When we started Project64 the operating system generally used was Windows98. We designed Project64 so that it would work in a self contained folder. We still use this design now; everything works from that one directory without needing an install. This also works great if you want to put the emulator onto a memory stick and run it from there...

With the current design of Windows (2000, XP, Vista onwards) being for multiple users and security around which users can modify files, this design of PJ64 does cause some problems. One of the problems is that limited users are not allowed to modify files in the Program Files directory. And if one user modifies settings, then this affects other users on the same system that also use this program.

Vista gets around this issues by virtual mapping writes to the program files directory, to the user directory.

So where should saves, settings, etc be stored in PJ64 v1.7 - user directory, application directory? Should we determine by the location of the .exe? Should it work differently on different OS's etc... ?? Your thoughts please.

I am redoing all the internals and the UI around settings. One thing I think should be dropped is the shell integration. Unless I am wrong and please tell me if I am this is a feature that is basically never used? What do people think about the simple/advanced settings .. Any new settings people would like? Suggestions on layout, etc .. if you have any thoughts this is the best time to give a suggestion since I am working on it.

Some of the things planned:

• When updating some configuration for a game, it will update the cfg file instead of the rdb. That way I can always do a reset back to original settings.
• Being able to set plugins for individual games
• Removal of shell integration (see comments for more details)
• Change the settings configuration UI to a tree list of pages instead of a tab list as it currently is (to be able to offer more pages and better organized) - current version is running out of space.
• Bold the setting that have been changed so you can easily see what is different.

 

Hopefully I will be able to achieve what is above, but happy to hear any other suggestions.

One of the things that bothers lots of people when they are full screen is that they don't know what's going on in the emulator when they use keyboard shortcuts for things like save states. A while ago zilmar and I added the capability to display messages to the user for this very purpose in full screen. In the last week or so I decided to make it a little bit nicer, I've also done this in another one of my emulators (hint, hint).

I think it looks rather cool actually, if it looks similar to media center, good, I intended to get it rather close. I will probably post a new build sometime into July 4th weekend that includes this update. Beta members will notice the time in the right hand side of the display, this is something quite a few people asked for I believe!

It does seem like this could be a good feature to add to project64. Which emulator on what system do you think implements this feature the best? I will look at how this works and see if I can do the same thing on pj64.

One of the new features added to Project64 makes it possible & easy to find new cheat codes for games. We use game shark cheats as the method. These work by constantly changing a location in memory with some value. For example, for infinite lives in Super Mario 64, the code is 8033B21D 0064. The first two numbers (80) tells the cheat system to constantly change 1 byte in memory. The next 6 numbers are the location in memory where this variable is stored. The rest of the numbers are the value to keep changing it to (64). This is actually 100 in decimal (64 hex). This will keep your lives at 100 no matter what happens. As you can see the most important thing to create new cheats is to know the memory location.

I am going to show you how to find this location above with the new tool; I have gotten in to the game. Open the memory search and searched for the number of lives I have, in this case 4. As you can see in this picture I get a lot of results.

I know to get myself killed. I know to search the results to see what address now contains the value of 3. This is a lot less. I kill my self again and search for the value 2, as you can see we are down to 2 values left. I can right click on an address to be able to view it in memory.

The memory viewer has a new great trick, it can now click on a memory location and an edit box appears and lets you change this memory address. I change the value to 8 and as you can see this has correctly changed the number of lives to 8 so we know that we have the correct address.

You can see we have the exact same location as the cheat above. Of course, we already knew this code, but you can use this same method to do many things in many games :)