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[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / (PC-FX Homebrew) Anarch]

Anarch is a raycasted fps by drummyfish and ported to many platforms.
Capitalism has taken over the world and destroyed everything on earth.
It's up to you to save the world !

This PC-FX has music and sound effects. There's also a version for the fxuploader if you own one.

Download link
https://github.com/gameblabla/anarch-PCFX/releases/tag/1.1

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / (Homebrew/NSFW 18+) Kidnapped Innocence]

NSFW : Do not play this in a public room

The PC-FX was sorely missing a new NSFW game... thus this wrong has been addressed.
It is a short PC-FX visual novel game, done in the same fashion as PC-98/PC-FX games.

Plot
Dark Pit and Pit fight each other but unfortunately, Pit loses the battle and is taken to Dark Pit's lair.
Dark Pit decided he shouldn't just lock him up, he should... "have fun" with him.

How to run this
Burn this on a CD-R with ImgBurn or play it on an emulator like Mednafen.
The game has been confirmed to work on real hardware but note that i was not able to confirm if it works on a PCFX-GA.

The game supports both the mouse and the FXpad.

Technical details
The game was made with liberis/v810-gcc.
I also had to extend it to add support for ADPCM samples, CD-DA and minor things (thanks Optimus for the timer code).
There's quite a lot of voice samples streamed from the CD and plenty of backgrounds that use the 16 millions color mode.
The 256 colors/4 colors mode are parsely used here and there as well.

There were quite a lot of technical hurdles as well, with most of my time spent on SCSI bugs and behaviour... and some bugs within liberis also that needed workarounds.


Download link
https://bafybeiddt3avurpt56xnoynrcvbwy4j3mdhtzhny4qw3bvyb7pb5oxvfae.ipfs.w3s.link/ipfs/bafybeiddt3avurpt56xnoynrcvbwy4j3mdhtzhny4qw3bvyb7pb5oxvfae/18%2B_angelspcfx.7z

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / nCraft port (POC) for PC-FX]

I wanted to see just how badly (or good) the PC-FX would perform with software rendering.
I tried to find a simple program to start with and one that could work in 256px wide mode as well.
I've eventually found the old nCraft attempt to the TI nspire CX and found the source code to be small and easy to mess around with.

So here it is :

Source code is available here :
https://github.com/gameblabla/ncraft

You can download it here (including for the backup memory) :
https://github.com/gameblabla/ncraft/releases/tag/1

The colors are a bit wrong but that's because i didn't really set a proper palette for it and it was just done for testing.

I'm planning at some point of making a separate CD for writing the backup memory version to the FX-BMP.
The whole game fits on 20kb so it's very feasible.
That way, you won't need to rely on an external flasher. (after all, games can save to it as well !)
The only thing i'm not sure if whenever or not i can basically flash the whole thing.

I'm also open to some suggestions when it comes to improving performance.
RAM to KRAM is especially slow and i wonder if there's a way of using DMA. (the SCSI DMA uses DMA but from CD to KRAM)

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / My progress on PC-FX homebrew development]

I was always interested in the PC-FX but the state of liberis unfortunately prevented me from doing anything
besides a very basic game, Simple Battle FX, for it.

The official SDK that was released for the PCFX-GA was certainly interested
but was said to only work on said hardware without modifications.
Besides, it only works on DOS/V (it always returns DOS16M errors for me) so this was a big pain in the arse.

I'm happy to say however, that i'm starting to get a bit more familiar with the (quirky) hardware.
Well yes and no lol... i'm not exactly experienced in all of this.

I wish i had discovered this older thread as Oldrover's posts and code samples were very interesting and
it's what helped me get CD-DA and ADPCM working in the first place.
https://www.pcengine-fx.com/forums/index.php?topic=18435.50

This is what was possible with liberis so far :
- Text on all background layers
- Simple 16 colors background image loaded from CD directly to KRAM
- Controllers (although it is apparently not working properly without a hack)
- Sprites (i'm having a bit of trouble with the 7up examples however)
- PSG soundchip (very low level functions)

However as you can see, this was not enough for me to make, say, a basic visual novel game.
Besides, the NEC PC-FX really needs Adol Christin being stuffed things up his ass.
In order to achieve this noble goal, i set out to find out more about the hardware.

32bpp

Initially i wanted to just go ahead with the 16 colors example that was there for a while.
And it has been confirmed to work on real hardware as well.
Unfortunately i had no idea how he converted his picture from a BMP or similar. When i asked him on twitter,
he said that he couldn't remember other than the fact it was his own tool.
Things were not going so well so far.

I took a look at GMAKER's tools and i eventually found b2k.
This tool however only supports the 16 & 32bpp color modes, not the 256/16 color modes. (this will be a problem as you will find out later)
The tool thankfully does work under dosbox and i was able to get something out of it.

However, there was still the problem of actually getting the whole thing to work in the first place.
I went under the assumption that the 16 color example just needed some modifications to it for it to really work.
I was able to get somewhere but it would only parse part of my image on the screen.
I immediatly suspected the microcode but i was not familiar with it so i read the translated documentation here :
http://daifukkat.su/pcfx/

Eventually in the KING section under Common microcode, i found these :

Code Select Expand

16M color mode / 64k color mode microprogram
Code Operation
0000 +0 from CG is accessed
0001 +1 from CG is accessed
0002 +2 from CG is accessed
0003 +3 from CG is accessed
0004 +4 from CG is accessed
0005 +5 from CG is accessed
0006 +6 from CG is accessed
0007 +7 from CG is accessed

16 color mode microprogram
Code Operation
0000 +0 from CG is accessed
0001 +1 from CG is accessed

The 16 color mode microprogram was suspiciously similar to the one that was in the example.
What if i reimplement it as they said instead ?

So yeah, this is basically how i got my 32bpp image to work.
I should note that there is also support for 16bpp but as you can see, it seems to take the same amount of memory for some bizarre reasons.
So there does not seem to be much point in using it.

I later figured out 8bpp and also wrote a tool for converting BMP palettes to a C array suitable for my needs.

CD-DA/ADPCM

In the same thread, Oldrover posted a bunch of code on how to playback an ADPCM sample as well as CD-DA.
It was mostly straight forward to get his code up and running though as he said, there were a few issues which i have now fixed.

As for AD-PCM, it was working fine but i can't get my head around the bits so for now it's only working at 16khz and the first channel. (the PC-FX has 2 channels and can support up to 32Khz)
Using the wav2vox tool, it was sounding OK but not particularly great... In fact, this sounds much worse than ADPCM on the Dreamcast.
The lower frequency could be the reason why but oh well.

Conclusion

All of my code is here if you want to take a look or even use it :
https://github.com/gameblabla/liberis/tree/cdrom

We are not exactly covering the whole hardware yet.
For example, the MJPEG side of things is still a mystery and woefully documented.
I don't think i can get MJPEG working on that thing sadly, even if it would be nice.

Doing software rendering (ala VGA) for 3D on the PC-FX would be nice but this would require converting the colors from RGB to Y8U4V4..
As a result, a performance penalty may occur.
Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad in 16/256 colors mode but the routine elmer posted would be too slow on the hardware.
I'm not even sure why i'm even talking about this when we don't even have a proper open source image converter for it lol...

There are some examples for the 7up/VCE/VDC chips but i'm not too familiar with those.
Most retail games use them because honestly, they don't have much of a choice given the constraints the KING chip has.

I'm also looking for artists etc... potentially interested in my project. : P
As it is, i don't think i can really port a game like Evil australians unless i mess around with the 7up chip. (the KING chip doesn't really have sprites and doing software rendering for small sprites is well, probably not a good idea lol)

Sidenote : Consolizing the PCFX-GA would be nice but it seems that it could only be easily done with the DOS/V version, which is unfortunately not cheap and rare.
Perhaps instead we could desolder the 3D chip from it and manually wiring it up to a PC-FX. This sounds like a terrible idea though, i have to admit.

I will get my PC-FX (as well as my 3DO) in a few months so until then, i won't be able to test on real hardware. (I need to try in particular the input code as it's said to be partially broken in liberis)

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / Marshall's PC Engine emulator for the PC-FX]

I'm not sure if this has been talked about here as i don't see a mention of it anywhere else.

So almost 8 years ago, Marshall worked on a PC Engine emulator for the NEC PC-FX.
His last commit on it dates back to 2018 and he was trying to get his JIT working but sadly it doesn't compile as is...

But there is still the ASM-based interpreter that can be compiled and used.

The source code was posted here: bitbucket.org/trap15/pcfxengine

Here's a video of it running under Mednafen:

Here's a link to a precompiled build of his emulator provided with a bunch of games :
gitlab.com/pcfx/pcfxengine-homebrew-samples.zip

Note that obviously i can't compile official roms with it so it will be only homebrew games.

So far, it seems to be only suited for slower based games. It was provided with Shangai but other commercial games are playable.
If you are a homebrew developer, this could be potentially used for PC-FX homebrew development as well.

If you do want to make a PC engine game to target the PC-FX however, make sure to force the CPU mode to 1.79Mhz and avoid having too many sprites on-screen.

Anyway, i was surprised no one mentioned this... : P
Btw, the PC-FX and PCE share a lot in common. The major differences are mostly the CPU and the Motion JPEG hardware decoder in the PC-FX as well as the increased color count but you can still find the same PSG, same VDC/VCE...

wayback.twitter.com/gameblabla/status/1483292369176956933

Here's Marshall's PC Engine emulator for the PC-FX. He never provided binary builds of it so i compiled it and provided it with some homebrew games. Speed is slow but some games work OK. Could be used for PC-FX homebrew if targeted specifically : https://youtu.be/WwbEiS3hDyM

— gameblabla (@gameblabla) January 18, 2022

[Localizations, Games, Apps, Docs / A small thing I did for PC-FX...]

It was really sad seeing the PC-FX with not a single homebrew working on real hardware.
trap15 then released liberis but it still is much work-in-progress but it can be used for text-based games.

So i worked on my very simple game and i thought my game was going to be the first working homebrew game for PCFX. I later learned that matej did it first with Soviet Union 2010 (Also see: http://matejhorvat.si/en/pcfx/index.htm). Yeah... But it's still the first homebrew game programmed in ANSI C for PCFX ! lol

Simple Battle FX is a RPG but without towns, shops or anything like that, just the fightings.
There's a DUEL mode, where you just fight a regular enemy with standard stats.
Then, there's the SURVIVAL mode, where you try to go as far as you can until you lose.

Like i said, it's very simple.

Video:

Screenshots:




Updated:  8/21/2021
https://github.com/gameblabla/simplebattlefx-pcfx
Download link

My next goal is to make a Tetris clone using the text mode
with some PSG music. (i hope)