Resurrecting Nuance

[The Helper]

That is very cool. What tools do you use to compile? Is it the latest Visual Studio?

I do not know where the latest version of the Emulator should go I know there is a source forge

Nuance

Download Nuance for free. An uneducated try to resurrect and modernize the Nuance NUON emulator. Unfortunately the author of the original project (Mike Perry) passed away a long time ago, but it seems like nobody picked up this piece of history and so there is no NUON emulator to be found...

sourceforge.net

 

[The Helper]

Hey toxie are you there? Where can people upload the changes they made like dvhsfan did to the emulator fixing warning messages? What it is the central repository that we are going to use? I have noticed a great deal of activity in the web stat logs on this thread from my NUON update I made so I imagine there might be other people looking at it. We should have the sharing thing all set up before hand if possible. I do not know what is best for a project like this. Help?

 

[The Helper]

I wish I could have gotten further with it. The changes toxie has done make the code a lot more understandable. Still, no matter how many times I refactor things, I end up with the same crashes.

I don't have a very good understanding of the video interrupts. I tried to form some sort of relationship between the audio/video interrupts but the video just kept chugging along as if I wasn't even making changes. The audio seemed a lot more straightforward. Should the CPU effectively stall until the audio buffers are cleared?...who knows! It is such a high level emulation that things aren't really happening anywhere near how they originally did, including the ordering of some operations given the crashes. While it is nice to not have to think about timing, clearly there is something needed to give it some semblance of the original timing in at least in a couple circumstances. This emulator is especially frustrating since it is seemingly so close to making these games fully playable.

Do you know anyone in the emulator community that can help?

 

[cubanral]

I downloaded toxie's code for the emulator. I cleaned up a bunch of Visual Studio warnings. Not sure how to feed back the changes to toxie or whoever else is working on it. So, if you would like the cleaned up code, tell me how/where you want it uploaded.
This doesn't fix any bugs or features, just gets a cleaner build.

I can definitely rebase my repo on toxie's changes from March. I ended up making a bit of a mess merging his changes. What I've done so far is mainly remove anything related to the non-functional cycle based emulation. With the hundreds of changes I've probably tried by now, I haven't fixed either of the crashes in Tempest 3000. Which version of Visual Studio did you use?

Do you know anyone in the emulator community that can help?

Nope, not a scene I'm involved in.

 

[The Helper]

I can definitely rebase my repo on toxie's changes from March. I ended up making a bit of a mess merging his changes. What I've done so far is mainly remove anything related to the non-functional cycle based emulation. With the hundreds of changes I've probably tried by now, I haven't fixed either of the crashes in Tempest 3000. Which version of Visual Studio did you use?


Nope, not a scene I'm involved in.

That is awesome! I love it. Please guys get together in some collaborative thing and share with us so we can all do it. You guys do not want to waste work. We need to work this out so we are working towards common goals.

 

[dvhsfan]

Which version of Visual Studio did you use?

Visual Studio 2019. Almost all of the warnings are gone. Only a few left. These were in the Nuance debugging code.
Looking forward to merging and producing a better emulator.
Would need to have instructions on performing the merge and uploading.

 

[EdgeConnector]

If anyone could add the _LoadGame bios calls that would be amazing! Would help me with testing code so much.

 

[dvhsfan]

If anyone could add the _LoadGame bios calls that would be amazing! Would help me with testing code so much.

Being a NOOB to Nuon, is _LoadGame in some document ?
I MIGHT be able to add this call.
EdgeConnector, what are you testing and what are the results ?

 

[cubanral]

Visual Studio 2019. Almost all of the warnings are gone. Only a few left. These were in the Nuance debugging code.
Looking forward to merging and producing a better emulator.
Would need to have instructions on performing the merge and uploading.

Great, I'll use that too. I replied to your private message with further details.

 

[EdgeConnector]

Being a NOOB to Nuon, is _LoadGame in some document ?
I MIGHT be able to add this call.
EdgeConnector, what are you testing and what are the results ?

It’s documented in SDK docs. It’s a bios call that will load the specified title from dvd by file name. Only works for signed files which should not be a problem now. It is also documented in the Nuance documentation as not implemented. This makes sense because no one could sign the binaries.

 

[mgarcia]

as per discord:
I got a port going for winXP... seems a bit slower tho but it's still runs great enough for homebrew dev

https://archive.org/details/nuance-resurrection-win-xp-compatible-files

 

[cubanral]

It looks like these files were removed. Would certainly still like to take a look at it though.

 

[mgarcia]

it was removed because it found two viruses in the codebase (the exe's NuanceResurrection-master/external/fmod-3.75/samples/multiple/multiple.exe and fmod-3.75/tools/asioconfig.exe )

here's the report link I got:

VirusTotal

VirusTotal

www.virustotal.com

I doubt it's an fmod issue, I noticed nudism.exe in both the old NuanceExperimental and resurrection but didn't think much of it (i'm not familiar with the code base)... doing a grep in the old archive, nudism isn't mentioned, so that's probably where it came from... not 100% sure tho, I'm going to scan my VM before uploading anything from it tho.

 

[cubanral]

I doubt it's an fmod issue, I noticed nudism.exe in both the old NuanceExperimental and resurrection but didn't think much of it (i'm not familiar with the code base)... doing a grep in the old archive, nudism isn't mentioned, so that's probably where it came from... not 100% sure tho, I'm going to scan my VM before uploading anything from it tho.

Nudism is a disassembler. I'm unsure why it started being included in the codebase. It should probably be removed from the repo as it isn't used. I removed some non-referenced source files and old builds from the repo already. Thoughts?

 

[Stephen]

It might be cool to see disassembled code, but I'm sure it would be impossible to understand so probably of limited use.

 

[The Helper]

It might be there to watch code values, or was going to like a debug view where you can see memory and values like in other emulators.

 

[mgarcia]

Nudism is a disassembler. I'm unsure why it started being included in the codebase. It should probably be removed from the repo as it isn't used. I removed some non-referenced source files and old builds from the repo already. Thoughts?

It's up to you, it's just a weird name! LOL
I've never uploaded win executables to archive before and didn't know it scans files like that.
I mounted the VM and ran ClamAV it didn't find any virus reported.
I also ran it in my NUON download/upload folder and zero virus found


Attached are the winXP build I use, it's about 10-20% slower in winXP compared to win7 VMware machine.

Download zip file of NuanceResurrection from github (https://github.com/andkrau/NuanceResurrection)
Copy and overwrite the attached files into the root folder.

2 out of all their anti virus vendors found a virus in my MSVC2010 executable:

VirusTotal

VirusTotal

www.virustotal.com

The diff txt has the changes I made (mostly newer C++ hacks and boost for mutex), search for mgarcia.
I don't recommend changing your code base tho, it's fine as is.

 

[cubanral]

Attached are the winXP build I use, it's about 10-20% slower in winXP compared to win7 VMware machine.

Cool that you got it working under XP!

New build is attached to this post. Compatibility is expected to be the same. There should be less audio clipping (buffer underflow?). Let me know if any regressions are noticed. Thanks to dvhsfan for all of their commits.

Changes since Toxie's last commit:

• Make sure enough time passed between audio interrupts
• remove disassembler binary
• Schedule audio interrupts in the same manner as the other interrupts
• dvhsfan: further safety improvements
• Correctly set DST
• safe string and file handling
• dvhsfan: correct bufSize detection in PrintInstructionCachePacket
• ignore .user, .vs, debug/ and release/
• Convert remaining printHandlers to make use of the buffer size
• Remove old builds
• Remove bUseCycleBasedTiming
• Remove use of ProcessCycleBasedEvents
• Make buffer size selection more straightforward
• Remove unused files
• dvhsfan: compiler warnings and general cleanup

 

[Stephen]

Just build my first new PC in nearly a decade. Looking forward to trying the emulator and seeing how it performs on this rig (and also if it will work on a Windows 11 system). Pretty beefy system - i9-12900, 64GB DDR5-5600 RAM, GTX3070 vid card (waiting impatiently on the 4k series).

WOW - ok, runs the emu at a rock solid 60FPS and my breakout game works perfectly. Can't wait to try out some other stuff. This is high motiviation to revisit some of my old code.

 

[cubanismo]

Is https://github.com/andkrau/NuanceResurrection the most recent+active version of the codeline? I have a set of small fixes that get the MGL demos from the SDK working (They sort of work in Nuance 0.5.1, but the display is messed up, and don't work at all in 0.6.1). Pic of working "room" sample attached!