Aaron Giles

Rogue emulation programmer & demon hunter. Formerly of #Microsoft, #MAME, #Connectix, and #LucasArts. Still active in the Seattle choral scene #SeattleSings via Summer Fling Singers, Sine Nomine, and the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium.

Author of #DREAMM emulator and the #ymfm audio library.

Public Key

npub1kfka8atu26kkeld7d7d7we4n7cndvmh99da6y9d3eq9lvkqapges3rrt7k

NIP-05 Address

aaronsgiles_at_corteximplant.com@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstymwn7479dttvlklxlxl8v6elvfkkdmjjk7azzkcuszlktqws5vc7fwzvl

Author Public Key

npub1kfka8atu26kkeld7d7d7we4n7cndvmh99da6y9d3eq9lvkqapges3rrt7k

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Last Notes

2024-10-04 15:58:50

It's always annoying when a band's Greatest Hits compilation substitutes live or remixed versions of their original songs, rather than sticking to the original studio versions that you're familiar with.
Case in point: I've owned Foreigner's "Records" since my early music collecting days (it was released in 1982!), but was always annoyed that they included a live version of probably their biggest hit of the time, "Hot Blooded."
So apparently in the aughts I decided to pick up a more complete and up-to-date collection to replace it, which would hopefully not have any live versions, and also include a few of their later hits. Only to find out that the entire freaking collection is live. 🤦🤦🤦🤦🙄
This shouldn't be so hard.

2024-08-10 05:13:16

https://corteximplant.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/936/012/382/380/605/original/88c67f21c1e863d0.png

2024-08-05 01:58:11

Sweet! Thought for sure it was done after the brilliant S3.
https://corteximplant.com/system/media_attachments/files/112/906/932/340/505/351/original/3dd541d1b9bbd3ee.jpg

2024-07-19 17:51:35

BREAKING NEWS: New Weird Al polka has dropped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0ZoX4dBvwk
And yes, he figured out how to include WAP. 🚿🫏🐈

2024-03-05 09:05:38

My hot take on the yuzu situation: many obvious dumb mistakes were made.
When we developed Connectix VGS back in the day, we went in knowing the risks of emulating a still-active console. We went out of our way to try and make it as legit as possible, adding logic to try and detect copied disks, attempting to get a proper license from Sony, etc.
But when we did release, the thing that become most apparent was that despite all our efforts, the #1 reason people wanted it was for piracy. In fact, VGS itself was pirated waaaay more than it was sold. The people who really wanted it were by and large pirates, and they were happy to pirate both us and the games.
At that point it become crystal clear to me that there was really no way to write an emulator for a current-generation console without inviting mass piracy. In fact ever since then it's been my firm belief that emulating current-gen anything is a fool's errand and should be avoided unless you're looking for trouble.
The fact that yuzu was pulling in $30k+/month from donations and creating an Android version was just fuel for the fire. Add to that Nintendo's well-known litigious nature regarding emulation and the whole TOTK foolishness, and I honestly can't believe it took this long for them to be shut down.
I'm just glad they didn't go to court and lose badly.

2024-03-04 19:10:29

Seems like every time I start to get into a band that's been around a while, I find out that their fanbase thinks all the newer material sucks. 😜
Which means that either (a) their previous material is godlike, or (b) they've evolved into something different and I like where they went.
More often than not, it's (b). Upshot: most fanbases are full of shit.
(Actually the same tends to be true of bands I've liked for a long time that are still putting out quality material. Universally the hard-core fans hat it. Seems like it's the trajectory of every band to slough off diehard fans with each release who just can't deal with the new stuff.)

2024-02-12 16:13:39

DREAMM 3.0b2 is now available to fix a few key issues from the first beta. First item is particularly important due to shuffling of game IDs: you will want to let DREAMM re-verify your games if you're coming from a 2.x version!
https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta
New in 3.0b2:
Fixed version check so you are once again prompted after upgrading to scan folders
Fixed standalone mode
Fixed black levels in basic and epx OpenGL shaders
Improved preset matching for sound fonts
You can now track new versions via RSS at https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/version.xml

2024-01-26 07:17:50

When I first left my job at Microsoft a couple years ago, I went through the process of scanning all the postcards I received from my JPEGView days. I then put them online and started the process of OCRing and tagging them.
I got through about half (3000/6000) before I kind of petered out, but still put up https://postcardware.net with what I had, along with a Mastodon bot @npub1atv…eecc that you can follow for 3x daily samples.
Since the beginning of this year, I've started working through the remainder, and just crossed the 3500 threshold. I just refreshed the database, so if you visit postcardware.net you'll be able to browse the current lot.
Onward to 4000!

2023-12-24 08:22:17

Was investigating a bug in the version of Maniac Mansion that shipped with Day of the Tentacle. You can access Maniac Mansion from within DOTT by playing with Weird Ed's computer, in which case it launches the original Maniac Mansion EXE as a subprocess. For the English release, they used the original 160x200 graphics version.
The data files are identical to the original release, so DREAMM supports running this version as a standalone. However, this reveals an interesting bug when running in EGA/VGA mode.
Looking into why this happens, it became clear that LucasArts recompiled the original code for the Day of the Tentacle release with an option that set the minimum CPU version to something higher than base 8086. This is evident because PUSHing immediate values is done directly rather than by loading the immediate into a register first.
However, it appears that when they recompiled the code, it optimized a bit too well, and removed some required EGA/VGA frame buffer reads, leading to the effect below. They likely missed a volatile modifier which didn't matter in the original release.
This would not have hit in the real world because when launching from DOTT (a VGA game) it defaults to MCGA mode which doesn't have this issue. It only happens if you run it directly with either v or e command line options.
https://corteximplant.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/634/403/798/524/955/original/c5af815a88f33140.png

2023-12-23 21:55:16

In case you're into torture, there's an AI upscaled 4k 60fps version of the Star Wars Holiday Special up here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJBN0p4Dlqs
Pretty sure I watched it as a young'un, but I don't remember it being movie-length. 😲

2023-11-12 22:21:35

- reply

@npub1y4h…t26u It was always the height of laziness in arcade ports to just use the built-in PC BIOS font instead of the original arcade font. It's a small thing, sure, but it always bugged me even as a kid, and made it feel less "arcade-y" for no good reason.
https://corteximplant.com/system/media_attachments/files/111/399/903/054/132/324/original/c10ce87762ddcf27.jpg

2023-10-13 22:24:34

Funny bug in Day of the Tentacle.
They install a keyboard filter off of INT 15h that I wasn't previously calling. Now I am.
The semantics are that the scancode is in AL and the carry flag is set. When the filter returns, it's supposed to clear the carry to ignore the keypress, or set it to allow it to process. It can also modify the scancode in AL. The path where they want to ignore the keypress, however, has a critical bug:
MOV AL, 0
CLC
IRET
Seems logical except that the IRET restores the flags from when the INT 15h was called, so the CLC doesn't actually do anything, and the carry is always set before calling the filter.
It's the fact that they clear the scancode to 0 that saves them. For some reason my keyboard logic is generating keypresses in response to the 0 scancode, which it shouldn't be doing, but once I fix that hopefully things will work as intended.

2023-10-04 17:38:03

- reply

@npub1u3f…nne2 That looks almost exactly like my yellowed container of zip ties. Fry's special, right?

2023-09-18 20:00:45

Is it just me or does anyone else *hate* the recent trend towards animated turn signals? I find them distracting and difficult to grok quickly compared to the traditional blinky light.

2023-09-15 20:55:57

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@npub1qw5…037m I rather enjoyed it, especially the back half of the season. Lady Jessica carried a lot of it for me. If S2 is happening, it's going to have to be a pretty different show.

2023-06-21 23:19:43

DREAMM 2.1b2 is now up, with a bunch of key crash fixes. Thanks for the testing!
https://aarongiles.com/dreamm/beta/
New in 2.0b2
============
* Fixed infinite recursion with malformed paths (affected non-GOG version of TIE Fighter)
* Fixed (hopefully) crash when running Indy Desktop
* Fixed (hopefully) crash when starting Jedi Knight
* Fixed crash running GOG version of Shadows of the Empire due to running out of stack space
* Fixed crash on Windows when minimizing during gameplay
* Fixed crash due to missing API when starting Outlaws historical missions
* Added missing Windows API for unknown version of Yoda Stories reported via telemetry
* Added telemetry ID display to the about box (or indication it's been disabled)

2023-06-19 22:32:56

Been playing with my OPL synth a bit today, running some of the other games with it. Found and squashed a few bugs, so it's relatively decent now. Also determined that 2 OPLs is plenty.
One thing that's unclear is what pitch the drum instruments should be played at. Since MIDI channel 10 maps different drums to individual keys, there is one "instrument" per key for the drums. But that means the pitch specified doesn't really apply, so there must be some implicit default pitch for the drums.
I also wonder if anyone ever made a set of OPL instruments for the MT-32 defaults. Right now if you play an MT-32 game through OPLMIDI, it translates the MT-32 to GMIDI and then the GMIDI instruments get selected.
The MT-32 -> GMIDI mapping is imperfect, so better results could potentially be obtained by making an MT-32-specific set of instruments, but I haven't found any. Let me know if you know of anything like that!

2023-06-18 06:48:30

Thought cross-compiling for ARM on Linux would be easier than the other two platforms, but it seems to be harder, actually.
On Windows I just needed to change the path to the compiler and linker to the ARM64 ones and things work out.
On the Mac, fat binary support is kind of baked in, so cross compiling x64 on an ARM64 host worked pretty easily.
But on Linux I'm a bit confused how to build for arm64 on an x64 host. I am able to run WSL on my Windows ARM machine and build an ARM64 version that way, but it sure would be convenient to just build both targets on x64. But things like sdl2-config (which provides paths to includes/libs) seem rather host-dependent, so figuring out how to do it properly appears fairly complicated.

2023-06-14 08:02:07

I think the next release of DREAMM will be 2.1 and will support these new games:
* Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures
* Yoda Stories
* Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion
* Outlaws
* Jedi Knight
* Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith
* Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine
* Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Plus will support the official Windows versions of the following games:
* Afterlife
* X-Wing (with hi-res graphics and 3D accelerator support)
* TIE Fighter (same)
It's hard to know when to stop. There are a number of other early Windows games that I think I could add pretty easily, but at the same time I need to focus on fixing bugs and landing a new release.
Also currently feeling net positive on the possibility of Linux support.
Hoping to get some early test builds out in the next week or two.

2023-06-06 21:34:08

Sweet, my frontend now transparently handles COMPRESS.EXE-compressed files, as were common in early Windows installers.
You can identify the files easily because they replace the final character of the file's extension with an underscore. So instead of ARROW.WAV you have ARROW.WA_ -- they store the removed character in the header of the file so you can put it back when decompressing.
Fortunately, the compression algorithm itself is trivial. The hard part was making it all transparent to my rather involved file identification system.
The upshot is that you can now install Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures and Yoda Stories directly from the original media/images.

2023-06-02 15:06:50

Shadows of the Empire had a weird design. It was originally written as a flagship launch title for the Nintendo 64, but eventually ported to Windows. I even had a Mac port going before it was cut.
But the design is heavily influenced by the fact that the original game was written for a cartridge-based system.
Each level's data was compiled into a static binary blob, plus some level-specific code. On the N64 these were copied from the limited ROM space (16MB) into even more limited RAM (4MB) as needed.
But on the PC/Mac, each level was built into a separate DLL and dynamically loaded. So the game would launch, and then to load a level, they call LoadLibrary() to dynamically link in the DLL.
Each DLL had two functions: GetLevelStub() and GetTheDataStub() to access level-specific code and data. I don't remember any more details about it, but I do remember needing to figure out how to do DLLs (or the equivalent) on OG MacOS.

2023-05-31 21:52:07

Mystery solved on the missing X-Wing/TIE cursors, but still need to figure out how to make it work.
So I've been running the GOG editions of these games because they were handy. But the GOG versions are a bit hacked up, for example to use ogg-compressed files instead of CD audio track.
In addition, the GOG versions ship with a custom ddraw.dll. I never really looked into this before, but it turns out that this custom ddraw seemingly reimplements DirectDraw entirely using OpenGL.
For example, instead of changing video modes, they leave the video mode alone and just scale the original-resolution video up using OpenGL primitives.
Now in DREAMM, if someone references ddraw.dll, I implement all the interfaces internally, so there's no opportunity for this custom ddraw.dll to ever be seen. (Which is good because I ain't gonna implement OpenGL as well!)
But! Since the custom ddraw.dll upscales the screen, it has to fake any mouse cursors to make it look like cursor coordinates are relative to the upscaled version. To do this, they hack the original EXE to change the cursor shape to blank (so the real cursor never shows), and then draw their own cursor over the screen just before page flipping.
So I'm basically going to have to heuristically detect this case and swap a proper cursor back in. Oof.