New emulator: Simbuino (Windows)

[Myndale]

Now that Rodot has started shipping official hardware I'm happy to release the emulator I was working on a few months back. This isn't really a proper "release" per se, more like a sneak peek for anyone that wants to see how it's coming along:

https://github.com/Myndale/Simbuino/blob/master/binaries/Simbuino-Install.zip?raw=true

I'll warn you right now, you'll need a fast machine to run it at full speed. I haven't started optimization yet and the entire thing has been developed in .NET and WPF/MVVM...technologies not exactly renowned for high performance! So far I've been concentrating on implementing the features needed by the official Gamebuino library, if you use that then you should be fine but if you start messing around with register settings then things will probably break. The main components that are still missing entirely are SD emulation and bootloader support i.e. you can't call the game loading or page write functions (LOADER.HEX won't run either). HEX files can be loaded from the menu, hit F8 to run them. Screen persistance is disabled by default but you can enable it via the menu to get greyscale support.

I started occasional work on this emulator the same week that Rodot announced the campaign and it's been solely for the purpose of my own personal education, so please don't expect too much. I do plan to continue developing it though, I've found the debugging functions particularly helpful with the graphics optimizations I've been working on this past week.

As always, feedback is greatly welcome. Enjoy!

EDIT: Simbuino is now open source and hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/Myndale/Simbuino, the above download link has been updated to reflect the new location of the compiled installer.

[Minest]

Cool! I'll try it out

[Minest]

It seems to be lagging for me. That could be because I'm on a laptop though.

[Myndale]

How many cycles per second is it running? You can see it in the bottom right hand corner of the window, should be hovering around 16,000,000. If it's lower then try disabling sound from the menu...sound support literally went in over the past 24 hours so I might still have some threading issues to resolve.

[Minest]

I tried disabling sound and it didn't work.
Anyway i think my laptop just sucks since it's working fine on my desktop, except for an annoying buzzing.

[Myndale]

I tried disabling sound and it didn't work. Anyway i think my laptop just sucks since it's working fine on my desktop, except for an annoying buzzing.

Actually I think I know what that might be, it's an unfortunate side effect of the way I'm doing the sound streaming. At least I should be able to fix it.

Thanks for the feedback.

[erico]

I got a similar result, a strong stuttering sound going on, even disabling it.

[Myndale]

Hmm...thanks erico. I've made a few changes to the thread priorities and increased the mix buffer size, if that doesn't fix it I think I'll have to switch to a different streaming method.

[DFX2KX]

I'll have to take a look at it when I'm not tired. I've been wanting to see this version sense you stuck up a screenshot of it on the original Emulator thread

[microgamer]

Well it installed fine, which is always a good start!
went to write some code and saw there's only an option to load file... it wanted a HEX File (I can't just load a C script in there right) - so does that mean I need to compile code elsewhere to produce a HEX file? Should I use Codebender first?

Also could someone please tell me the equivalent commands for these microview graphics calls, so I can try a small game

1) uView.setColor (WHITE) - sets draw color to white (1) or BLACK (0)
2) uView.pixel(x,y) (plots a pixel at x,y)