Its been quite a while...

[MarioNES]

Ok so here is the whole big long story:

I was working on 80five, and I had quite a few large leaps in progress with it. I had full Game Genie support, and screenshots.

Then last week, my hard drive crashed. so I lost it.

but I have been dabbling in a language called FreeBASIC (http://www.freebasic.net) which I can only explain as BASIC written like C++. It seems rather powerful and extremely portable. I could potentially have 80five distributable on DOS, WIN32, or Linux. So I am going to take a stab at it. Its gonna be a trip straying from the Visual Basic programming environment and going back to straight coding again, but I hope to do some awesome things with FreeBASIC.

I am working on a new site too, I need to revamp.

Ooh... I may also make this project open source.

Maybe. Dont bug me about it though, you'll get a no.

Be back ina day or so, I have a lot of coding to do.

P.S.
If you know anything about FreeBASIC or want to give some tips or suggestions feel free to use the forum or PM me.

[kcar181]

Hey mario welcome back. Been wondering how you've been. Sorry to hear about the crash. Good luck on the revamp :) Stop by IRC sometime and say hi

[PmHacks]

Hey mario welcome back man. Nice to see an emulator coded in a basic lanaguage but is portable over all platforms and also nice to hear a "maybe" open source'ing

[MarioNES]

I've always loved open source software and wanted to have MarioNES be an open source project from the start. But MarioNES was a project I started working on at the suggestion of my father and he was my main source for help throughout the project, so the source meant a little more than usual to me. And the constant badgering from certain people about seeing the source eventually led to me making it a definite "no-way." But this is an all new project and hopefully I can make this a "stepping-stone" or "base" that others cann make their own simple NES emulators from. A learning tool for hungry minds.

I am very excited about FreeBASIC though. Its incredibly versatile, but it is basically learning a completely different but familiar language.

[MarioNES]

Ok, so writing it in FreeBASIC isnt as easy as I thought it would be. Its not hard, just isnt as much of a breeze as I had hoped it would be. I'm on my 3rd rewrite in FB, mainly due to me not knowing the differences between VB and FB, and my lack of debugging tools for it. But never fear, I wont let this trip me up. I am also playing around with Allegro. Hopefully I can harness it to make a fully cross platform NES emulator. It shouldnt be hard, theres plenty of others that use it.

On another note, I am currently updating the website. Doing a complete revamp actually so I hope to have that up by today or tomorrow.

P.S.

For those wondering, MarioNES is dead. Its now nothing but 80Five.

[Dackr]

Aww... what happened? It's been over two weeks. =(
I'm actually excited about the recent developments with your emulator and FreeBasic. I'm gonna check it out...

[MarioNES]

Nothing really has happened. I am in my 4th rewrite, since I started to rewrite in FreeBASIC. The language is very similar to QBasic, but is also fairly similar to C syntax. So the way I did things in VB, cant be done exactly the same in FB. So i keep running into brick walls and having to rewrite huge chunks of code, or the whole thing.

But then again, I was trying to rewrite a complete NES emulator, using the finished product as a reference. Now I am going to do it, step by step, and write the cpu, then the ppu(video), then the apu(sound), and mappers and such separately. Making sure all are working before I move on to the next piece.

Believe me, it isn't dead. Just going slower than I expected.

Then again, the same odd thing happened every time I decide to work on the emulator again. I got a full time job.

Anyone else notice this always happens? I decide to do a lot of work on 80five, then I get a full time job and cant work on it as much.

[Dackr]

I admire your ability to learn freebasic so easily. And the technical knowledge you must have to write an emulator like this... Wow, I'm telling you, there aren't many people who can do it.

I'm getting so used to VB 6.0 that I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be able to make complex programs with anything else. -_-'

[The Player of Doom]

C++ is easy :P And it has the power when you want to fiddle ;)

[Dackr]

Well... if it's easy... I haven't discovered it yet... I'm not saying I can't use C++, I just can't use it as easily as VB. In fact I do know of things that are easier to accomplish in C++ than VB. (Speed, access to memory, etc.)

Although... I've been toying with the idea of going dot NET for a while now, since I've heard that the functionality differences between VB.NET and C.NET have been minimized with extra functionality being added to VB.NET. We'll see... Does anyone else have an opinion on this?

[The Player of Doom]

The framework is utter crap if you ask me. If you use the framework with any other language than C# and VB.Net you get severe restrictions that will make your life annoying. Plus you need to learn a whole new bunch o' stuff like how DLLs work. Plus it isn't easy to export classes from DLLs via the framework, while it is through native.

C++ is harder than VB and certainly not easier to program with; but the speed beats VB any day, as well as what you can do with it, since it is basically translated into native code without any added extras (no array bound checking, no handling of pointers, etc). Basically, you have to manage everything yourself. But in the end it is worth it, and you WILL get used to it and then you will never want to use VB again.

Did I also mention that the framework is and will be slower than native however you do it? This will be true, at least until vista, which will favor managed over native.

[Dackr]

:bigcry: How sad... I borrowed Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 from a friend just to see if I'd like 'em.

The Result: Dissapointed. I seriously doubt I could ever get used to the .NET framework. And it IS slower, like you said, Doom... which really sucks. It has a laughable conversion for old Visual Basic 6 to .NET. Doesn't even come close to porting the code without SERIOUS manual overhauls to the output.

I admit that the interface is much cleaner and the code is more precise and customizable (Like C++). In fact, VB.NET is like taking VB and C, squishing it together and shaking it vigorously; taking everything I ever liked about VB and rendering it unrecognizable. It may, in the end, be the wave of the future... but It will take quite a bit of getting used to...

:::EDIT:::
After several more hours of trials and deliberation, I am satisfied... I accept the differences and I enjoy the improvements. There are so many changes that it was frustrating at first.

The main reason I got got frustrated was because I kept getting an error porting over code from VB that in all accounts shouldn't have given me the error it was giving me... and after a couple hours I opened the code again and without altering it, I ran it, and there was no error. So- blah... I'll blame my computer... or my idiocy. Whichever it was, it went away on its own...

[The Player of Doom]

I pretty much felt the same overwhelming work when I first used VB6 and tried upgrading to VB.NET. But I think the point still stands that you should stay away from .NET. The only time you really need it is Vista, which is still a bit off and will be expensive, outrageous system requirements, yada yada...

Once you get used to C++, you can do most everything without hitches. Even the low end thing with memory leaks, corruption, becomes part of the life and you learn to solve them easily.