Which Symbian OS based phone is the best to run fMSX/S60?:

http://www.symbian.com/phones/index.html

I'd say depends on what you expect. If you want decent control, you should find a Symbian s60 phone with a joystick or something like that, like the Nokia 6600. That phone might be a bit too slow to emulate on a good level, though. I'm using my Nokia 6630 for some time now and emulation is good enough. This phone doesn't have a joystick-like thing, so controlling is a bit difficult. Ah well, that's the general problem with mobile gaming. Unless hardware facturers are going to solve this issue, mobile gaming will never get popular and will only be restricted to patience and other static games.

@Ivan: ...and remember that from the phones listed on the site you linked, only the ones running Series 60 can run fMSX/S60. There are other devices like UIQ or FOMA based that also run Symbian OS but not Series 60.


On the subject of supporting Nokia N90, I've been implementing new rendering routines now. I hope to be able to release a first version sometime soon (1.08c). What "soon" is, is of course a bit difficult to say... I'm still unsure what the color bit depth is on the device so the first version is going to run in 352x416x16bpp mode. If this isn't enough I'll try to go for a 32bpp version. The new c variant should of course run on other S60 2nd ed. FP3 devices as well but so far I quess the N90 is the only one with that OS version. I've done many smaller changes in the code here and there as well so I'll probably release a new "b" variant too (1.08b). I will probably not produce new "a" variants anymore so the last "a" version will stay at 1.07a.

Hi, Ivan !!

I have a Nokia 7610 running fMSX v0.97b and works very fine with MSX1 and MSX2 games. The speed is very very great!!
Also I have any problems with DSK images, but with ROMs runs perfect :-)

The emulator is at http://personal.inet.fi/private/riihimaki/s60/fmsxs60.html

(Sorry for my english, it's horrible)

Ok, version 1.08 is out but this baby is completely untested so use with caution That also means that there is a high risk a 1.09 version is to follow soon after someone tries to use 1.08c In principle there is only need to use 1.08 if you want to run the new "c" variant, there is nothing ground breaking new for the "b" variant except for the somewhat improved Z80 emulation but I doubt it has much effect in games.

It is as I feared, v1.08c is unusable, it does not work correctly on N90. I was able to test the emulator on a real N90 and it is now fixed, I will upload new v1.09c later today without further notice. There won't be a separate v1.09b as all changes between 1.08 and 1.09 are specific to the "c" variant. Sorry for the inconvenience.

jr:
Just tried fMSX on my new phone (6630, yay! ^_^). Works like a charm! Especially the input responsiveness, even with resample resizer! Again, thanks for your great effort!
(Finally, Nokia built in a faster CPU )

Have (played some games again and noticed that the PSG in some games sound distorted:
For instance in Metal Gear 2, when you press button 1+2 to crawl, the noise generator doesn't mute...

And I would like to request two features:
1. Can you build in controller profiles? It's sometimes annoying to reconf the mappings... (Dunno whether someone else has mentioned this before)
2. Option for 16/22(?)/44(?)kHz audio sampling. Since newer phones get nicer audio DSPs, why not take advantage of it?

Latok:

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If you want decent control, you should find a Symbian s60 phone with a joystick or something like that, like the Nokia 6600.

Do these joystick also support diagonal directions? IIRC that wasn't possible with my old phone (Nokia 7650).
Btw, what's the best keyboard/joystick configuration for 6630s? Any suggestions?

That's Nokia: just a five direction cursor pad. My 6260 has it as well and indeed, you wouldn't want to play arcade games. But SD-Snatcher seems to be especially made for this phone

The Panasonic X700 does have a joystick that allows diagonal controls, but was just a tad too slow to make MSX emulation work like a charm. I'm personally looking out for the X800

Sousuke, I certainly could add support for saving and loading controller settings from a file. I will put it on my list of things to do but I guess the reason why I haven't implemented something like that already is that when you think of it, it would be nice to have similar thing supported for all other settings as well, not just controls :-) Having support for all that would require a bit different UI though IMHO so... perhaps I'll just add what you asked for...

I already have support for 16kHz sample rate in the sound engine but due to optimization reasons the sample rate needs to be defined at compile time rather than runtime. I could of course build and release a separate version of the emulator that has 16kHz sample rate instead of 8kHz but I think that would just add to the already perhaps a bit too confusing number of variants ;-)

Anyway it seems to me that the growing number of devices with different HW specs are beginning to limit optimization possibilities, I just hope they keep adding more horse powers under the hood so I can add more dynamic features like the support for various sample rates and use less optimized code while still keeping the emulation speed at decent level. Too bad new cool things also create more overhead, for example in the 1.09c I currently only have support for raw and fast fit rendering and while the emulation usually can keep up on a N90 you can still easily find out that 1.08b runs faster on a 6630 than 1.09c on a N90. The reason is the higher resolution display which has four times as much pixels (double resolution) and twice the color depth, all in all summing up to eight times more data to handle when rendering the screen (572kB vs. 71,5kB).

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That's Nokia: just a five direction cursor pad. My 6260 has it as well and indeed, you wouldn't want to play arcade games.

I think phone keypads (in general) are mostly too small to play "fast games". Makes me think about test my phone with a bluetooth keyboard...
Do all software (more important fMSX/S60 ) work with BT-keyboards without needing applications to care about it, jr?

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Having support for all that would require a bit different UI though IMHO so... perhaps I'll just add what you asked for...

Thanks in advance! I'm already looking forward to it

About the samplerates: Why not build in both routines? A general one for various rates and a optimized one (e.g. 8kHz). How much additional code/overhead would it produce?
IMHO CPU power may be (still) a problem with *some* smartphones, but drive-space by now not anymore. Even when I have to delete some MP3s on my MMC, I've got to set my priorities

I haven't tested the BT keyboard, maybe they'll let you do that in a shop before buying it? I would image it to have a small impact on input responsiveness but since I haven't tested it I cannot say for sure... Technically fMSX/S60 is accepting all keyboard input as long as it is offered through the normal OS event queue.

I also haven't measured how much space the sound engine takes but I guess it's somewhere around a few dozen kilobytes (uncompressed) due to some precalculated data tables.

Hmm darn, in this little town here, there are no computer shops with BT keyboards...
Maybe I'll give it another try in a few weeks, when I've moved to my new appartment (bigger city)

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I would image it to have a small impact on input responsiveness but since I haven't tested it I cannot say for sure...

Hope not, CPU power should be enough
I remember having tried RemoteS60 some time ago, a remote tool using BT connection.
It accepted all keyboard inputs, that was very handy when writing messages. The response time weren't bad, IIRC very good.
But unfortunately it didn't work with fMSX/S60... I can't tell, how that app hooked into the OS.

Good luck -- with finding and testing the BT keyboard and your new apartment. fMSX/S60 is quite a resource hog so a separate app trying to process BT messages might get drowned under the emulator.

Reading your message just reminded me of your request so I got the source and implemented the control load&save in the menu (quick&dirty solution). Haven't taken a look at the PSG problem you reported though, sorry. I'll think about fitting both 8kHz and 16kHz sound engines side by side when I have a bit more time

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fMSX/S60 is quite a resource hog so a separate app trying to process BT messages might get drowned under the emulator.

I've just downloaded a new trial of RemoteS60 Pro.
This new version also supports 6630 via USB (DKU-2). Unfortunately no BT connection was possible, due to the lacking BT serial port support on the newer phones
Though, I gave it a try... But I'm not sure, whether there'll be large lags using a BT connection (transfer + CPU).

So here are the results:
Playing via PC-keyboard is possible, after pushing the remote app's priority to high and slow down the sampling rate. Otherwise the simulated inputs became laggy. fMSX/S60 still had enough CPU time for emulation (no rotation, smart resize, sound).

I'm still wondering how the remote app is hooked in the OS's queue...
The whole PC-keyboard can be used, when writing messages. But defining keys "keyboard-keys" in fMSX/S60 was not possible.

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Reading your message just reminded me of your request so I got the source and implemented the control load&save in the menu (quick&dirty solution). Haven't taken a look at the PSG problem you reported though, sorry. I'll think about fitting both 8kHz and 16kHz sound engines side by side when I have a bit more time

Thanks jr!
Take your time, don't put too much stress on you.