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PCAE 2.7 available (if anyone wants to host it)


JohnPCAE

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First, let me say congratulations to the Stella team for Stella 2.0. It's been a long time coming, and it looks to be well worth the wait. The release got me thinking...I've had PCAE 2.7 sitting on my hard drive for a long time now and I've been too lazy to release it. It's just a bug fix of 2.6 that's designed to play better with XP (as well as fix a few other bugs and add some minor usability improvements), but if anyone wants to host it I'd be happy to email it out. I don't work on it anymore (I've moved on to other things), but hopefully it will solve most of the problems that people have had with it. If anyone's interested, send me a PM and I'll send a ZIP out (with source, as usual).

 

John Dullea

 

P.S. I looked into posting about this a while ago, but I lost my AtariAge login and had to make another one (with a different email -- if you forget your login you're out of luck since supplying your email isn't enough to get it emailed back to you). Anyhow, better late then never.

Edited by JohnPCAE
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  • 2 weeks later...
John does this version fixes kaillera problems? Could never get it to work.

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I personally doubt it - there are technical reasons why you can't expect to be able to play 2600 games with multiple players over the internet. At least not until/unless typical internet latency drops to single-digit millisecond ping times (very unlikely anytime soon.)

 

However, with a LAN, ping times can be in the proper order of magnitude, so this could work in theory. But a LAN isn't as desireable.

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I'd really like to see Kailera working. You don't actually have to play multiplayer games with simultaneous action against other players like Combat or Ice Hockey for example.

 

I would really enjoy playing a two player variation of an Atari 2600 game over the internet just so I could observe another player's technique or critique his playing style and have others do the same for me. You can watch the other player perform and the latency really makes no difference to the audience, right? Do both players need PCAE and the specific rom on their own PC and just use the internet as a broadcast link for the video signal? (kind of like having an atari hooked up to 2 monitors and two joysticks with really long cables?) Or do you have to set up a remote server somewhere on the internet for both players and the input is latent for both??? If it were setup in a peer to peer format rather than a client to server format it could work well, couldn't it?

 

I'd just like to be able to watch others play online, sort of like having a webcam viewing your monitor and broadcasting over the web to your opponent, but then have a saved state of the game in progress download to the opponent's PC when it's his turn to play and then upload back to yours when he loses a life.(I realize it would take a few seconds for this process to occur, but with small sized save states like Atari 2600, it shouldn't be that bad.) I don't know if this has been done already, but it seems very cool to me. Of course, the video signal would appear on the remote monitor seconds later, but since you're not actually participating until it's your turn then it doesn't really matter. It would work great for games like video checkers, video chess, Oink, Pressure Cooker, or River Raid; anything where 2 or more players players take turns. To me this really beats having to just watch someone elses' .AVI file with no sound and not getting a turn to compete.

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You can watch the other player perform and the latency really makes no difference to the audience, right?

Kaillera lets you do that, but it affects all connected like in other online systems.

 

Do both players need PCAE and the specific rom on their own PC and just use the internet as a broadcast link for the video signal?

Yes players need same emulator and same roms (although Kaillera will let you get away with different versions). No video is transmitted.

 

Or do you have to set up a remote server somewhere on the internet for both players and the input is latent for both???

Yes. By default kaillera looks for games on a master server.

 

If it were setup in a peer to peer format rather than a client to server format it could work well, couldn't it?

Yes. You can download the server version of Kaillera and tell your buddies to connect to your IP. For more information go to http://www.anti3d.com/

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  • 2 months later...

I did some reading through some of the other threads on the 2600...I do a lot of coding, but I don't do much with PCAE anymore because I've sort of moved on to other things (e.g: AutoREALM, as well as a few other things). I've also written a fictional novel and I'm working on the sequel. If there are some issues with PCAE, I'm not against trying to squeeze in some fixes, but they probably won't happen quickly. For those of you who have recently asked for PCAE 2.7, check your email :D

 

One of the reasons for the long-time problem with XP is that none of my boxes run it :D I'm exclusively running Win2k here, and it wasn't until I could borrow an XP box for a while that I could do some playing around to find out what was wrong. It turned out to be a bug in the screen buffer code when using full-screen video. If anyone has any problems with 2.7, feel free to email me at johnpcae_at_yahoo_dot_com.

 

I also read that there have been some issues with illegal opcodes, especially the SBX opcode. If I only had a nickel for every time one of those things gave me hearburn :roll: As someone else posted elsewhere, examples of illegal opcodes are rare in the extreme, so while it's possible to code for them (and PCAE does support most of them), they're just about impossible to test. I coded the 6502 kernel based on two books that I had in 1995 (and still have on my shelf): "Assembly Language Programming with the Commodore 64" and "Compute!'s Programming the Commodore 64". The first doesn't contain anything on illegal opcodes, but the second one does (though I don't know how complete it is). I think I also have a text file somewhere that I found on the net that has a little info. Basically illegal opcodes were a real shot in the dark and all I could do was hope that I got it right. Today, with things like the Cuttle Cart it's actually possible to do some real testing. If there are problems with illegal opcodes and someone has a good reference on them, it might be possible to make some fixes (the assembly code is pretty simple, though I haven't looked at it in years). I also saw something about "phantom fetches" or somesuch. This is the first I've ever heard of such a thing -- what the heck are those? :P

Edited by JohnPCAE
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I can understand your moving on to other projects. I'll be honest to say though I was disappointed to see kaillera fail with PCAE. Anyway kaillera has become more of a online network for fighting games so I don't think many people would have used the feature. It is difficult to find people willing to play old games.

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Why isn't the latest version hosted here:

 

http://www.classicgaming.com/pcae/

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I don't think Matt maintains it anymore. He originally hosted it for me on his own site, then moved it to classicgaming when he had to move on (life gets in the way, somteimtes). There were a lot of issues with classicgaming and some other project that I don't remember right now, and a lot of people were moving away from it. I hosted the later verions up to 2.6 on vg-network.com (Dave's Video Game Classics), but it looks like the site has changed and I'm not sure if they even host emu's anymore. I don't have the contact information for them or how to login to where I used to upload it. It looks like the site has undergone a total transformation. From my standpoint I don't much care where it's hosted as long as it's available for everyone. I have a SourceForge login for AutoREALM and I'm tempted to open up a SF project for it, but I don't have any hosting for a webpage and it seems to be a waste of SF resources for a project that I hardly ever touch anymore.

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I can understand your moving on to other projects. I'll be honest to say though I was disappointed to see kaillera fail with PCAE. Anyway kaillera has become more of a online network for fighting games so I don't think many people would have used the feature. It is difficult to find people willing to play old games.

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I have never been happy with Kaillera. If I were to do it today I'd simply write my own socket code, invent my own protocol, and just use that. I've learned enough in the years since PCAE 2.6 that I would probably take that course, and package it all into a DLL that the emu could simply use. At least then I'd have control over the source to the network layer.

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I did some reading through some of the other threads on the 2600...I do a lot of coding, but I don't do much with PCAE anymore because I've sort of moved on to other things (e.g: AutoREALM, as well as a few other things). I've also written a fictional novel and I'm working on the sequel. If there are some issues with PCAE, I'm not against trying to squeeze in some fixes, but they probably won't happen quickly. For those of you who have recently asked for PCAE 2.7, check your email  :D

 

[...]

 

I also read that there have been some issues with illegal opcodes, especially the SBX opcode. If I only had a nickel for every time one of those things gave me hearburn  :roll: As someone else posted elsewhere, examples of illegal opcodes are rare in the extreme, so while it's possible to code for them (and PCAE does support most of them), they're just about impossible to test. I coded the 6502 kernel based on two books that I had in 1995 (and still have on my shelf): "Assembly Language Programming with the Commodore 64" and "Compute!'s Programming the Commodore 64". The first doesn't contain anything on illegal opcodes, but the second one does (though I don't know how complete it is). I think I also have a text file somewhere that I found on the net that has a little info. Basically illegal opcodes were a real shot in the dark and all I could do was hope that I got it right. Today, with things like the Cuttle Cart it's actually possible to do some real testing. If there are problems with illegal opcodes and someone has a good reference on them, it might be possible to make some fixes (the assembly code is pretty simple, though I haven't looked at it in years). I also saw something about "phantom fetches" or somesuch. This is the first I've ever heard of such a thing -- what the heck are those?  :P

993571[/snapback]

You probably aren't real interested, but if you are there are some good discussions about illegal opcodes and other esoteric 2600-specific emulator issues on the [stella] mailing list, which is archived here: http://atari2600.org/pipermail/stella/

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  • 1 month later...

Hi John,

 

Thanks for working on PCAE. I've been using pcaewin since I started doing Atari development in 2004. It's still my favorite emu. The debugger has helped me solve many nasty problems in my code.

 

I've been using it with XP for a couple months now, and it works fine for me.

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