publish those? I would like to run them under openMSX and see how it scores. And can you say something about the amount of CPU power that is required by the emulators? For people with gigahertz machines that may not matter, but for people with older machines it is important to know whether an emulator can run at realtime, and if it cannot, which features you can disable to make it run faster. I like seeing Almost Real among the test programs. For those interested in the technical details, I can give some background info that can explain why emulators failed at certain moments: - "_AR" is a BASIC command which triggers a hook which starts the loading. RuMSX failing on this probably means a problem in disk emulation. - "fake SCREEN 0" is actually SCREEN7. The VRAM uses a different addressing in SCREEN7 and 8 and Almost Real compensates for that. If the emulator does not implement this different addressing, the display will be garbled from the moment the logo starts rolling in. - The multilayer scroll in the title part is a lot of line interrupts and polls, which time colour and horizontal adjust changes. If things are displayed wrong here, VDP timing is off. - I don't really know why the loading pictures are so hard to get right - I can't get openMSX to display them correctly either (yet!). There may be different code for MSX2 and MSX2+ in this part, I'm not sure, Mark wrote it. - The hang in the fractals part can occur on real MSX as well, so it's a bug in Almost Real. However, on real MSX it is pretty rare, but if emulator timing is off you can get it 100% of the time. This bug can occur on turbo R, I'm not sure whether it can occur on MSX2. By the way, I assume you mean the emulated MSX hung on this part. If the emulator itself hung, something is very wrong. <shameless plug> We're still looking for someone to port openMSX to Windows. For details, visit http://openmsx.sourceforge.net/. If you're interested, post a message on our mailinglist. </shameless plug> Bye, Maarten -- For info, see http://www.stack.nl/~wynke/MSX/listinfo.html
