BlastEm 0.3.0 - Now with Windows, OSX and 32-bit x86 support

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Mask of Destiny
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BlastEm 0.3.0 - Now with Windows, OSX and 32-bit x86 support

Post by Mask of Destiny » Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:21 am

Hey folks, I finally got around to putting together another release of BlastEm. Bulk of the changes are related to the expanded platform support and various bugfixes. Titan's Overdrive is running a lot better than it did, but there are still some small issues. SSF2 and a subset of the I2C EEPROM games now work (most of the ones that don't just need to get added to the ROM DB).There's also untested support for that Sega I/O board used with GEMS.

A more detailed changelog and download links are available here

TmEE co.(TM)
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Post by TmEE co.(TM) » Wed Jul 22, 2015 11:01 am

The emulator doesn't seem to want to start at all on my WinXP laptop. When I run it with a ROM I see the window appear for a moment and then it quits without any messages or anything.
*XP pro SP3
*Pentium M 750 (1.86GHz)
*GeForce 6600Go 128MB
*2GB RAM
Mida sa loed ? Nagunii aru ei saa ;)
http://www.tmeeco.eu
Files of all broken links and images of mine are found here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/FileDen

Mask of Destiny
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Post by Mask of Destiny » Wed Jul 22, 2015 2:45 pm

I haven't tested on XP, but in theory it should work. Are you passing it a valid ROM filename? BlastEm doesn't have any sort of GUI currently (other than the output window) so it will exit immediately if you don't pass it appropriate arguments. Unfortunately, error messages are only displayed on stderr which doesn't work so well on Windows unless you build as a terminal app (in which case a terminal will be spawned on startup always which is kind of annoying).

TmEE co.(TM)
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Post by TmEE co.(TM) » Wed Jul 22, 2015 4:00 pm

I ran from command line and gave it a ROM i.e "blastem myrom.bin"
"blastem -h" didn't seem to do anything either, linux only ?

As far as the console goes you can use the FreeConsole WinAPI call to toss it away.
Mida sa loed ? Nagunii aru ei saa ;)
http://www.tmeeco.eu
Files of all broken links and images of mine are found here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/FileDen

Mask of Destiny
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Post by Mask of Destiny » Wed Jul 22, 2015 5:31 pm

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:I ran from command line and gave it a ROM i.e "blastem myrom.bin"
Hmm, I think I still have an XP machine around so hopefully I can replicate when I get home.
TmEE co.(TM) wrote:"blastem -h" didn't seem to do anything either, linux only ?
Well it's dependent on having a terminal attached, so it would work on Windows if I had built as a console app.
TmEE co.(TM) wrote:As far as the console goes you can use the FreeConsole WinAPI call to toss it away.
The main problem is that I want to stay attached to the console it was launched from if it was launched from a console and not spawn a console at all if it's launched some other way (from a frontend/launcher for instance). I don't think there's any way to replicate that behavior on Windows (it's why most language VMs/interpreters ship two executables on Windows), but maybe I can come up with an acceptable compromise to make the Win32 build a little more functional.

Mask of Destiny
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Post by Mask of Destiny » Thu Jul 23, 2015 5:39 am

My XP machine doesn't want to boot. I did confirm that the 0.3.0 build works on my Windows 7 machine though.

Is there a particular ROM you were trying to run? It's possible there's a bug that's causing it to exit on that particular one.

I'll probably try to put out a 0.3.1 release soon with some bugfixes. I'll try to make the Win32 build a bit less half assed when I do.

TmEE co.(TM)
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Post by TmEE co.(TM) » Fri Jul 24, 2015 7:11 am

No ROM I tried worked. I see the window pop up for a moment and I think i see the ROM name in the title area, and then it quits.
Mida sa loed ? Nagunii aru ei saa ;)
http://www.tmeeco.eu
Files of all broken links and images of mine are found here : http://www.tmeeco.eu/FileDen

Mask of Destiny
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Post by Mask of Destiny » Mon Jul 27, 2015 5:07 am

I've pushed out a new release, 0.3.1. This fixes GDB remote debugging (I broke it inadvertently before the 0.3.0 release) and makes it much less hostile to being run in a way that makes the terminal unavailable. Error messages (and select non-error messages like -h and -v output) will be sent to a message box in addition to stderr if it's being run on Windows or it detects that it's not attached to a pty/tty. Additionally, it will open a console window when the debugger is triggered in such an environment.

A bonus addition is a pure SDL2 fallback renderer for cases when OpenGL 2 is unavailable. This change is courtesy of a new contributor, Higor Eurípedes.

Not sure if the new build will fix your problem TmEE, but it should hopefully make it more obvious why it's not working.

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