Necromancy

Friday, 8th February 2008

After seeing Scet and Drilian's work on their respective emulator projects I decided I needed to do something with the stagnating Cogwheel source on my hard disk drive.

The only ROM I have tested where I can't find an explanation for a bug is the Game Gear Garfield: Caught in the Act game. Like many games, when left at the title screen it'll run a demo loop of the game in action. At one point Garfield would walk to the left of the screen, jump over a totem pole, shunt it to the right and use it as a way to jump out of a pit. However, in Cogwheel he would not jump far enough to the left, and not clearing the totem pole he'd just walk back to the right and not have anything to jump out of the pit on.

I remembered a post on MaxCoderz discussing a long-standing tradition of thinking that when a JP <condition>, <address> failed the instruction took a single clock cycle. You can see this misreported here, for example. This document, on the other hand, claims it always takes 10 clock cycles - and most importantly of all, the official user manual backs this up.

So, Garfield can now get out of his pit. The user interface has changed (again) - I'm now using SlimDX to dump pixels to a Panel, which seems to be the least hassle distribution-wise and doesn't throw LoaderLockExceptions.