New Z80 emulator

Wednesday, 6th December 2006

One chap I cannot thank enough is CoBB for all his hard work in the Z80 field.

I've rewritten the Z80 emulation from scratch; this time it uses an expanded switch block (the 'manual' way) to decode instructions. Rather than write every combination of instructions out by hand, the code making up the switch blocks up is generated by another program, reading instruction information from a table copied from an Excel spreadsheet.

At the cost of a significantly larger assembly (from 40KB to 140KB) I now get a 100% speed increase (from ~50MHz to 100MHz).

I still can't pass the port of ZEXALL I'm testing with (and the same instructions too - not bad for a 100% rewrite to end up with exactly the same bugs), but after comparing some of my offending tables against CoBB's ones I've isolated some of the hiccoughs. The only instruction group test I fail is, naturally, the one that takes the longest to execute - getting a hardware, or indeed emulator, comparison takes well over an hour.

Anyhow, rewriting the Z80 emulation seems to have been the right thing to do. As you might have guessed from the picture at the top of this entry, Sonic now runs.

My VDP (Video Display Processor) emulation is still rather rough-and-ready (I've really been concentrating on the Z80 bit) and the second column of background tiles is not updated correctly, so I apologise in advance for the distortion! It only appears in SMS mode (the display is cropped in Game Gear mode).

The fill colour (in the left column here) is incorrect in most games too.

I rather preferred Sonic 2, but maybe that's because you can pick up dropped rings and I'm rather lousy at it otherwise.

I accused the previous Wonder Boy III shot of not reading the start button. Somehow I also failed to notice the missing sprites (clouds and main part of the castle), which was part of the main problem. It now appears to play well.

Support for zoomed sprites seems to be missing in some emulators (at least, the versions of Dega and Pastorama I have to hand), but I use them so implemented them to let my programs work when testing - it's nice to see a commerical game use them too!

Gunstar Heroes runs, but flickers and jumps (not the visible sprite 'flicker' in those screenshots) - some bug in my CPU interrupt handling or VDP interrupt generation.

Psycho Fox runs insanely fast - even faster than The Flash as seen to the right - making an already difficult game to control virtually impossible. I'm really not sure what could be causing that, but the enemy sprites sometimes flicker up and back down quickly, so it could be one of the remaining CPU bugs.

Fantasy Zone demonstrates both the blanking colour bug (that left column should be green) and the distorted second column bug, but plays well. I tried to get a better screenshot of Maze Walker, but not handling 3D glasses makes looking at the screen a rather unpleasant experience (it flickers the left and right eye views in quick succession; the 3D glasses had two LCD shutters that opened and closed in sequence with the images on-screen).

I might add a Dega-esque red/green anaglyph filter, but I find those rather unpleasant to look at so might provide a stereo pair view.

In any case, the most important SMS game now runs -

I shall refrain from using the Terry Pratchett quote (just this once).

Some games look like the above, which makes me happy - it's the ones that do nothing at all that worry me. What with the CPU bugs, dodgy emulation of the mapper, missing (important!) hardware ports and hackish VDP, it's surprising anything runs. It's getting better.

EDIT: How are there so many spelling errors? Fantasy Start as opposed to Fantasy Zone, Video Display Hardware as the expansion of the VDP acronym... I should not write these so late at night.