DrSMS Official Site

Welcome to the DrSMS Official Site

DrSMS is a Sega Master System and GameGear Emulator that will allow you to play all of the old Sega 8-bit classics on your Gameboy Advance.

September 17, 2005, 3:03 am

DrSMS Discontinued

I’ve decided to officially discontinue my work on DrSMS, I’ve moved on to other projects on different platforms and developing on the GBA holds no real interest for me any more.

Thanks to everybody for your support over the last couple of years and massive thanks to RedMage for hosting this site for what seems like for ever. Not sure how long this site will stay up for so as RedMage may want to take it down.

All is not lost for you SMS/GG emulation lovers though, Flubba author of PCEAdvance, Goomba and co-author of NESAdvance and SnesAdvance has just created SMSAdvance. So you’ll be able to enjoy increased compatibility on his amazing emulator which already surpassed DrSMS.

His site is here

Goodbye.

Reesy

September 20, 2004, 1:10 pm

DrSMS gets faster

Gained alot of emulation speed by re-writing the scaling/rasta code. The old code used the HBlank IRQ, the problem with using the HBlank IRQ is the overhead in instructions. When an interupt occurs the GBA jumps to a function in the bios, this then calls the interupt handler. You then have to check what interupt has occured, and clear the interupt.

I'm now using HBlank DMA's, these can be setup to copy data as soon as the HBlank occurs and the best bit is you only have to set them up once a frame and just set the repeat option on the DMA.

Thanks to everybody of the Pocketheaven boards for the suggestions.

See ya

Reesy

September 18, 2004, 8:05 am

Screen scaling changed

I was on the Pocketheaven boards today and noticed a post about screen scaling techniques used in GBA emulators. Its seems there is away to make the screen look abit clearer than it does currently in DrSMS. Currently to scale the screen on DrSMS I just skip a line every 5 lines, but on every frame the same lines are skipped. The new technique ( well new to me ) involves simply changing the line that is skipped every frame.

For example if in frame 1 line 5 is skipped, then in frame 2 line 6 is skipped and then in frame 3 line 5 is skipped again. Because this is happening so quickly your eyes see both lines, clever hey!....Well I thought it was. Kinda wish I had thought of it, ah well.

Anyway I have now implemented this new scaling technique and it looks great.

Thanks to aaronphughes on the Pocketheaven boards for posting his idea.

See ya

Reesy

September 16, 2004, 10:21 am

DrSMS News

Improved the buffered sprite mode today without any noticeable loss in emulation speed. Also fixed the gamma correction, which now looks much better in normal gamma mode. Due to these improvements I will be changing the default settings for gamma to NORMAL instead of +3 and the buffered sprite routine will now be the default sprite routine.

I've still got a list of things to do before the release of version 7, but it shouldn't be too long now.

See ya

Reesy

P.S Big thanks to Flubba for showing me how the gamma correction should work.

September 13, 2004, 2:25 pm

DrSMS News

I've been working on DrSMS recently and I noticed a problem. It seems somebody left some test code in version 6 of DrSMS, I haven't got a clue who it was :) .. Okay it was me, I was testing some stuff to do with Codemaster Mappers and I completely forgot to remove the code before I released it, oh well.

So basically if you've noticed some games that run on Version 5 of DrSMS but not on version 6 then hopefully they should work again on the next release.

I've also got PitFighter working. It wasn't working because of the way I "hack" the sprite collision flag. I will add some menu options to allow you to choose what type of collision detection you want, ie none, hacked, full. Hopefully this will keep every body happy.

Big thanks to Bock on the SMS Power dev forum for his advice on the pitfighter problem.

I'm busy optimising my code at the moment, there are a few areas which are abit sloppy and can be improved. Hopefully this will speed up the emulator a little bit more.

See ya

Reesy

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