| Posted By
Litwr
on 2013-06-25
12:43:36
|  we are losing plus4emu
This picture shows the plus4emu at overclocked to 950 MHz Raspberry Pi with 384x288 at Raspbian environment.  So we need about 2 GHz ARM CPU to run it at 100% -- This means that Android can't run plus4emu yet. It is a bit odd because RPi can handle 1080p video... It is sad that this emulator doesn't have frame skipping feature.
There are another sad news. It looks like that fltk library (it provides graphics for plus4emu) loses proper support. I can't run plus4emu with upgraded Debian 6 Linux distribution. There are problems with OpenSUSE 12.3 too.
BTW I've also found several minor syntax errors at C++ sources which stop modern compilers.
RESUME: without proper support we will lose this portable and most accurate emulator soon.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2013-06-24
17:41:13
| Re: we are losing plus4emu
I started doing a proper Windows port a while back mainly as a WTL/OpenGL exercise, but I got bored of it. I know it's not very promising for Linux users but you see that's just always been the thing with Linux that those myriads of API's get screwed up rather quickly and your source is just not guaranteed to compile even after just a few months... not to say that Windows is superior or something but you can still just easily compile and run dynamically linked executable there from 10+ years old, untamed sources.
So if there's interest I could upload it somewhere but the OpenGL rendering is a bit buggy at startup and more than half of the GUI is not accessible at all.
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Posted By
gerliczer
on 2013-06-25
04:08:24
| Re: we are losing plus4emu
Hi Litwr,
Well Raspberry Pi being able to handle 1080p video won't help anything at all with running CPU intensive tasks. Video accelerators don't do any generic calculations.
FLTK, as it can be seen on their homepage, is an actively developed toolkit for the three major platforms therefore it should be possible to upgrade the plus4emu source with properly supported FLTK version relatively easy. IstvanV gave up the project years ago. (He seemed to expect something from us that we, as in plus/4 enthusiasts, didn't give him which he seems to have found in the Enterprise scene with his other emulator, ep128emu). Anyways, the project is GPL licensed, the sources are readily available, so you are free to do the necessary maintenance work to be able to run this nice software under current Linux OS distributions. Contact him, I'm fairly sure he will be ready to help you achieve your goal. Maybe it will gladden him if he finds someone willing to carry on with his project. You may also contact MagerValp. He ran into the same problem with MacOS X many years ago. He may also be willing to help as that way he could also have a native emulator, if he is still interested in our machine, or maybe he already has the silver bullet.
Hi Gaia,
Your Windows port of plus4emu won't help Litwr at all as he is a Linux guy. Have you ever given a thought to Qt? It is C++ which you are good at and cross platform, nowadays having Android port too.
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2013-06-25
13:26:39
| Re: we are losing plus4emu
Sorry for a bit excessive panic. The big problem is only OpenGL -- it is not supported properly via fltk. The switch -no-opengl at the command line fixes plus4emu. It can smoothy run Xargon wars at 65% speed with this option. My experience shows that RPi has performance equal to Celeron-766MHz or Pentium-260MHz. If OpenGL libraries will work properly and will support RPi hardware video accelleration then it will be possible to use 100% speed emulation. This means also that it is worth to port plus4emu to Android -- 1GHz modern ARM maybe fast enough for 100% speed. I don't have any Android device...
It is odd that plus4emu runs slightly slower with OpenGL with modern Linux than without OpenGL.
[Gaia] Thanks. Microsoft Windows have their advantages. They allow to run 20 years old EXE-file! So the Microsoft Windows' users may use plus4emu.exe without problems. I tried it with Wine - it works. Is your EXE is better than made by IstvanV?
Linux like +4  is Paradise for the programmers. However it becomes too big and complex...
I've made several speed tests with plus4emu and different hardware:
3200MHz AMD - 1300%
3200MHz AMD with Wine - 1150%
1900MHz Intel Atom - 370%
766MHz Celeron - 65%
950MHz RPi - 65%
[gerliczer] Thanks for the piece of advice.  Fltk has not easy time. They stopped to develop version 2. They also have the mentioned OpenGL problems. It will be good if IstvanV could update his superb emu and made its Android port. I've just sent the reference to this thread to his sorceforge.net e-mail. Qt is also good and supported very well.
EDIT: It is also very difficult to get sound sometimes. Alsa driver may produce a lot of error messages. It is curious why IstvanV missed SDL?
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Posted By
bubis
on 2013-06-26
06:16:52
| Re: we are losing plus4emu
@Litwe: He didn't miss SDL. You can build a basic SDL version too as far as I remember. And that's probably the best starting point to create an Android port, all the C64 emus I tried are based on SDL too.
UPDATE: I found it: plus4lib/sample.c uses the plus4emu C interface, sets audio/video callback functions implemented using SDL and that's it.
BTW, if you have a Raspberry Pi you can install Android 4.0 on it, so you can do the Android port yourself. ;) We probably don't need SID and drive emu all the time, so 100% seems possible even on your dev board.
I am more than happy to test it on my Nexus 7, but unfortunately I don't have the time to do the port myself in the foreseeable future.
I am also happy to lend my Nexus 7 for a short pediod of time in Budapest to someone who is serious about porting YAPE or Plus4Emu to Android. (I need to trust the person of course.)
FYI: Existing Plus/4 emu is available for Android in the AnVice experimental builds:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vice-emu/files/experimental%20binaries/
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Posted By
Litwr
on 2013-06-28
13:43:53
| Re: we are losing plus4emu
IMHO everybody with knowledge of C++ can make plus4emu version for any OS during 3-4 days. The knowledge of plus4 is not required...
EDIT: to bubis
1) plus4emu uses sdl only for joystick, it uses portaudio and libsndfile for music
2) where do you see Android 4 SD image for Raspberry Pi? I could find Android 2.3 only.
3) I couldn't find an easy way to increase plus4emu speed. The disabling drives and SID gives almost nothing.
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