Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Software Forum => Topic started by: Howard_Casto on June 05, 2004, 09:18:50 pm
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Taken directly from my site:
For those of you living in a cave chankast is the great new dreamcast emulator. It runs well, already runs a lot of commerical games, and is fast enough to run on the average modern pc.
Unfortunately, it's currently in the very early alpha stages, which means no fullscreen and no command line options.
Guess who your hero is? (Me) I whipped up a wrapper that allows you to launch virtual discs via the command line, set the window to fullscreen and exit with a keypress of your choosing.
I normally don't do emu-specific wrappers anymore, but this emu is special.
Have fun!
http://www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/ (http://www.oscarcontrols.com/lazarus/)
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SWEET!
of course... I haven't got it to run any games full speed yet...close... but not quite there.
But I'm going from CDs instead of isos. Not sure if that makes a difference.
But I am VERY happy that I might get some of these great arcade games on my cab... without soldering a dreamcast controller...and finding diodes..
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Howard you are my hero! It'd be awesome to finally play SF3 and MvsC2 on my cabinet.
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SWEET!
But I'm going from CDs instead of isos. Not sure if that makes a difference.
Not really... there are instructions in the readme to run it both ways. You just link to a real cdrom drive instead of a virtual one.
About the speed issue. A little birdie told me about an upcoming utility called speed pig. It will speed up chankast dramatically. Look for it soon.
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update... chankast utilites was released and it appears to be crap. The speedup only works on certain pcs (most average mame pcs use amd athlon xp processors, which it doesn't like) and it ruins the sound. Not worth downloading imho.
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new chankast alpha out this weekend, also elsemi has signed up to help garofi and the other guys out, elsemi working on another dc emu yipeeee!
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It can run regular DC discs? My games (Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, among others) all show up as audio discs within the emulator.
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It can run regular DC discs? My games (Sonic Adventure, Crazy Taxi, among others) all show up as audio discs within the emulator.
No
Not yet at least. There are rumours/fantasies about hacking the GDrom interface of chankast to a dvdrom. I don't think I explained that accurately. I don't know if they are hacking a driver or what.
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It'll probably never happen unless one or two talented people are REALLY dedicated onto getting it work.
The gdrom disc is a special compression cdrom that can hold a full gig of dat ainstead of the regular 750 megs.
The cgdrom has 30 mb at the beginning that is in regular iso format. That can be read easily. Then there is a physical barrier (a black line) between it and the cgrom format data, which cannot be read by a normal cdrom. Now in theory a cdrom can read cgrom data, but as it doesn't recognize the data, it'd have to be raw read. This would require a custom cdrom driver. Also it most likely means the gdrom would have to be cached to the harddrive durning gameplay anyway, so it's pretty pointless.
There are rumors of certain cdroms that can read cgrom discs, but so far nothing real has turned up.
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Howard,
Is there any chance that I can get you to update the wrapper to work with the latest Chankast release?
I'm getting a file not found error when I run it. I suspect this is because the exe file name has changed.
Thanks,
Todd
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No, it's because that version of the wrapper only works with that version of chankast. I quit updating because they keep rearranging the menu format, among other things. I'm not interested in making custom wrappers anymore.
A more generic wrapper, which can be scripted to work with chankast, will probably be released sometime this winter.
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Howard,
Is there any chance that I can get you to update the wrapper to work with the latest Chankast release?
I'm getting a file not found error when I run it. I suspect this is because the exe file name has changed.
Thanks,
Todd
It actually has the fullscreen option implemented now so you shouldn't need a wrapper.
07/07/2004: Chankast Alpha 0.25 released
- FullScreen and multiple resolution support
- CPU core bugs fixed
- VmsBrowser integration
- LCD CMU support
- LCD VMU emulation
- Rumble pack emulation
- Control and CD plugin support
- Windows 2000 compatibility (ASPI driver)
- Command line support to run home made binaries
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Yes, but you can't launch it from the command line, nor can you exit with a single keypress or set rendering options crucial to getting the games to run correctly on a per game basis, thus deeming the emulator useless on a mame cab.
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Yes, but you can't launch it from the command line, nor can you exit with a single keypress or set rendering options crucial to getting the games to run correctly on a per game basis, thus deeming the emulator useless on a mame cab.
Doh! I actually don't have a computer that is even close to good enough to give chankast a whirl. Plus I already own a dreamcast. That stinks though...
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Thanks for the info Howard. I will wait for the generic wrapper then.
-Todd