More games, new release...

I am adding some additional games to the JaC64 site and will also do a release of JaC64 1.01 before christmas. It will include a stand-alone jar-file (actually the same file that is used as the JaC64 applet) that can be downloaded and used for playing C64 games locally on any machine with Java support. It will be easier to configure via regular menus than the Applet version of JaC64.

Javasound works on PS3 / YDL 5.0.2!

Yes, it did work! Now JaC64 and JSIDPlay are fully usable on the PS3. I did try some music collections and the music and the graphics was fine. This is really nice, now I do not have to install VICE to play C64 games on the PS3.

Sound working in Java on PS3?

I have seen some forum posts saying that the sound works in Java in the latest version of Yellow Dog Linux for PS3 (5.0.2). I will try this out later this week and hopefully confirm. That would make it possible to fully use JaC64 and JSIDPlay on the PS3 (under Linux). I guess that might be other bugs too, but this is probably the most serious one.

Rewrite C64 CIA

The CIA emulation of JaC64 is currently being rewritten. This will hopefully improve the compatibility of the emulator and will also make the code look nicer (I hope ;-). The new CIA emulation will be included in JaC64 1.01 which will be released some day next week.

C64 Emulation on PS3

I got the latest version of the VICE C64 emulator to work on the PS3. Really nice to be able to play C64 games with sound. I am still hoping to get some sound from the Java also, but I'm not sure if it is possible without getting a new version of the SDK/JRE from IBM (with better support for PS3). To get VICE running there are a few additional packages needed (mostly X related) and some minor modification to the source code (XCreateBitmap should have a 1 instead of 0 as last argument).

I have also tried to get some sound out of a small C program using ALSA which works better than doing the same thing from Java...

JaC64 and JSIDPlay are almost working under PS3 in Linux

I bought a PS3 a few weeks ago and installed a YDL linux on it. Of course I also installed a Java and tried surfing to jac64.com. The applets starts and shows all graphics, but sadly there seems to be no sound support (I use the IBM Java). Hopefully someone will figure out how to get sound working, otherwise I have to figure out another way to synch the frame-rate (emulation speed) of the emulator. Any one else have gotten sound from Java on a PS3 under linux?

Version 1.0 of JaC64 is up!

I have finally removed the Beta status of JaC64 and now released JaC64 1.0 (it is currently up on www.jac64.com). Latest fix is mainly for getting rid of the newly introduced javasound bugs in Java SE 6. So if you have Java SE 6 installed, please try the emulator and report any problems. It works for my machines (3 PCs with windows).

Commodoregaming have re-introduced JaC64 on their new Gaming PC site, check their vintage section on www.commodoregaming.com

Workaround for the Javasound problem

I found a workaround for the javasound bug. Instead of using the write in a way that makes it block I first check if there is room for the current newly generated piece of sound. If not, a regular "Thread.sleep(1)" is called, which will cause the soundbuffer to be emptied slighly, usually enough to be able to add the generated buffer.

A new version of the JSIDPlay is already up at jac64.com and a new version of the JaC64 emulator will be there in a few days.

Javasound messed up?

I did not get the blogs at www.jac64.com to work well, so I move over to more robust technology...

I have been synchronizing the speed of my C64 emulator JaC64 using the javasound SoundDataLine's write() method that before Java SE6 blocked the calling thread for as long time it took to get enough space to write the sound data to the buffer. This way of synchronizing the emulator worked very fine until now when I upgraded to SE6 which seems to get waits of up to ~300 milliseconds where SE5 would wait a few milliseconds. This is of course causing the emulator to "sleep" for several frames which cause all games, demos, etc. to be very hard to enjoy...

So instead of doing:

... generate sound in buffer ... [for a few milliseconds playback]
dataLine.write(buffer, 0, GEN_LEN);
... ....

I now need to fix a new way to get the emulation speed to be correct, and also report this bug to Sun for fixing it in the next version of Java SE6.