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Re: Best place for an emulator to download games from

Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2016 8:50 am
by Tom
Boray wrote:PRG Starter analyzes the file, with the starting address, different basic versions, usage of different chip addresses in the program...
I guess it's time to start considering this more seriously. Do you have a strategy for PAL versus NTSC? Otherwise I'm tempted just to run both and show only whichever is making best use of the display, that usually being how a human being realises that they're using the wrong sort of software.

Re: Best place for an emulator to download games from

Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 3:24 am
by Boray
Tom wrote:
Boray wrote:PRG Starter analyzes the file, with the starting address, different basic versions, usage of different chip addresses in the program...
I guess it's time to start considering this more seriously. Do you have a strategy for PAL versus NTSC? Otherwise I'm tempted just to run both and show only whichever is making best use of the display, that usually being how a human being realises that they're using the wrong sort of software.
I would think it's best to have PAL as default as there are more games making use of the bigger screen than NTSC-specific ones. With PRG Starter you can send an option to VICE by putting it in the file name within {}-brackets: {-ntsc}. That could be used on the few NTSC-only games.

Re: Best place for an emulator to download games from

Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2016 9:25 am
by Tom
Boray wrote:I would think it's best to have PAL as default as there are more games making use of the bigger screen than NTSC-specific ones.
What you say is smart. I'm wondering whether there's really much that can otherwise be done to auto detect output mode that would actually be better for the user than just using PAL but performing a selective screen zoom. I guess that if I'm seeing per-frame raster effects but they all seem to be close to the centre of the screen then probably whichever mode I'm currently in is wrong (unless the other mode is NTSC and the output area is larger than an NTSC frame).

I'm just typing as I think. I really like the principle of PRG Starter: loading a game really should be as trivial as (i) download emulator; (ii) download game; (iii) double click on game. No need to have touched a Commodore before in your life. What you've done is brilliant.