RetroCopy Cross Platform

11/24/2010 4:06:07 AM

By RetroRalph

v0.911 is out there in the public now, thank god for that. The last 2 weeks I have been less and less motivated to work on it as bug tracking is boring, and finishing up GUI features is boring! The thought of adding a new popup menu to set key configurations gives me a shiver down my spine.

I basically need challenges and new things if I want to take advantage of my talents. NEO GEO emulation for instance I can iron out in a week, but finishing up some GUI features, noooooooo.

There are still some features I want to add to RetroCopy's interface to make it easier to use, such as overlaying the buttons you use for input when you start a game (helps newbies). And basically some sort of "wizard" that gives you a guide of how to get started. Either way though, v0.911 is a massive leap in the RIGHT direction of how I want the GUI handled.

But now my focus is on the LINUX port. This is exciting to me for a few reasons. I haven't done any linux work for a few years, RetroCopy has been my only C++ project for the last 3 years and it was windows only. I'm also excited to see if the Linux port will be any faster or slower.

All my current work in RetroCopy has occurred in Visual Studio, mostly because I believe it's the best IDE for C++ programming. As such I've never had a need for MAKEFILES that most open source emulators use. That changes now, and with a project as large as RetroCopy I am looking at adding something close to 500 source files to a new BUILD SYSTEM. This is quite a time consuming thing.

I've been looking at what the large open source projects use for their build environments, it seems CMAKE is popular, so I'll try it. I'm interested to see how a Windows GCC build of RetroCopy performs vs the MSVC builds we've all got used to, so that will be my first challenge before porting it to Linux. Happy days ahead though for non Windows users.

5 responses to RetroCopy Cross Platform

DiDaDo wrote:

11/25/2010 3:59:57 PM

Now LINUX users say something..

RetroRalph wrote:

11/25/2010 4:52:28 PM

I have a debug GCC/MingW build running now. Surprisingly it's about 3 times faster than the debug build of MSVC and weighs in at 56MB! I'll have some release mode results tomorrow. I hope it's faster than MSVC there too. . It was quite an effort to get it to compile with gcc, but Linux should work out of the box now besides a few portability files that need to be created.

I might move permanently to debugging with GCC if I can find a decent enough IDE for it, given that it's so much faster.

RetroRalph wrote:

11/26/2010 1:31:55 PM

Best try so far with GCC optimizations is 4.3 on the benchmark whereas Microsoft Visual C gives me about 4.9 in 32bit. So GCC is 87% as fast as MSVC's compiler. I'll have to play around a bit more to see the best options.

Waxonator wrote:

11/26/2010 8:46:29 PM

No matter what I do, I get a little bit of crackling in the sound when a game is running.

RetroRalph wrote:

11/26/2010 8:52:01 PM

Yeah because sound is so low latency now it can sometimes be a bit crackly if the system "hitches", which Windows seems to do quite often. Have you tried all the sound engines? I'll be putting in an automatic "Detection" method such that if a crackle happens it will push out the buffer slightly to stop it happening again at the cost of latency.

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