PC-FX homebrew development.

[elmer]

The PC-FX is quite expensive....

I recently sold my extra boxed system and a half dozen common games for $200 shipped, so it's not that expensive.

That's because you're a kind and generous soul, and not a seller in Japan working hard and trying to make a living off of eBay. 

[Necromancer]

They weren't from Japan, but I did buy 'em on ebay and I didn't lose money reselling them.

[elmer]

Hmmmm ... small hiccup with GCC 4.7.4 ... the V850 guys changed the system ABI in 2010, and so liberis won't run without modification. I'm still trying to decide how to handle that, and if there's any advantage in using the new ABI on the PC-FX's V810.

In the meantime, I have binutils 2.22 and GCC 4.5.4 compiling V810 code, and have the liberis demo programs running on mednafen's PC-FX eumulation with that combo.

Since GCC 4.5.4 was released in 2012, I'm still going to claim 12 years of improvements over the old Japanese GCC 2.95.2.

Early days, though, and lots more testing to do ... but good progress.

Jeez ... I posted that almost a year ago ... where has the time gone! 

I thought that I'd take a short break from the Xanadu translations and take a look at this again.

Binutils 2.23 and GCC 4.7.4 are now compiling the "liberis" demo programs correctly, using the old V810 ABI that dates back to the ancient Japanese GCC 2.95 (and even earlier).

I'm definitely going to need to do some more testing, but moving up to the GCC 4.7 compiler gives us nearly full compliance with the latest "C11" standard.

There are still a couple of things from C11 that didn't get to be standards-compliant until GCC 4.9 (like atomics) ... but nothing that anyone is likely to need on an old single-core system like the PC-FX.

The nice thing (for me), is that I've now got binutils 2.23 and GCC 4.7.4 on both the PC-FX and the X68000, so I can mess-about in C with both of Hudson's old GCC-capable machines. 

[nodtveidt]

Sounds like a major improvement over the old system, and sufficient for those ambitious enough to do some serious dev. I am considering buying a PC-FX for this purpose.

[elmer]

Sounds like a major improvement over the old system, and sufficient for those ambitious enough to do some serious dev. I am considering buying a PC-FX for this purpose.

I was going to recommend a PC-FXGA, mostly in order to use a nice-and-fast PC CDROM drive that can read anything. But you've already pulled-the-plug, so I'm a bit late.

As long as you're willing to put up with the tools in their slowly-evolving state, then I think that you'll find it a nice machine to work on. 

[nodtveidt]

As long as you're willing to put up with the tools in their slowly-evolving state, then I think that you'll find it a nice machine to work on. 

I was willing to work with trap15 while developing liberis, using Linux inside of a virtual machine and even ironing out a method of making the system work under cygwin... so yeah, I'm up for it.

[elmer]

As long as you're willing to put up with the tools in their slowly-evolving state, then I think that you'll find it a nice machine to work on. 

I was willing to work with trap15 while developing liberis, using Linux inside of a virtual machine and even ironing out a method of making the system work under cygwin... so yeah, I'm up for it.

You helped Alex with creating "liberis"? That's so cool! 

That's also how this kind of stuff is "supposed" to work in these "internet-connected" days.

Someone may leave ... someone may appear. As long as there's decent documentation for everyone's efforts, then we can all build on each-other's hard work and create something wonderful.

I've been adding my work to this endeavor ... but I wouldn't have even started without seeing that Alex "trap15" Marshall had trailblazed the whole library issue, and that's without considering Rypheca's incredible contribution in creating Mednafen in the first place.

Piece-by-piece ... that's how we'll open up the PC-FX for "modern" homebrew development.

[nodtveidt]

My contributions were minimal but yeah, I was there... by the time I got involved though, liberis was already pretty far along. Mainly what I did was testing new stuff he was adding, but I also wrote a high-level sprite library extension so that HuC users wouldn't have much of a learning curve. I think it was Ryphecha who got the old gcc working in the first place. We would all jaw for hours on IRC while it was being developed.

[spenoza]

Talk about a labor of love, doing any kind of dev for the PC-FX. There's underdog and then there's underdog.

While you're at it, develop for the Bandai Pippin (but deliberately make sure it won't work on a Mac).  ; )

[nodtveidt]

Bandai Pippin

[Arkhan]

Documentation for this crap is pretty much the most important part.

Even more important than getting it working, probably.

One day, when PCE/MSX stuff I am doing has died down, PC-FX is where my tentacle rape space pirate RPG Mahjong dating sim is going to be.

[nodtveidt]

Documentation for this crap is pretty much the most important part.

Absolutely. Poorly-documented toolchains go nowhere fast. Imagine if WinterMute had taken the time to properly document *anything* he worked on... way more people would be using devkitpro... but since he never felt it necessary, only those with free time on their hands had the patience to figure everything out on their own. Just one example. HuC did not have the greatest documentation at first either, but several people stepped up to help. Your Squirrel library is probably the best-documented dev tool there is in the PCE scene.

[elmer]

Documentation for this crap is pretty much the most important part.

Well, I'd say that we're lucky to actually have the full system documentation, even if it is in Japanese.

I've got all the docs readable by Microsoft Word ... and we can convert them into any modern format for translation/editing.

All the work that Alex Marshall did in converting the old http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA007898/pcfxga/ website into English is still available for updates & edits.

(His site "daifukkat.su" website died last year, but I've got a backup of it.)

He was very good about including doxygen tags in his source, so there's some semi-decent documentation for how to use the code that he's written.

I'm cleaning up my "build" scripts so that they're a bit-more sensibly organized.

I've got Mednafen building a 64-bit Windows version now, and I'll try to get the tools 64-bit-clean over the next week or so.

I'll also try to put a hack into Mednafen so that we've got 8MB on the PC-FX instead of 2MB.

It's so much easier to have extra memory available in "debug" builds to compensate for the larger size of the compiled code, and to also provide extra space for in-game logging/debugging info.

[Arkhan]

This reminds me, I need to work on PCFXTOO.com again... lol

I hate websites.

[nodtveidt]

My PC-FX came in today, so it's on like popcorn.