meisei 1.3

A new version of hap's meisei has been released. This relatively new emulator (less than two years old) focuses exclusively on MSX1. It's perhaps best known for its unusual features, enabling the user to toy with sound and graphics, on the fly. New in this version:

VDP: corrected vblank interrupt timing, it was 1 scanline too early
VDP: improved render timing, updating the surface at the start of hblank instead of at the start of the active scanline
VDP: fixed screen 0 text colour 0 always being black
VDP: corrected interrupt request/acknowledge timing due to a small delay between that and accessing a VDP register
VDP: added vblank interrupt/flag suppression quirk when reading the status register at the same time the vblank bit gets set
VDP: added Toshiba T6950/T7937A model
VDP: fixed a few small bugs with mode 3 sprite cloning
VDP: fixed screen 0 border size
VDP: corrected emulation of bogus mode 1+2(+3)
Z80: if ld a,i/r is interrupted, the p/v flag is reset
Z80: made trace logger more user friendly, it's disabled by default
mappers: fixed Irem TAM-S1 (R-Type) mapper range
mappers: added ROM mirroring quirk to Konami types
mappers: common MegaROMs are autodected by finding mapper register writes, inspired from Marat's fMSX
mappers: removed Zemina ZMB type, no dumps exist in order to test it
mappers: added optional extra settings per type, instead of all mapper types being identified and auto-configured with a single id
mappers: Konami Sound Cartridge can now be configured as Snatcher/SD Snatcher type, or a modified board with 128KB RAM
mappers: merged simple no-mapper types into a single one, and made the page layout configurable, it's even possible to create a hybrid ROM/RAM board
mappers: rewrote ASCII MegaROM emulation, with support for about 30 official boards, and any custom configuration
mappers: added Al-Alamiah Al-Qur'an type properly (protected/encrypted)
internal RAM size and primary slot can now be configured
added: lumi noise simulation
added: a firmware downloader, for indirectly obtaining essentials, such as BIOS files, this will also check for meisei updates

Furthermore, to enrich the ASCII MegaROM emulation, you can help hap out if you have any of these cartridges.

Relevant link: meisei

Comments (26)

By muffie

Paladin (933)

29-05-2009, 05:19

Attention: Meisei 1.3 will only be available to the 25 first users that came to the 35th RU Barcelona meeting...

By Vampier

Prophet (2412)

29-05-2009, 07:41

Newsflash: Microsoft has sued the Meisei author for copyright breach!

In other news:Marat Fayzullin has upped the price to $44,99 for fMSX

Stay tuned!

Nice release MK

By muffie

Paladin (933)

29-05-2009, 15:17

hap's negotiating with M$ now, and Meisei will be included on w7 Ultimate...

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 17:02

Cool, Did microsoft release any games for MSX or only system roms?

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 17:08

Good news btw. Nice enhancements.

A question about the fix for the interrupt timing. Does this mean meisei runs the Utopia fullscreen interlaced pictures correctly now? If it does it is the first emu to do so.

blueMSX runs that part fine btw, but I'm cheating a bit. There is a blueMSX detection code in the demo that patches the demo to think it runs that part on an MSX2 which runs correctly in both openMSX and blueMSX. I didn't try to find a patch for openMSX though, so if you run the demo in openMSX on an MSX1 you'll see what I mean (unless it got fixed very recently)

By hap

Paragon (2042)

29-05-2009, 17:12

mufster was talking out if his arse.
Hmm, I don't think Microsoft even released any games in the 80s.

Does this mean meisei runs the Utopia fullscreen interlaced pictures correctly now? If it does it is the first emu to do so.No clue, try it. It's still a scanline renderer, so mid-scanline changes won't be visible.

There is a blueMSX detection code in the demo [...] you got me interested, tell more, how does it detect blueMSX? =)

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 17:25

Hehe... I can tell you, but its probably not good to write it here. Then all new games won't run on the emu.

I did btw make an openMSX detection for Lotus F3, to allow us to reject any highscores submitted by emu players. So far we've allowed all highscores, but we wanted to have an option to reject them if we saw too much cheating.

By hap

Paragon (2042)

29-05-2009, 17:41

Nah, keep it secret, more fun that way.

http://www.bluemsx.com/dvik-joyrex/lotusf3/m_scores.php
^who used an emu according to the submitted data?

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 18:44

Probably QuibusAndopenMSX. I can check the others.

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 18:57

On track Buena Vista, Chinuchanu used a real MSX.
On track Essington GP, Chinuchanu, Nikki, Nigel, Nathalie, Charlene and Bas used a real MSX

By Manuel

Ascended (19462)

29-05-2009, 19:02

dvik: wasn't that problem also occurring on my real MSX2? Also, there were other artifacts there (the "wobbly" stuff we talked about).

I do wonder how you detect openMSX (Well, it's not that hard, turbor also made an emu detector which also still works on all emus, but it needs MSX2!)

Also, I wonder which of those new features need to be ported to openMSX (Except for those mappers.)

By hap

Paragon (2042)

29-05-2009, 19:02

That's pretty interesting in the sense that it shows MSX gaming is popular with the help of emulation. Then again, not many people own a Mega Flash ROM SCC.

*edit* is EAERZRXRXS an emu? (meisei 1.3)

By muffie

Paladin (933)

29-05-2009, 19:25

@dvik: When BlueMSX debugger will be able to set watchpoints (on memory, ports and etc...)?
@manuel: When OpenMSX debugger will work with Windows 7?
@hap: When we'll have MSX2/2+/TR emulation?

No good debuggers on real msx!

By hap

Paragon (2042)

29-05-2009, 19:36

wait until someone else releases "redmeisei" with all those features

By Manuel

Ascended (19462)

29-05-2009, 19:52

Muffie: openMSX 0.7.1 works fine on Windows 7. I tried (And even built it on Windows 7.) You can already try the binaries mentioned here to check this statement: http://www.msx.org/forumtopicl9507.html
AFAIK, the debugger works also on it, but I haven't tried that yet. Check with this link: http://openmsx.sf.net/temp/openmsx-debugger-0.7.1-dev9782-VC-x86.zip and Qt-4.4.3-x86.zip for the necessary libs.

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 20:05

dvik: wasn't that problem also occurring on my real MSX2? Also, there were other artifacts there (the "wobbly" stuff we talked about).

Yeah, I don't remember exactly what it was, but I believe it was on that same part, right? On the MSX2 it looked like the VDP lost sync pretty bad, probably a hardware issue. The part is swtiching between screen 0, 2, and 3 every frame and updates table pointers a lot.

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 20:06

@muffie: the bluemsx debugger support manual watch points on registers and io ports. Just single step through your code and watch the register windows

By Manuel

Ascended (19462)

29-05-2009, 21:20

@dvik: yes, it was this part. Anyway, if it doesn't work stable on a real machine, maybe we should not expect to get this emulated properly... apparently we're in a grey area of the hardware then...

@muffie: I just tried the debugger on Windows 7, and it runs fine

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 21:30

@dvik: yes, it was this part. Anyway, if it doesn't work stable on a real machine, maybe we should not expect to get this emulated properly... apparently we're in a grey area of the hardware then...

Its emulated ok on MSX2 (both blueMSX and openMSX), but since it doesn't run stable on real MSX2 hardware we disabled the part if running MSX2.

The part works very well on MSX1 though, so the MSX1 part of the emulation should be fixed. The same MSX1 bug btw, can also be shown in all dvik&joyrex demos that does border effects, e.g. the bars in the intro of MSX Unleashed, and the border scroller in the same demo. I don't remember, but it may even be visible in the Sudoku game.

The problem here is that the VBLANK interrupt is fired about 0.95 scanlines too late (or early) on MSX1 emulation (essentially using MSX2 interrupt timing).

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

29-05-2009, 21:32

I did attempt to fix this in one blueMSX release (2.7 or something), but there were side effects that broke other things, so I reverted the fix in the release after.

By muffie

Paladin (933)

29-05-2009, 23:05

@manuel: openmsx 0.7.0 was running ok on W7, the problem was just on the debugger. It was not being able to connect to the openmsx session.
I forgot to mention that I'm using the 64bit version. I'll test again as soon as I'm back at home.

By Manuel

Ascended (19462)

29-05-2009, 23:15

muffie: I'm also using the 64 bit version (so, works fine).

By Yukio

Paragon (1540)

30-05-2009, 12:54

Hmm, I don't think Microsoft even released any games in the 80s.

Microsoft Filght Simulator.
But we need to check for MSX Personal Computers, not IBM-PC XT.

By hap

Paragon (2042)

30-05-2009, 13:01

Ah yes, forgot about that game.

regarding emulator detection discussion, followup is here

By muffie

Paladin (933)

01-06-2009, 19:48

hap, is it possible to add disk support to Meisei?
I tried to use one of the Brazilian disk interfaces that we used to place on the second slot, but the emulator freezes.

I used this one: http://www.msxpro.com/hardware/roms/ddx30c.zip

Check this page for more: http://www.msxpro.com/roms.html

By hap

Paragon (2042)

01-06-2009, 20:12

Disks are currently only supported via Vincent's DSK2ROM: in meisei, do help -> get updates, then insert a .dsk file into one of the cartridge slots as if it was a diskdrive.

I'll add real disk emulation later.

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