The JT BETA KEY changed this week. Update your SD card.
Fist of all, welcome to all new subscribers and thanks to all of you who have stayed around. I have felt your support during this hard effort and it has reminded me of how important it is to get these systems right for the community.
After three months of development, the JTCPS3 core is finally good for beta testing. It has been a long trip, with about two weeks of debugging an FPGA compiler issue that felt like a heavy rock on your back. There is some work left ahead but no big problems. The most complex aspect of this core was to design an architecture that work on the MiSTer SDRAM fast enough without requiring extra hardware.
I had not played SF III before. I got familiar with it as the core matured and started producing its fantastic scenery. I am amazed at the quality of the animations, at the use of color and at the delicately crafted music. The game feels vibrant and incredibly responsive. I can see why supporting this game on FPGA was so desired.
List of pending items and known bugs, please do not bother reporting them:
The stroken items were updated after publishing the post
you will see some solid color squares here and there
The GFX layer for the score shows a small horizontal offset
the victory/loss image has a "bar" effect as the image scrolls
the same screen also has some artifacts in the text
the full screen zoom effect is not implemented
you may catch an image drawn with complete wrong tiles for a split second (this one is rare)
The ROUND and FIGHT words are not fully displayed
SiDi128 version missing
Only the games that fit in a 64MB SDRAM are supported
DMA timing not verified with real hardware yet
Missing wide mode support (although today's games don't use it)
Paussing the game halts the music too
Even though the list may seem large, the games are playable and these tasks are not scary anymore. We will be going through them rather quickly, releasing new games evey week until we complete the game list. For this first release we are presenting:
Street Fighter III New Generation
Red Earth
Only NO CD versions. There are no plans to support the CD versions as the games themselves are identical.
The CPS3 games do not fit inside an Analogue Pocket, regardless of whether the core can be technically done or not. So no version for the Pocket. The core worked on SiDi128 but that version is not ready for this week. Not sure if we have any SiDi128 supporter anyway.
By the way, in today's files, the sound for Gradius III is fixed but the bug where you randomly died is still present.
Let's discuss about other systems, etc. in a future post and simply enjoy CPS3 today!