Still idk what’s wrong with colors. It’s not just hues - specifically blue is wrong, it appears teal and it should be gray-ish. Everything else is how it should be, but not that color.
Also the artifact colors are a lot darker than they should be. That makes sense, it’s because the luma changes are supposed to be filtered out when it interprets the dithering as chroma but aren’t - but why would the color itself be wrong, no idea
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Well, gitlab is mostly down so I can't really work, so more Highscore progress instead.
First, I got sidetracked yet again and implemented color correction for Neo Geo Pocket Color. Previously the accurate filter was just showing the RGB source as is, which is not really what it should be. Like Game Boy Color, pre-backlight Game Boy Advance and DS Phat, it has muted colors and greenish blue - and games like this one use garish colors to compensate.
There's no existing shader for this, so I based it on non-backlit GBA correction, and tuned blue to be even greener, matching this recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW6I9bOyzjQ
I think it turned out fairly well. One thing I'm not sure about is the big picture across platforms - for GBC and GBA I currently always do color correction - for GBC that's it, for GBA you can pick between original and backlit models which are both color-corrected and for DS you get DS Phat colors (color-corrected) vs DS Lite and newer colors (not color corrected). Here tho it instead color corrects when the accurate filter is on...
I'll also need color correctiojn for Game Gear, Lynx and WonderSwan Color. I have a hunch WonderSwan Color will have a similar screen too, while the other 2 will be more different since they are backlit. I may be wrong tho, need to do some research.
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But I also made some progress on touch controls. I've been rewriting it using a combination of a metadata keyfile and an SVG for the actual controls, and finally got some results. They are not clickable yet, but each control is a separate widget, just like in the prototype.
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More progress, now I hooked up input and have working button and dpad controls with the new system, and redrew the placeholder layout to look less like a placeholder.
One open question is how to handle portrait/landscape with different layouts.
I also discovered Inkscape has a css editor, TIL
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Oh, I also have feedback on the controls, using the same kind of animation as in the gamepad layout view. So it's slowly coming together
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And now multiple layouts work - in particular, it works in portrait now (on phones; on larger screens not yet)
Landscape+non-fullscreen is scuffed, but at least it works. There will be platforms where this amount of controls will just not fit tho :/
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And a playtest. It's not as precise as I'd like, but I mean it's a touchscreen, not much you can do.
It also needs a few more things, like an A+B zone between the 2 buttons.
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Tweaked layouts again after a bunch more playtesting - you can see the phone controls are a bit higher than before, and added tablet layouts (tho I fully expect them to see more changes). I also made hitboxes larger, and there's a shared area between A and B buttons now, for pressing both at once.
There are 3 more layouts: shorter phones (360x720 instead of 360x760), 16:10 tablets in portrait and a layout for really small window sizes with no controls
The entire thing is also more responsive now, e.g. the way game screen shifts makes more sense now
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Ok, now I'm happy with the overlays. Here are 2 phones with different screens and it runs fine on both... well, to a point. Phosh doesn't have a way to unfullscreen the app so you softlock it by fullscreening, and it also lags like hell in landscape for some reason. This is also using an older runtime as with the newer one GL doesn't work. However, on OP6 it runs well, and rn I only care about the layout.
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Added GBA and SNES controls as well.
I had to rework hitboxes on the face buttons to be round, and did a bit of polish in general.
The buttons on SNES are a bit smaller, otherwise they don't really fit (especially on the portrait tablet layout with select/start between dpad and buttons, not shown here)
The shoulder buttons on both SNES and GBA are as bad as you'd expect but this is probably not fixable.
Shoulder buttons on touchscreen are always scuffed no matter what, you're supposed to use fingers for them, not thumbs - while with touchscreen you use thumbs for everything. You can't hold a shoulder button with your index finger while pressing face buttons or dpad with thumbs, so e.g. GBA Metroid games are likely unplayable. But oh well, I mean it's bad even on keyboard - you really want a gamepad for games like that.
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Oh lmao, the camera "corrected" white balance because of the blueish tones in the second game
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2 more features for overlays:
The layout will need to be tweaked a lot (I mean I had a design for N64 which was completely different) but I wanted to try this one first just to check how it would work (answer - badly, the stick and A/B buttons are too low)
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Ok, it's in main now. It's still just GB, GBA, NES, SNES, N64 for now, but the infra is all there, I refactored it to allow things like stick<->dpad mapping and multiple touch controls for the same input, and there's a toggle now so that touch controls don't appear on desktop (can't autodetect it sadly)
I also tweaked N64 layout a bit since the last time. I kept the A/B button position, but stick and dpad are now swapped and Z button is now vertical so that the start button doesn't overlap the game - previously it was rather unfortunate as in Zelda games it was right over the map. There's now a tablet layout as well.
Anyway, other platforms are still missing but now it should be easier to iterate on it and add them one by one, instead of keeping everything in a single giant branch.
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Hm, so I implemented haptic feedback for touch controls, but it doesn't seem to be possible to implement the actual game rumble via libfeedback?.. I mean the entirety of feedbackd is structured around themes and named events, but here you need to simply play rumble with magnitude X and duration Y. Well, ideally strong/weak magnitude, but just magnitude is fine, just in general to differentiate stronger/weaker rumble. feedbackd does do that internally, but it's entirely private.
Even for input it more or less works by accident. The default theme only uses haptics for buttons, but there's no guarantee it won't turn into sounds instead (which would be unwanted here for rather obvious reasons). I currently set profile to quiet as well since the default theme actually does use sounds in the full profile, but ofc the daemon is allowed to ignore that too... So the app can only hope no one is doing weird things with themes :haggard:
I wonder if I should just copy parts of feedbackd in tree and use that instead - I mean that's basically what libmanette does for gamepads already. Tho also I see it uses udev for finding rumble devices, which won't really work in flatpak unless I hardcode those 3 specific devices that it supports
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And now SMS controls. I am planning to have matching dpads for every platform, yes ^^
Also wondering if I should arrange NES buttons in a line too - right now it's based on the dogbone controller if it wasn't obvious
Ah, and the reason this controller is special is that the pause button is not a part of the controller but is on the console. This is messy, but at least touch controls can now access this mess
I also experimented with an unfullscreen button, but I'm really not sure if there's any nice place for it... I may instead have some alternative way to bring up the header bar in fullscreen
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Today wasn't a particularly good day, but in those few hours where we actually had power I added overlay controls for a few more platforms: SG-1000, Game Gear, TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo Pocket/Color
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Neo Geo Pocket Color is a bit notable since it uses a digital thumbstick instead of a d-pad, so now I have an alternative d-pad appearance (read: press animation) that makes it behave as one
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I also redrew Master System d-pad and made NES overlay resemble the original controller rather than the dogbone one, with buttons in a horizontal line rather than slanted like on GB, and the d-pad looks a bit different
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3 more platforms, out of which only 2 are playable on mobile: PlayStation, Sega Saturn, Mega Drive.
The latter is not playable since the emulator I'm using (BlastEm) doesn't support aarch64 and all the others are proprietary or incomplete (e.g. the one in MAME is just not very accurate)
It's still usable on x86_64 tablets tho, and I mean no reason not to have an overlay. I also made a 3-button version which is currently unused - I very much want to support it in future, but right now it's always 6 buttons even if the current game doesn't support it.
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I now also have a WIP implementation on rumble on mobile, but it depends on a specific WIP change in feedbackd first. Once that lands, I'll land the Highscore change too.
(see https://mk.nyaa.place/notes/a1nxkpssf21a0cu4)
(watch with sound, you can hear rumble but not see it)
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Finally, I got sidetracked today playing Metroid: Zero Mission on OP6, and... it's surprisingly playable? Shoulder buttons are not great, I mean it's a touchscreen, but it is playable. So far I cleared Kraid, and at least up to that point it's perfectly fine, incl. Kraid battle itself.
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Lots of progress today. By now it's mostly platforms that are weird and require special considerations, so I'll go in more detail here.
First, Atari Lynx. Lynx games can run in portrait and are fairly tall, so I needed a special overlay that's short and adds a padding to account for the notch.
Next, Nintendo DS. Same story because of 2 screens, and additionally the controls cannot overlap the screens in landscape as you have to be able to do the touch input. Also there's a mic button, and when not using vertical screen layout, a button to swap/rotate screens.
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While I'm there, Famicom games have a mic button too now. This is all temporary, ideally I'd like to use the physical mic input, but for now it is what it is (GStreamer is scary)
(for those who don't know, unlike NES, Famicom has a mic in controller 2, instead of start and select buttons. Some games, like TLoZ, use it - you can shout into the mic to kill Pols Voices. For the US release, they made them weak to arrows instead but forgor to update the manual)
Next, Atari 2600.
This one is difficult because of all the console switches, and it comes in 3 versions because while the original controller only had one red button, games can actually use 2 with a Mega Drive controller. And then people came up with a way to use 3 on third party controllers.
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And Atari 7800 as well! This one is less messy, tho it still has the console buttons/switches. I also based it off the european controller, not the horrible original one (same as SG-1000 is using Mark II controller (SJ-150) instead of SJ-100.
Also yes, Tower Toppler is using NTSC artifact colors, I actually do support those, tho I wasn't able to make the hues match exactly ^^
Finally, Virtual Boy. This was one of the platforms I had implemented in the old prototype branch, tho ofc this one was redone from scratch like everything else.
I swapped the right d-pad with the B and A buttons simply because those are more commonly used, so they are easier to reach.
So, that's it for today. At this point the only overlays left are:
For rotary controls I need to think how to present them in general, and WonderSwan is just weird.
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And the last few overlays done. First, WonderSwan. This system is notorious for weird controls - I mean they aren't bad, but they are a nightmare to emulate since they don't map to either gamepads or keyboards. On a touchscreen, however, we can actually recreate them, even though they are still awkward. Especially on tablets - not shown but e.g. in landscape the Y buttons are still clustered below the screen so that they are easier to reach, which looks atrocious. But oh well.
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And finally, rotary controls: Atari 2600 paddles and driving, as well as NES Arkanoid/Vaus controller. I still need to think how to even present these on a touchscreen in a good way, but for now an MVP - 2 buttons for turning in either direction. It's not great, but it works.
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So, that's it for overlays. It's definitely not 100% done, there are sometimes criticals from missing widgets which I still need to investigate, and I need to verify that sideloading overlays works + write docs for that. But, now all of the games are playable on a touchscreen ^^
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A few more preferences, or rather they are a bit more flexible now. Load state on startup, video filter and frame blending are now both global and per-game, so you can override it for just one game if needed.
Meanwhile monochrome NGP and WonderSwan have matching snapshot thumbnails and screenshots now with accurate filter.
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The feedbackd change for arbitrary rumble patterns has landed today, so I landed the highscore side as well - if you're playing a game that supports rumble on mobile. it can now use the phone's own rumble. This is tied to whatever player is using touchscreen; players using gamepads still get rumble on their respective gamepads while players using a keyboard don't get rumble, same as before.
Additionally, it's now possible to install firmware via drag-n-drop onto the firmware page in preferences. Not onto the library view yet - for that we'd need to be able to add games as well, and that gets complicated with multi-file games.
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Implemented undo for remove from recent. Properly batched and everything.
Next will be move to trash - since the undo machinery is already there it shouldn't be too difficult
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the reason why the game is tinted magenta and then green is probably crt shader (which tints the game into magenta/green vertical stripes to simulate phosphor dots) + video compression, it does not look like that in person
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I managed to fix SMS artifacting: it's not perfect but it mostly matches how it should look like now.
The first screenshot is the new version, then how it was before, then RGB, and then the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLWZoEgjNnU, from http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2016/07/video-potpourri.html
SNES and PCE should also be a bit more accurate now.
Also implemented move to trash as well now
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This filter is such a rabbit hole ngl. Now I made 480i actually interlaced: no visible scanline separation, both fields are blended together with an offset. 240p is shown same as before.
Hopefully this won't be too horrible performance-wise
No recording as it got destroyed by video compression, so have screenshots instead.
While the "after" screenshot still has visible scanline separation, just more faint, it moves every frame so in practice looks more like slight jitter than anything else
Now I need to keep myself from diving into research of what consoles always output even/always odd field (e.g. NES) and which actually alternated it - scanlines should be more visible for some than others :neocat_googly_shocked:
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Meanwhile the FM audio issue in SMS turned out to be an upstream bug in Gearsystem and it's fixed now ^^
The maintainer is extremely responsive, I literally accidentally sent the bug report with only title filled in, and by the time I finished typing the actual body they already reproduced it ^^
So yeah, FM audio toggle is back, and it works reliably now.
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Gearsystem upstream also added Light Phaser support, so we support it too now.
Unfortunately, they also broke savestate compatibility in process, and it crashes if you load an old one - same as earlier with FM sound. So that prompted me to version savestates. Now the old ones will be greyed out instead of crashing.
I'd prefer not to have that in the first place, but the app is not stable yet so I don't care that much.
Meanwhile, controls overlay is now accessible without the gamepad/keyboard menu. It's still there as well, of course.
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Ah, also I now parse the ROM header for SMS and GG as well. I just use the last 8 bytes as the ID - basically everything except the magic number. It's not fully unique, since e.g. early japanese Mark III games don't have the header altogether, but it's good enough for now. If it turns out to not be enough, we can add checksum to the mix later.
I'd like to parse headers for as many platforms as possible before the release - adding it later is a bit disruptive as you have to rescan the library, so having it immediately is nice as we can add a game database later if needed. Like here I needed it to only enable Light Phaser for games that support it.
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All cores specify their versions and commits now. It's not used for anything right now, so just displayed in the debug info in about dialog, as well as saved to snapshot metadata - what version was each snapshot saved with. Just in case we need to debug a bug with older savestates down the line.
Yes, I'm future proofing the app so I don't need to do invasive changes later.
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A few more input updates. First, I refactored the pointer input to route it through the same controller system as everything else, so it can now be shown in the input overlay.
Second, I now parse Mega Drive game headers (when they exist, anyway...) and with this only use the 6-button controller
when the game actually supports it.
Third, Famicom mic button is only available on Famicom games now, so tidying up input further.
Other than that, I fixed a bunch of input-related bugs, e.g. rotating screen while pressing touch controls doesn't result in input getting stuck anymore.
Also, snapshots store core version and commit now
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I keep getting sidetracked. So, I discovered that reducing resolution like it would in an RF signal actually changes colors, making them closer to what they should be. This tower should be grey, not green. It also fixes vertical striping, another thing that shouldn't be there
This is probably the game I spent the most effort on in this entire project at this point :neocat_googly_woozy:
(not complaining tho because when it comes time to support another platform that uses artifact colors, it should just work)
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nothing truly illustrates the Never The Same Color nature of NTSC better than artifact colors - it's nearly impossible to precisely reproduce these as they drastically change from even the tiniest adjustments
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And I got sidetracked again. This time on my quest to make games look as ugly as possible I added an option to disable CRT filter, so you get NTSC/PAL only - i.e. how the games would look like on an LCD screen.
And - a lot of tweaks again :neocat_woozy: I reenabled dot crawl for PSX since we're emulating composite, again improved the cursed warehouse rolling effect in SMS Shinobi, and made the result scale with linear horizontally and with AANN vertically instead of nearest - otherwise it gets pixelated when scaling
You may also notice the vertical red stripes between green panels now also match how they look like in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLWZoEgjNnU so it is definitely getting better
Also updated cores, Gearsystem broke savestates again - specifically to add paddle support. I don't have that yet, but it should be straightforward to expose it, just not today.
Also rebased the Sega CD code, but BlastEm's Sega CD support is very unstable atm, so it's gonna remain in a limbo 😔
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A few small fixes:
One day this will be perfect :3
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Been a while since the last update, but I was sick (kinda still am but eh). So, the app finally prompts to view controls when starting a game. I ended up going with a small notification popup in the corner rather than just opening the overlay. It also tells you which controller is used and it shows up again if it changes later
Thanks @xerz@fedi.xerz.one and @tromino@lovingcounty.cafe for the idea :3
I'll also need to have an option to remove these - if you know controls and don't want these to ever show up it would be nice to have. The problem is I have no idea how to call it. Controller/controls/input notifications/popups/hints/prompts? idk
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I also had to draw a whole bunch of icons for this (incl. 3 different lightguns :neocat_googly_woozy:), but it's fine ^^
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I reverse engineered the luma/chroma filters from the NTSC filter (the original shaders precomputes them for performance reasons (calling sin() 64 times for every pixel can get slow) but deosn't document where it got them). So, now I know what those functions are and can also tweak them.
Speaking of, did a few tweaks - the new functions are not an exact match of the old ones, and instead have a few improvements:
I also switched N64 to composite-like output, and fixed a fairly nasty bug caused by missing {} in an if statement...
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