Tag development - PPCenter

Pseudo Saturn Kai : still WIP ...

Written by cafealpha 25 february 2016 no comments

Still WIP, and last week was a busy one !

First, I fixed USB dev cart legacy firmware-like screen that wasn't working at all. Well that's a developer-oriented feature that I seldom use, but that needs to be fixed anyway

The fact I seldom use this feature was the starting point of the problem : modifying a module apparently not related with that feature caused major bug ... software development in a nutshell

Thank you Shazz for beta testing my firmware

There are still other bugs remaining, and I plan to fix theses soon

And, (what's more important), game loader was sometimes loading game, sometimes not. Loading game backups is Pseudo Saturn Kai main feature, so I really don't want it to fail

Origin of this bug was unclear, but I fixed/improved many things at once, and game loaded every time after that, so let's hope I won't have to face with it in the future

One additional "bug" was game loader being kicked to multiplayer screen, and it was caused by ... game corrupted dump

First half of the game IP header was filled with zeros, so Saturn couldn't even recognize it as a Saturn game ...
I "fixed" what I could on firmware side by displaying something like "bad game dump/burn ?" message before kicking to multiplayer screen.
Let's hope it will reduce the amount of "can't load xyz game ! Hurry up to fix your bloody firmware !!" kind messages after release

And of course, there were many, many minor fixes, for example :
- Added scrolling help messages under menus
- Credits screen ... stub (names missing), and only in Save Data Manager for the moment
- Added alternate menu exit keys : it is now possible to do something like "A/C:select, X:delete, Y:info, Z:whatever" in a single menu. This is preliminary work for Action Replay codes addition

So firmware development is continuing ! Everything is in good way :

data/images/20160225_please_disperse.jpg

Pseudo Saturn Kai development is going well. Please disperse.
(Screenshot from The Naked Gun)

Nothing to see here
(Mr Nielsen, you're missing us )

On a positive note, I tested Bubble Bobble (listed as incompatible in Pseudo Saturn compatibility list), and it worked fine

I absolutely don't know why it works fine. I suppose that registers cleanup and running RAM cleanup code from ROM just before loading game helped a bit ... well at least it works

Completely unrelated note : I uploaded 10+ years old videos of me playing Tetris Attack puzzle mode ! You can enjoy the videos in my Tetris Attack page , or directly in the appropriate youtube playlist for theses videos.

data/images/20050105_ta_puzzle_ending.jpg

Tetris Attack puzzle mode ending screen

The quick lazy brown dog jumps over the foxes ?

Written by cafealpha 11 february 2016 no comments

The quick lazy brown dog jumps over the foxes ?
The brown fox quick lazy jump jumps over the ?
The ... well, I forgot what it was, but just to say that I spent a some time in messing with fonts in my Save Data Manager application

In fact, it would be more accurate to speak about code pages (*), because I finally added support for Japanese text display :]

(*) For those who forgot what code pages was :
Once upon a time, before Unicode unified every characters, (and also made strlen function not working correctly on UTF-8 text), there was a custom for all countries in the developed world to define up to 128 extra characters that would be used in second half of ASCII character table.
Of course, Japan wanted to do the same, so it added poor looking "1 byte kana" characters on this extra 128 character page, and also added the remaining characters (including kanjis) after that, which gave birth to Shift-JIS encoding.

Since Saturn was developed, during this prehistoric "codepage" era, it is normal to find can find some code page remnants in Saturn software

One of these "code page remnants" is the comment string stored in each Saturn saves : didn't you noticed that sometimes BIOS displays Japanese characters in its save management screen ?

So, Save Data Manager must display Japanese characters instead of garbage characters when showing comment in save data selection menu !

data/images/20150704_save_delete_menu.png

What save comment looked like before
adding Japanese characters display ...
(It's a 6 months old screenshot)

How to do this ?
First, I need to verify that BIOS was defining characters according to Shift-JIS charset, and the best way to do this was to modify some save states and see what BIOS is displaying on screen.

And if possible, displaying as much as possible characters at once would improve the job's efficiency, so I choose to modify Keio Flying Squadron saves since they take only 32 bytes each.

So here comes the reason I choose a such weird title for this article : I wanted to display all font characters at once on screen

In the facts, I didn't used such a complex "lazy brown dog jump blah blah blah" sentence. I just displayed all the character in ascending order, and here is what it looked like in BIOS screen :

data/images/20160203_chars_katakana_raw.png

Repeat after me : －ｱｲｳｴｵｶｷｸｹｺｻｼｽｾｿ...

Looks good

That's definitely 1 byte kana characters in typical order.

Saturn BIOS also has ability to display European (accented) character, and switching from a codepage to another is just the matter of changing a byte per save data, so let's try and see what it looks likes :

data/images/20160203_chars_francais_raw.png

Same text as above, I just changed the language value

Oh, it looks like the good old ISO 8859-1 (latin1) charset

The picture above was displayed by setting French (my native language) language code in save, and setting to another language code (I tried with Spanish) gave unsurprisingly the same results.

So in the Saturn world, one byte equals one character, and there are two codepages to handle in order to display save comment string.
I first feared I had to deal with multi-byte characters (that is a real pain to handle when coding software), but that's not the case, and in fact it's relatively easy to do.

(2 hours later)

Katakana and European fonts

Hmm, theses characters are looking cute :)
It's seems that it is time to feed my image conversion tool ^^

(5 minutes later)
Okay, latin.bin and katakana.bin files are ready, I should add some codepage stuff in my text display code now !

(1 hour later)

data/images/20160203_font_test3_katakana_text_and_menu.png

Finally some exotic language displayed !
I lost 30 minutes in wondering why application wasn't
initially showing Japanese characters ... and it appears that
I was "cleaning up" the comment string by replacing exotic
character into space character
"It wasn't a bug, it was a feature "
It made sense when Japanese character wasn't displayed
correctly, but it was time to remove this string cleanup code.

Job complete ? Well, there are still some details to fix, and this is what take the most of time when developing software, but at least the boring part of the job is done :]

As a reward for me, I can now set save comment to a cool one when importing save data and that comment isn't defined.
I initially used a dummy "ImportData" string, but the holy "ｾｶﾞｻﾀｰﾝ,ｼﾛ" string defined in hitomi2500's ss-save-parser project is definitely better.

data/images/20160203_save_default_comment.png

ｾｶﾞｻﾀｰﾝ,ｼﾛ !

Last but not least : finishing this main quest opens doors to firmware translation side quest !
Well, Japanese translation would be ugly, because kanji characters are not available (just old-looking katakana characters : this article title would look like ｻﾞﾚｰｼﾞﾌｫｯｸｽｼﾞｬﾝﾌﾟｵｰﾊﾞｰｻﾞﾌﾞﾗｳﾝﾄﾞｯｸﾞ on firmware :D), and on software side, handling multi byte characters is a real mess, so I don't want to do make a Japanese version of Pseudo Saturn Kai and Save Game Manager.

However, translation for European languages is now technically possible

Well, "possible" doesn't means I will do this right now

This is a low priority job, so I will do it when I will have enough time and motivation for it.

BTW, in order to test if exotic character display was OK on Pseudo Saturn, I tried to print "beta" glyph (defined in European codepage) on the title bar :

data/images/20160211_pskai_main_menu.png

Pseudo Saturn Kai main menu

Without any surprises (text display routines are common between Pseudo Saturn Kai and Save Data Manager), it works !
I can finally indicate that this is a beta version ^^

Edit : oops, the feature to inform me when a comment is posted seems (once again) not to work, and consequently I didn't noticed new comments :/

Here are the comments I replied so far. Since I'm late, they deserve to be re-posted here :

I am really happy to hear that you don't have cancer anymore!! Congratulations! I wish you a really long and happy life! :) Anon

@Anon : It doesn't guarantee I'm cancer free !
CT scans indicate that there is no evidence of cancer relapse, but CT scan has limits (it doesn't shows millimeter-order tumors), so I continue regular cancer screening and taking care in everyday life

--------------

Hey @Spawn, could you upload those Saturn saves you have on your PC?
I have been looking for an archive of Saturn game saves for months now and I haven't found any.
Maybe with the save states I have, and your saves I can upload them somewhere and start an archive? I'll give you credit for it of course. ReyVGM

@ReyVGM : Thank you for sharing your saves on segaxtreme !
They will be available for everybody on Save Data Manager, so that it will be easy to import on Saturn or emulator.

--------------

best wishes for 2016 !!! vbt

@vbt : Thank you ! Best wishes for 2016 too !!!
Well, we are already in February, sorry ^^;

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It's great to see your active development, cause my saturn projects are almost in hibernation today (i'm a bit in a time trouble). And i'm glad my code is of some use.
Good luck! hitomi2500

@hitomi2500 : Hehe, I got some free time until end of March ... I don't know what it will be after that, but what's sure is that I will continue to have fun with my Saturn

Please keep continuing the good work too :]

--------------

stunned and confused

last night I went on a sega saturn nostalgia trip.

I had to catch up with 8+ years @ segaxtreme.
I found antime's usbcart, hitomi2500's fork, hitomi2500's new "wasca" and your stuff here.

sounds great ...
I need to dig up my saturn and finally start something.
I have a usb-cart from 2006 from pinchy (he seems inactive since 2007). seal1

@seal1 : Hey, I remember seeing your nick in segaxtreme thread about yano/Freewing transfer device (I built a Freewing device at that time).
It was a long time before I made my first USB dev cart ... nostalgia.
Many members forgot about Saturn and left segaxtreme, but luckily vbt and antime are still active.
You're always welcome on segaxtreme, even if it just to say "hi"

Merry New Year !

Written by cafealpha 28 december 2015 6 comments

I sometimes check this blog in order to verify if there are some interesting news, without success, and then I realized that I am the only author of this blog (

), hence though I should write something here in order not to deceive my countless fans.

So, sorry for the lack of news recently, I was busy with Saturn things, but also in deciphering Christmas presents lists

... and now busy in tidying up lego blocks and trashing used wrapping paper

I hope you're spending nice Christmas vacations ! I'm a little late for wishing you a merry Christmas (

), and a little early to wish you an Happy New Year (

), hence the broken title

So what's new with my Saturn projects ? In fact, nothing worth writing an article, but here is a short (and probably incomplete) list anyway :

1. SD Memory Cart : when overwriting save on Saturn side, keep the old save file on SD card (but remove it from saves list, of course).
Basically, it automatically keeps old saves somewhere on SD card, so that it is possible to revert to a previous state. I hope Saturn RPG fans will like

2. USB dev cart mode : when USB cable is detected, allow to unlock CD-ROM and then prompt for data upload.
This feature allows to makes tests on Saturn main program using data from CD-ROM without the need of installing a modchip, and without the need of burning a CD-R on each program changes

Special thanks to Shazz for reminding me to add such a feature, antime for wiring FTDI's PWREN signal to Saturn (it was unused for 3 years, but it was useful in order to detect USB connection, and hence hiding USB dev mode for normal users not using USB), and of course CyberWarriorX and jhl for Pseudo Saturn

3. PCB changes : basically removing few debug "in case of" stuff, and also moving SD card socket in order to fit better with cartridge shell.
It is still WIP, but plan to send the updated gerber to the PCB house on next month.

4. Few changes to the sources of yabause I'm using for testing my projects.
Especially, I added position save/restore and keyboard shortcut to each debug dialogs ... long time I wanted to do this

5. In Backup Data Manager, some additions to "Import" feature : backup data dump file read and parse was done a while (4-5 months ?) ago, I just added something to select where (Internal Memory or Cartridge or Floppy) to save selected saves, and plan to port save data extract algorithm next month or so

Thanks to hitomi2500's ss-save-parser project, such "Import" feature is easy to integrate in my Backup Data Manager project

Last but not least, I also want to thank Stac user on Assembler forums

He's doing good job in beta testing, and thanks to his reactivity and good communication, project is progressing faster than I was expecting.
Beta testing is far from being a funny job, especially with me as main programmer (

), and when testing requires to play games (this requires time, and bugs on my Saturn project may lead to loose of progress in game), so once more, thank you

PPCenter :: devblog

PPcenter. Arts and craft for my Sega Saturn. Since 1847 !

Pseudo Saturn Kai : still WIP ...

The quick lazy brown dog jumps over the foxes ?

Merry New Year !