Whdload Game Installers update + free game

[platon42]

I don't think that's correct. The Highway interrupts are completely disabled until the software enables them (i.e. starting Poseidon) -- otherwise these interrupts could freeze the machine. And even if there are spurious interrupt signals (!) (which is very unrealistic because the MACH chip really forbids them), they should be catched by the default interrupt handler and not crash the machine.

It would be cool, if you could check that is indeed the Highway that's causing the problems and Poseidon is not running while playing
WHDLoad games.

As for disabling Poseidon: The next release has a new version of the AddUSBHardware command with a "REMOVE ALL" option, effectively turning off Poseidon. This allows the stack to go offline via shell scripts.

About running USB input devices for games: Poseidon is a software that heavily relies on multitasking and as most games disable the OS and multitasking, this is a no-go. Moreover, WHDLoad would either have to feed the input a MMU based custom chip emulation (dead slow) or patch each hardware hacking port request.

The solution indeed is to use a fully fledged emulation like UAE. For example, I've been playing Puzzle Bobble on MAME via an USB joypad the last few days

[platon42]

Hi lempkee,

> yes platon but WHDLOAD is not a pure emu

I never said anything like that. In fact, I wouldn't consider it an emulation at all. It runs the game in a MMU protected sandbox. AFAIK the allocated chip mem and sections of the fastmem are mapped to a temporary buffer and all the hardware environment is "backed up", before the game is run. When the game has to load stuff from the HD, the whole system is temporary restored from the buffers, multitasking is enabled and after the loading has been completed, the game and its data is restored back in its original position. This is all major magic, because actually some of the hardware registers cannot be read back. So WHDLoad games run on the CPU and are NOT emulated. Optionally, parts of (old versions of) the kickstart are emulated or mapped via the MMU.

Again, the game in the sandbox knows/sees nothing about the system and applications that were run before WHDLoad and vice versa.

About the MAME binaries being huge -- if you see the list of CPU's and GPU's and other custom hardware being emulated, using large lookup-tables for speed etc., it is not too surprising, that the binaries are that big. Anyway, it's real fun playing these old games on MAME.