The Vintage Gaming Network

Makaron is a dreamcast emulator for Windows, which is able to run commercial games, with sound at decent speeds on Windows. The author of Makaron, Dknute has posted he following WIP News:

I found few bugs in T9, here’s quick summary:
- T9 actually reports itself as Test 8/3, my bad. The EXE file info should be correct though.
- Due to small changes in SH4 recompiler it may now trip on illegal opcodes, including ones that real hardware would ignore (like 0×0000 in delay slot). That breaks “Tokyo Highway Battle 2″ and some “backups”. I’ve already fixed that.
- “Street Fighter Alpha 3″ freezes when entering attract mode. Cause yet unknown.
- SH4 fast interpreter is very slow, I was testing something and forgot to undo the changes. And there’s a key that will break it even further if pressed :) Fixed.
- ARM7 was set to normal interpreter rather then fast one and this will add a bit to CPU usage. Fixed. Actually, I’ve finally completed the ARM recompiler - not very sophisticated but it is somewhat faster. And is default now.

Somehow - thanks to the free time perhaps - I was also able to come up with several improvements to the AICA module. I got more things done in past 2 days that in last 3 months… Anyway:
- There are two types of ADPCM streams on DC, and both can be looped even if only one is supposed to be used that way. But that didn’t stop people from trying… Long story short, background music in Soul Reaver sounds fine now. Also, ADPCM samples don’t like simple linear interpolation it seems so I’ve removed it. Trust me, it’s better this way.
- I’ve implemented the Amplitude Envelope Generator (AEG in short). There’s very little information on how it works, not to mention several special cases that I found got me scratching my head for a while. It has to be recalculated per-sample, though on the bright side I’ve designed it to use integer math only. Makes “Gundam Side Story 0079″ and “Gun Bird 2″ BGM nicer.

I think I could now try to add FEG and LFO too, but before I do I might need to redesign the module so it’s more clear what’s happening and where. In other words: it will take time.