Caloric for windows

Comments, problems, suggestions about Oric emulators (Euphoric, Mess, Amoric, etc...) it's the right place to ask. And don't hesitate to give your tips and tricks that help using these emulations in the best possible way on your favorite operating system.
mmu_man
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Caloric for windows

Post by mmu_man »

I just ported Caloric to win32 (using SDL):

Image
Image

Unzip this to C:\Program Files\ for testing.
Sound works also. Didn't test much though. Cload seems to work.
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Post by mmu_man »

Maybe I'll look into supporting the debugger, but I'm not sure I want to use GTK for that...
I might be possible, but it might also just be unusable, as I don't think GTK and SDL will play along nicely at all in win.
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Symoon
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Post by Symoon »

Seems very promising !
Tested on a PIII-800 under Win98se.
Few random problems report:
- the sound is not perfect (probably dur to the computer being too old/slow).
- couldn't perform a CTRL C during a LIST to stop the listing
- switching to environment screen during CLOAD provoked a few corruptions in the loading (several wrong bytes loaded)

Anyway, it's excellent !
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Post by Yicker »

Looks good and runs well on my Laptop.

Only had a quick look so far but a couple of points,
- Couldn't do some control functions such as Ctrl-C and Ctrl-Q.
- Some corruption when loading a BASIC test program.

Some suggestions
- Would be nice to have a black border around the screen like the real Oric.
- Be able to change the size of the window, appears quite small on my Laptop screen.
- Have menus instead of the F1 configuration screen.

Just my personal views.

Well done, very impressive so far. :-D

Scott
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Post by mmu_man »

well, it's basically (x)euphoric, so it has its options...
You can zoom with -z 2 or more on command line.
You won't get menus because it's using SDL, which only gives a surface to draw on, it doesn't know about the gui (which is why it's portable).
Maybe switching to GTK for the display (it's used for debugger already) would do, but GTK in windows is really ugly and buggy.
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Post by Yicker »

Hi,

Just tried the -z 2 command line option and it works a treat, well impressed :-D.

Are there any other command line options that might be of use?

Cheers
Scott
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Chema
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Post by Chema »

Hi.

Just tried one of my demos with the 3d engine and also ran Space:1999 and it works great!

A few things I noticed, though.

-Sound is quite crappy indeed, not sure why...
-It seems that the application does not get presses of the CTRL key at all.
-A small black border would be indeed appreciated.
-The debugger is something I would desire desperately ;)

Any other additions that would be fantastic would probably break portability, I understand that. Menus and icons and such... That is the price you pay.

But all in all a fantastic step ahead. Well done!

EDIT Just read from xeuphoric manpage that CTRL key is mapped to CAPS LOCK on the host computer, so that solves the problem. As long as you get used to it :)
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Post by Dbug »

What about using WxWidget instead of GTK ?
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Chema
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Post by Chema »

Chema wrote:Just read from xeuphoric manpage that CTRL key is mapped to CAPS LOCK on the host computer, so that solves the problem. As long as you get used to it :)
Oh well... is it just me or this creates lots of problems? Everytime I press CAPS LOCK to simulate CTRL, the keypresses switch from CAPS to SMALL alternatively, as it is supposed to do, but this is TERRIBLE for playing games.

I allways have to press it twice so the game gets the correct keypresses... Am I missing something?
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Post by mmu_man »

I don't know why CTRL isn't handled directly... It should be doable in SDL just fine.

Caloric author said he doesn't like wx... but indeed it'd be better (though I still don't have it for BeOS, but there is a port in progress).
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Post by mmu_man »

Ok, fixed the keys to be saner, just replace caloric.exe with this one.
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Post by Symoon »

mmu_man wrote:I don't know why CTRL isn't handled directly... It should be doable in SDL just fine.
I guess it was for "historcal" reasons: I seem to remember the keyboard in Euphoric has been modified several times.
If you look at the Oric keyboard, the CTRL key is above the SHIFT key. So early Euphoric must have been designed so that the CAPS LOCK key, which is above the SHIFT key on PC, would be used (the idea being that it would be useful for some games using both keys).
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Post by Twilighte »

This is a major breakthrough. I tried Caloric a week ago on my Vista Laptop and it worked a treat. I too found the CTRL key a problem, it seems to treat it as ASCII 8.
Anyway, should try latest before i mention bugs.
It would be great to have the F1 screen in GUI form. It would also be cool to have the black border around the Oric but i do know if it does this then capturing the screen (prt scrn) usually captures border too which is not so great.
What would be super cool is to have a status bar at the bottom of the window showing stuff like Joystick activity, Sound levels, Disc activity, CPU speed, Emulation speed, etc. :)

A bit like this one (VICE, C64 Emulator)
Image

Obviously showing C64 graphics here is not polite, since it has such inferior graphics to the Oric :P
But to me debugger tools would be my first request. Pretty amazing as it stands though. Also cpu usage is about 7% compared to euphoric under dosbox which here uses 50% cpu on a Turion 64 Vista Laptop.
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Post by waskol »

Hello,
Very amazing and awsome work !
Would it be possible to have the sources ?
I did not touch my emulator since a long time now and the difficulties I meet are about the VIA and about the AY-8912 emulation. If that could bring me some tips or if I could have some ideas for your emulator, that could be excellent : a native Win32 oric emulator : ho man, no more Dosbox, I dream about it.

Thank you by advance.
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Post by mmu_man »

I just ported it and fixed some stuff... I'll zip up the sources shortly and send them back to Jean-Yves to be merged.

It would really be handy to have the sources of the latest euphoric to be able to merge them... I hate forks.

As I said, Caloric has a debugger but it needs GTK, and I didn't try building it yet. And I'm not sure GTK and SDL will play along nicely in win32...

As for the menu and status bar, again it would require GTK, but that would mean switching to GTK fully as one can't mix GTK and an SDL surface on the same window AFAIK. And that would mean less supported platforms, as I don't know any toolkit (not even wx) that runs on as many platforms as SDL does. BeOS has SDL. It doesn't have GTK or wx (yet, there are ports going on).

And BTW, Vice has a custom native GUI AFAIK, it is ported to BeOS as BeVice, and has a nice native GUI there too. But it means less portability, and I don't see myself writing a win32 gui and a BeOS gui, and...
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