archive.worldofdragon.org

http://www.6809.org.uk/tmp/test.shtml

And wait a while. About 50 seconds on my Ultra 45 with 2 * 1.6GHz UltraSPARC-IIIi...

Impressive, but it's extremely processor intensive, my laptop's cooling fan is a constant whine meaning the CPU has stepped up to fastest speed and it's still slower than PC Dragon on a 33 MHz 486!

Alastair wrote:Impressive, but it's extremely processor intensive, my laptop's cooling fan is a constant whine meaning the CPU has stepped up to fastest speed and it's still slower than PC Dragon on a 33 MHz 486!

Same here. Its a real crippler!

Yep, it's pretty poor. Not even sure what room there is for performance improvement - it's already pared back quite severely (no HSYNCs for example). Also still slightly buggy, probably due to overflows (no nice uint8_t or uint16_t types in Flash).

Perhaps Java *would* be a better idea. I suppose the language I had to write this in is already quite Java-like in appearance... Mocha manages it, so perhaps Java just has a better bytecode interpreter (or perhaps Mocha cuts more corners than I'd like ).

It takes almost 20 seconds for the text to appear on screen and it is really slow.

Maybe Java could be a nice language to use. I suggest you to look this link. It's an Amstrad CPC emulator fully done in Java and I must say, it runs quite well.

I'm pretty sure that if you contact the author, DevilMarkus, for advice he'll be quite delighted to help you.

Well cor blimey. Looks like a big part of the slowness was my use of haXe's built-in List class for events. Implementing my own has sped things up significantly!

Still buggy mind, even though I've accounted for the lack of 8 and 16 bit integer types. Wonder what's going on there...

Edit: found the bug

Wow....really good....

Its much faster now, but still very CPU intensive compared to Mocha. Mocha runs very comfortably (~25% CPU) even on my old 1 GiG Pentium III machine. Your Flash Dragon uses 100% CPU time on the same machine, and is very sluggish.

Oh yes, definitely still slow. Suspect it'll never be as fast as a Java implementation (though I don't *know* that), but I do keep finding little bits here and there to shave off.

My main issue at the moment is a persistent bug that I can see no cause for in the code. Lack of good tracing isn't helping - you're supposed to be able to redirect haXe's trace() calls to a Firebug console, but I'm seeing nothing. Anyone been through that?

Hooray! The bug is fixed All my fault: missed some flow control that differed as I did the translation from C to haXe.

I've also added all the other video modes.

Next steps are joystick emulation and snapshot loading, I reckon.

Edit: added snapshot loading, and some snapshots. No joysticks, no sound yet.