Serious Chankast discussion (Chankast Authors welcome to join!)

[mashakos]

I started this thread to give my thoughts on the Chankast emulator. This is not because it's lacking in any department and it's also not just for complementing and 'discussing' the emulator. This thread has to have a purpose.

The Chankast Team have done something a lot of programmers (me included) fail to do without a lot of practice: Give people exactly what they said they were going to give them. Not less and not more; the team said they'll release an alpha version that has incomplete compatibility and that's what it has: 90% compatibility. Amazing but not complete. Had they said something like 'Chankast will be the most compatible emulator for any system in the history of the PC ever!' the emulator wouldn't have had the same impact it has now. People would have still been impressed, but the Chankast team didn't just impress - they shocked.

Every team comes to a point where they can't go in the same direction; they reach a crossroads. When faced with the choice of which road to take, many groups take the wrong path either because of too much pressure, compliments or indifference from their intended audience.

You might wonder about the need for this. After all, Chankast doesn't have a long way to go before it's complete so why bother ? It's my personal experience that after performing a great achievement, burnout sets in. The person feels spent and loses focus, or finds the next small obstacle even harder than the first large one.

I propose that this thread offer some form of a beacon for the chankast team. A north star which when they look at they always know where that direction is.

So I'll start with these comments:

• I think that under no circumstances should the input system in Chankast change. It's one of the best I've seen on any emulator, game or program. I read some people can't assign mouse buttons and if that is the case then that should be fixed but otherwise nothing should be altered.
• I don't believe that any additional video options are needed except for fullscreen. As far as I can see, Chankast gives a near perfect emulation of dreamcast gfx. Adding more options for 'MipMap LOD bias adjustment' or '15-bit RGZBA color format' would just confuse things (and I know I made up the second one guys )
• I belive that there should be more of a community effort regarding the creation of utilities / frontends for Chankast. So the official chankast forum can have a few more categories
• Chankast got people interested in dc emulation as is evident that most of the posts are either of n00bs asking how to run games or of old dc gamers enjoying a bit of nostalgia. The author of the Chankast Wrapper (HowardC ?) showed that Chankast could get people interested in programming too. So if the Chankast Team is into idealism, there could be a way that people can learn how to play and program.
• What else? Oh Yeah. n00bs should have their own forum (as if that'll drive them away!)

As you may have gathered from the last point I have run out of ideas . But I'm sure you guys can add something?

Peace out

 

[pliflier]

i hope chankast can add the new function that read cdi image directly

 

[mashakos]

i hope chankast can add the new function that read cdi image directly

Good idea. It would be more useful if it can read cd images from zip files though.
My 5 DC games are taking up 2.6GB. That's a lot of space. The zips are just 591MB so reading from zips would be a great feature

 

[Guru64]

Good idea. It would be more useful if it can read cd images from zip files though.
My 5 DC games are taking up 2.6GB. That's a lot of space. The zips are just 591MB so reading from zips would be a great feature

Have you checked if the ISO contains a dummy file? Try rebuilding the ISO without it. I made a DOALE ISO of 429 MB that way.

Anyway, a option that loads ISO's directly without having to mount them would rock! That way I won't have to change between different versions of Daemon Tools to load patched ISO's.

 

[mashakos]

Have you checked if the ISO contains a dummy file? Try rebuilding the ISO without it. I made a DOALE ISO of 429 MB that way.

Anyway, a option that loads ISO's directly without having to mount them would rock! That way I won't have to change between different versions of Daemon Tools to load patched ISO's.

I thought the dummy files were needed or the image will be corrupt. Which program did you use to rebuild your image?

 

[Guru64]

I thought the dummy files were needed or the image will be corrupt. Which program did you use to rebuild your image?

I just use the same method for making a ISO selfboot. It just copied all the file, expect for the dummy file. Make sure to use the IP.BIN and 1ST_READ.BIN files from the ISO if it is already selfboot.

 

[dreamer]

i think chankast progress has been superb, i agree that it should have a full screen, as the resolution seems fine as it is it wouldnt need options to increase this, however my most concern is for games to be more stable and compatible, i would prefer that to all the extra fancy options you get on emulators (sounds loggers, avi screen recorders, save states etc). all the extra stuff is cool, but i hope soon that compatibiliy will increase, and i'm sure it will for a long time untill that chankast team are happy with what they have created
oh and i also agree with mashakos' idea of running zip's of rar's, but that would mean it couldnt be read from a drive, as you can't mount a zip can you (???)

dreamer

 

[OzTm]

As far as I can imagine you cannot read an iso from within a zip file. The program must decompress it to a temporary folder, or something. So why don't you do that instead of asking these guys for such useless work. Just zip all your games and unzip whichever you need to play at a certain time, then delete it until you need to unzip it again.

As for the compatibility... I beg your pardon, but... ARE YOU COMPLETELY NUTS? This great emulator is by far one of the most compatible and stable that ever existed. AND it is only in ALPHA stage.

Just let these guys continue their great work, and stop asking for things that you only want because you're too lazy to zip/unzip some files, or don't want to waste too much HDD space for your most beloved games...

 

[Nightmare]

ARE YOU COMPLETELY NUTS?

no need to open the hostilities here :gunman: ... go to the aspect ratio thread for that

since we can't read gdroms on our computer, it's not easy to find the best way to emulate the dreamcast drive...
personaly i don't like zip files... and i don't think the authors will implement the possibility to read directly cd image... or they have to make a choice (.iso .cdi .nrg .bin etc...)

to my point, the best way should be to bypass the dreamcast booting system to enable the read of a directory... its pretty easy to extract files... so you will just have to select the directory as the drive...

 

[mashakos]

As far as I can imagine you cannot read an iso from within a zip file. The program must decompress it to a temporary folder, or something. So why don't you do that instead of asking these guys for such useless work. Just zip all your games and unzip whichever you need to play at a certain time, then delete it until you need to unzip it again.

It's been done before. There was an iso plugin for EPSXE that can read from within a zip or a rar file. I wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise. Anyway this thread was supposed to be for new ideas.

As for the compatibility... I beg your pardon, but... ARE YOU COMPLETELY NUTS? This great emulator is by far one of the most compatible and stable that ever existed. AND it is only in ALPHA stage.

Who's arguing that point? Do you want to start something out of nothing ? Read the post more carefully:

the Chankast team didn't just impress - they shocked

Just let these guys continue their great work, and stop asking for things that you only want because you're too lazy to zip/unzip some files, or don't want to waste too much HDD space for your most beloved games...

Would that last statement help the Chankast Team in any way? Mention things that might be useful to the development of Chanka OzTm !

 

[Guru64]

My list of stuff I would like to see in a newer version

Video changes:

-Higher resolutions
-Full screen
-Frame skip
-Frame limit (You can choose between: Automatic (Chankast will select the right FPS), Modified (You can choose the FPS yourself, example: 100 FPS) and No limit (Runs as fast a possible))
-OpenGL or Direct3D rendering

Sound changes:

-No sound (for faster speeds)

Other changes:

-Run ISO (without mounting)
-Run BIOS

 

[dav3]

I'd like very much to see plugins support and some plugins from another [in]famous dc project available for chanka.

 

[ector]

If you want to play your ISOs while still having them compressed, why not use NTFS compression? Just rightclick the unpacked iso, choose advanced, and enable NTFS compression. After a bit of churning, check the properties of the file again It's a LOT smaller (if the ISO contains a lot of blank space).

The reason that zip files can't be used is that zip files are "all or nothing", you can't do "random access" like you can on an ISO or CD. If a game needs sector 2068, it would have to unzip everything from the start up to sector 2068 to read it.

Of course NTFS compression is also good advice for "garbage-cleaned" GC ISOs, instead of using the Dolphin shrinker (which wasn't that good of an idea).

 

[mashakos]

The reason that zip files can't be used is that zip files are "all or nothing", you can't do "random access" like you can on an ISO or CD. If a game needs sector 2068, it would have to unzip everything from the start up to sector 2068 to read it.

You're right. Some of the larger games would take a while to load. I guess only small sized games like Ikaruga will be easily played this way. Anyway it was just an idea.

If you want to play your ISOs while still having them compressed, why not use NTFS compression? Just rightclick the unpacked iso, choose advanced, and enable NTFS compression. After a bit of churning, check the properties of the file again It's a LOT smaller (if the ISO contains a lot of blank space).

Good idea but don't try this on the whole drive and here's why:
I have my whole 'apps' drive compressed. When it was still shiny and new and had 90% free space everything was fine but once more than 50% was full windows started taking longer to load. With 12GB left it is very slow and almost any program that loads a large file takes ages to load. Be warned!

 

[The Khan Artist]

I haven't done PSX stuff for a while, but someone made a compressed iso format that could be accessed directly. That might be worth looking into.

 

[Ennok]

I just have info on what the dummy file is for, I didn't see an answer to this so if i'm repeating someone then jsut tell me to shutup :canadian:

The reason for the dummy file in DC iso's is because of how the DC reads a cd. It reads it from the outside in, and a cd burner burns it from the inside out, so if you have only 100megs taken up on a burnt dc cd then it's gona sit there and search from the outside in until it finds what it's looking for.

So the dummy file is there to force there to be data all the way to the end of the CD to save on wear and tear of the laser in the DC.

But since we don't need to worry about anything like that, then I say ditch the dummy file that might be in any of your iso's !! :bouncy:

Ennok

 

[Guru64]

I just have info on what the dummy file is for, I didn't see an answer to this so if i'm repeating someone then jsut tell me to shutup :canadian:

The reason for the dummy file in DC iso's is because of how the DC reads a cd. It reads it from the outside in, and a cd burner burns it from the inside out, so if you have only 100megs taken up on a burnt dc cd then it's gona sit there and search from the outside in until it finds what it's looking for.

So the dummy file is there to force there to be data all the way to the end of the CD to save on wear and tear of the laser in the DC.

But since we don't need to worry about anything like that, then I say ditch the dummy file that might be in any of your iso's !! :bouncy:

Ennok

I already knew that. So... Shutup! (Just kidding...)

I think there are alot of people that didn't knew that, so it's useful.

 

[jdsony]

I'd like very much to see plugins support and some plugins from another [in]famous dc project available for chanka.

Please no plugins. The last thing I want to do is be messing around with plugins and changing all the settings to make different games work. Having a lot of options is good as long as they aren't required to be messed with to be able to play. The whole plugin system used in Playstation and N64 emu's takes a lot of the workload off the core system coders but makes everything much more complicated for the user and compatibility wise.

I'm not technically challenged and have a good understanding of all the plugin options and what they can do but it wastes a lot of time. There is no need for 14 different resolution options, texture compression options, texture colour options, 16, 24, or 32bit colour, etc. etc. If you like tweaking then it might be fun but if you want to play it's not so much fun.

Chanka is great though, I went out and bought a dreamcast and a bunch of accessories because of it. It's too bad the dreamcast can't be re-released as a gaming system geared towards retrogamers and multimedia enthusiasts. They could sell it for really cheap and release emulators, software apps, an IDE adapter etc. I guess there's really no point though since there is faster hardware out there that you can do the same thing with.

 

[Nightmare]

Please no plugins. There is no need for 14 different resolution options, texture compression options, texture colour options, 16, 24, or 32bit colour, etc. etc. If you like tweaking then it might be fun but if you want to play it's not so much fun.

i understand your point, but plugins can also liberate cpu resources and enable you to profit of your video card possibilities... (who said i need speed !!!)

14 differents resolution, etc... hum... we are not in psx emulation scene... and people set the parameters in relation with their systems,

if you don't accept plugins, it mean that chankast dev team have to do all the work... plugins enable the possibility that people can discharge the dev team of some tasks...

 

[BlackNinja]

cmon guys stay calm ,make 1 emulator is very dificult wait next release