lxdream.org :: News

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lxdream.org :: NewsLatest Versionlxdream 0.9.1
released Jun 29
Download NowNavigation Log in | Register News Development (58) Releases (10) Website (4)DownloadMailing ListsGitIssuesDreamcast WikiFAQForums Archives September 2019 June 2010 February 2010 October 2009 July 2009 June 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 June 2006 Welcome to lxdream.org Lxdream is an emulator for the Sega Dreamcast system, running on Linux and OS X. While it is still in heavy development (and many features are buggy or unimplemented), it is capable of running most demos and some games. September 14th, 2019 by nkeynes Development moved to github Posted in Development

In the interests of making it easier to contribute (as well as being easier to maintain), the Lxdream source repository and issue tracking been migrated to http://github.com/lxdream/lxdream .

Posted in Development | No Comments

June 12th, 2010 by nkeynes ISO9660 support update Posted in Development

I recently discovered that there is in fact a very nice ISO9660 library out there already called, oddly enough, libisofs. Im not sure why I didnt come across it earlier, but in any case Ive ripped out my half-baked ISO support and added a dependency on libisofs instead. It looks to be available prebuilt for most systems, so hopefully no major dramas there.

The on-the-fly ISO-building support is in now as well (mainly thanks to the above), at least for executables. You can now load binaries from either the gdrom dialog (which packages it into a MIL-CD disc image), or the load binary dialog (which does what it always did). The command-line is also changed slightly lxdream mygame.elf loads the program as a disc, and lxdream -e mygame.elf executes it directly.

Additionally, loading binary files (i.e. as generated from sh-elf-objcopy -O binary) is now supported (seeing as it turns out that this wasnt working previously). Since theres no reliable way to identify them from content, they have to end in .bin to be recognized though.

So with that out of the way, I think I might go back to poking at the renderer the next time I have a few free moments. One thing at a time

Posted in Development | 7 Comments

February 25th, 2010 by nkeynes CDROM work-in-progress Posted in Development

The (hopefully last) major refactor of the cdrom host subsystem has finally landed in trunk this shouldnt be particularly user-visible at this point (unless Ive broken something, which is entirely possible), although it does fix a few long-standing bugs that no-one ever ran into. Mostly this is to make things more flexible, so that I can add features without it becoming an even more tangled mess.

The first of these is the ability to boot from disc without actually needing the Dreamcast boot rom. This is in now, and is working for dclinux and (I think) most homebrew. As far as I know it doesnt work for any commercial titles at the moment though. As a nice side-effect it boots faster too (as it doesnt have the flashy logo  screen).

The other piece of work that this supports is on-the-fly construction of cdrom images for example, taking a binary program and encapsulating it automatically in a bootable image. Also of interest is support for SBI images, which are basically filesystems-in-a-zip. This also makes it easier to add image formats like BIN/CUE and BIN/TOC, so Ill probably add those in the near future as well.

In unrelated news, OS X 10.6 has been giving me a lot of grief exception unwinding support seems to be subtly broken (worse, in a way thats hard to detect with a simple configure test). I wasted far too much time trying to track down a memory corruption bug that eventually turned out to be coming from the unwinder as well *sigh*. So for the time being Im going to settle for building on 10.5, and hopefully itll work on 10.6 as well. Incidentally, Im intending to drop support for 10.4 for the next version unless someone screams really loudly trunk hasnt actually built on 10.4 in quite some time, and no one has complained  yet

Whats new

CDROM host subsystem finally properly separated from the Dreamcast bits. Much better nowBIOS-less booting of discs. Most homebrew should be able to run now without the actual boot rom.New -b command-line option to run without the BIOS even if its configured

Posted in Development | 1 Comment

October 28th, 2009 by nkeynes Website upgraded Posted in Website

Were now (finally) up-to-date with everything on the site let me know if Ive inadvertently broken anything. I eventually gave up on the Trac option the core system is nice enough, but it was going to take far too much work to get the plugins up to standard, in order to support everything that the current site does.

With respect to lxdream itself, unfortunately Ive had precious little time to work on it this year as life just seems to keep getting busier and busier. Im hopeful I might be able to pull together some kind of end-of-year release, but I cant say whether or not that will actually happen.

Posted in Website | 2 Comments

July 5th, 2009 by nkeynes Mailing lists Posted in Development, Website

Its been pointed out to me that lxdream currently lacks mailing lists, and that it might be a good idea to have some. I mean, sure we have the forums, but they arent really as convenient as email, are they? So since my esteemed webhost actually has mailman setup and ready to go, Ive gone ahead and setup the standard lists with lxdream-users, lxdream-dev and lxdream-commit click here to go to the subscription pages. Mercurial commits are already going to lxdream-commit (albeit HTML-only at the moment, using CVSspam for the notifications)

You can also monitor the repository through the RSS feed at http://www.lxdream.org/hg/lxdream/rss-log whichever you prefer, but the mailing list has more detail (ie full diffs).

Posted in Development, Website | No Comments

July 3rd, 2009 by nkeynes Moving to Mercurial Posted in Website

As of this evening, the public source tree is now being maintained in Mercurial at http://www.lxdream.org/hg/lxdream. The subversion repo will stay up for the immediate future for reference, but wont receive any more updates. So if youre following the development trunk, please install a copy of hg if you dont already have it, and grab the new tree with hg clone http://www.lxdream.org/hg/lxdream

Theres a few reasons to change to a distributed system like Mercurial

I can commit bits when theyre done, without needing to be online at the timeI can integrate changesets directly from other people, rather than just patchesIts much easier to test changesets across multiple machines before it hits the public trunk

As for why Mercurial specifically mainly because I have more experience with it personally, although it does still feel more mature to me than the alternatives at this stage.

Ive been planning to switch over for quite a while actually, but its taken me far too much time to hack hgweb into something at least vaguely usable (its still missing a few important things from viewvc, but its a lot closer than when I started)

While Im changing things anyway, Im also exploring the possibility of moving the entire website into Trac Im not 100% convinced yet, but its one of the very few platforms that does offer pretty much everything we need in an integrated package (so all the tools would be fairly seamless). Migration will be interesting though, and probably quite painful.

Posted in Website | No Comments

June 29th, 2009 by nkeynes Lxdream 0.9.1 Turtle released Posted in Releases

As promised, the 0.9.1 release is now out. It is somewhat faster than 0.9, the core is around 30-40% faster, and MMU performance is nearly an order of magnitude better, but rendering performance is still holding things back overall. Theres also (finally) preliminary VMU support for anyone who cares about that you can attach them in the controller settings panel.

As always, its available from the download page, release notes are here. And to make things even easier for Debian users, theres now an apt repository available just add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.lxdream.org/debian unstable maindeb-src http://www.lxdream.org/debian unstable main

and do apt-get update, apt-get install lxdream.

Next version well try and attack the rendering performance problem

Whats New

Lots of core performance improvements, especially in the MMUVMU support (memory card only)GDB remote debugging supportQuick-save statesLIRC driverNow uses the ~/.lxdream directory (by default) to store runtime dataAudio + input drivers are now built as plugins

Posted in Releases | 1 Comment

June 15th, 2009 by nkeynes Been a bit quiet around here Posted in Development

Not much really got done last month, seeing as I was away for nearly all of it, but I did get a few small tidy ups done. The new translation core is definitely on hold now for a while so I can get some other things done Ill get back to it at some unspecified point in the future.

So I suppose what everyones waiting for: There will be a 0.9.1 in the next few weeks (also known as the what do you mean we havent had a release in 8 months?! release), which will be more or less current svn trunk + one more feature Im working on at the moment.

Changes

Wahrhaft sent in a patch to add hotkey support, quick-save-states, and an LIRC input driver, thanks!Refactored the gdrom support module to be a lot cleaner, and make it easier to add other MMC-based native drivers. I think a fixed a few bugs in the process as well.Added ability to build drivers that require 3rd-party libs as dynamic objects rather than statically linked this should make binary packaging a bit saner. On by default for now, configure disable-shared to turn off.GTK: Added GNOME desktop entry for more convenient desktop integrationOSX: Added fullscreen support (er wait, the OSX port doesnt do fullscreen?)

Posted in Development | 4 Comments

March 24th, 2009 by nkeynes GDB debugging support Posted in Development

I was distracted by Anthony Greens Moxie blog this last week and a bit, specifically by the bit about qemu gdb support. This seemed like a really good idea, not to mention being fairly simple to implement, so its in now for both the SH4 and ARM. The actual debug support just hangs off the existing debugging framework, so the work needed was really just to implement the protocol.

If you want to have a play with it, run lxdream with -g port to start an SH4 GDB listener on the given TCP port, or -G port to start an ARM GDB listener. Or both for that matter, although gdb is likely to be confused if you actually connect more than one debugger at a time. To note the obvious, youll need to build an sh-elf-gdb or arm-elf-gdb (respectively) for this; your system debugger is just going to get confused. Also worth noting is that GDB tends to default to big-endian if theres no file loaded you need to explicitly force it to little endian (set endian little).

It supports all the usual bells and whistles except watchpoints, which Im looking into at the moment. They should be reasonably straightforward to implement now, and will have zero cost when theyre not being used. And as a nice side-effect of all this I can finally do a full implementation of the on-board UBC.

I probably should have done this a long time ago Its nice to have a full symbolic debugger without having to actually write one from scratch ^_^

Posted in Development | 2 Comments

March 1st, 2009 by nkeynes No Feb release Posted in Development

Theres not going to be a February release as originally scheduled theres just not enough stuff ready to make it worthwhile in my opinion, and anyone looking for the latest has probably already pulled it from SVN. At the current (depressingly slow) velocity, there may be something releasable in April. Well see I need to make sure the new SH4 translation core is solid, and make some decent headway on the PVR2 performance problems first.

Update-wise, we have a new SDL audio driver now, thanks to Wahrhaft, but otherwise not much of note to report at the moment. However, this might be a good time to note that theres lots of other work that would be good to see done, but Im simply not going to have time for any time soon so if anyone out there is interested in contributing in any way, please let me know. There are some obvious areas that might be a good place to get started with lxdream

OS X port The base port is fairly stable, but theres a number of outstanding issues, and the UI could no doubt be improved.GTK UI for that matter, the GTK UI isnt very pretty either and could use some good UI design attention.Audio subsystem Current audio is almost obnoxiously bad, with plenty of bugs and missing features. Fortunately MAME has a fairly complete implementation that could be used for comparison and testing.Translations we have partial translations to german, spanish, italian, and portugese so far, which need to be updated for 0.9, and it would be great to support more languages as well. There are still some untranslated strings that need to be fixed as well.SBI image support, not to mention the many other bugs/enhancement requests in the issue tracker.

And of course, anyone interested in working on improving lxdream in any other way would be eagerly welcomed too ^_^.

Posted in Development | No Comments

Older Entries .webmaster@lxdream.org. Copyright (c)2006-2007 Nathan Keynes. The authors are not affiliated with Sega or any other company.All trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

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