Aaron's To-Do List

Note that nothing here is a promise. This all just represents ideas in my head. Who knows if I'll get to it all!

High-level

• convert sound cores into devices
• make scheduling a device thing instead of a CPU thing, allowing any device to participate
• integrate proper localization (work with MAMEPlus!)
• compile with UNICODE=1 for all builds (will deprecate Windows 9x support)
• define & implement more general pipe-like interface for external communication
• change OSD sound interface so it creates sound "targets" much like render targets
• allow setting of realtime clock to fixed value from command line for regression testing

CPUs

• write x86 DRC front-end, unifying all x86/NEC variants
• investigate and fix TMS32031 calculation bug

Debugger

• add timer window
• add CHD viewer window
• make workable in a fully command-line fashion
• convert to using pipes
• separate debugger from core application

3D

• Add texture management to poly.c
  • Accepts array of 8 32-bit parameters
  • Hashes those parameters and performs lookups
  • Automatically manages via LRU
• Pre-compute textures in voodoo at upload time and remove on-the-fly format conversion for a bit more speed

Video

• render crosshairs in UI layer not in game containers
• game-specific crosshair bitmaps and sizes
  • user selectable?
• fix crosshair rendering to understand scale and offset factors
• font improvements:
  • start with built-in font, then load others
  • standardize on BDC as the font format, provide BDF2BDC converter
  • find a good unicode font
  • user-selectable at runtime via menu?

Outputs

• convert output system to use pipes
• add ability to get XML description of current game

Drivers

• write tests to figure out 3dfx mipmapping algorithm
• remove use of MDRV_VBLANK_INT(count) where count > 1
• cliffhgr.c:
  • add proper latching/buffering to ensure no dropouts
  • fix 9928a emulation to match screenshot
• 3DO-based systems

Documentation

• write debugger documentation
  • Debugger basics (covers the main window, the keyboard shortcuts, and a couple of very basic commands)
  • Viewing memory (covers disasm/dump, memory and disassembly windows)
  • Breakpoints and watchpoints (covers basic breakpoints and watchpoint usage)
  • Expressions (covers using expressions to change values and the whole expression syntax)
  • Advanced breakpoints and watchpoints (covers conditionals, actions, etc)
  • Other techniques (covers tracing and other things)
• write description for how to compute crosshair parameters

Other Stuff

• look into inpout32.dll for hooking up ZVG to WinMAME