This project is out of my passion on PCE and Nectaris (a japanese war game that "inspired" Battle Island on PC). With several existing emulators out there, I've tried to use them to play Nectaris on my EM500. However, the speed is too slow to be enjoyable. So I think if I can write a stripped version of PCE emulator such that it can at least play my favorite at reasonable speed.

This emulator is coded from ground up except I used hu6280 cpu core borrowed from fpce. It turns out the 6280 cpu core is too power consuming and the emulation is very slow (in version 0.1a). The only option remained is do some hacking into the cpu core and making the sprite/background rendering as fast as I can. After rewriting the graphic engine for more than six times, I think I got a much better one (version 0.1a2).

Features in version 0.1b

This release is for Jornada 54x and Jornada 56x devices only.

- Updated buttons remap logic to allow not defining particular button 
- Updated buttons remap to handle more buttton code

Features in version 0.1a2

- Improved speed, more playable on my EM500
- No sound
- Shrinking screen to fit most used 320x25566 resolution into 240x256
- Improved sprite engine and background reenndering
- Buttons mapping
- Autosave Configuration
- Frame skip
- Setting CPU clock

Features in old version 0.1a

- No sound
- Buttons mapping
- Autosave Configuration
- Frame skip
- Setting CPU clock
- Lazy background update

Configuration

Like other emulators, you have to have GAPI installed and your device must be 16-bit color. Putting the unzipped bfe.exe file anywhere you like. Roms can be resided in "My Documents" folder either in main memory or storage card.

Options dialog: Throttle you won't need it at all as it won't emulate in full speed Frame Skip 0~ 9 corresponds to 60fps~6fps. 4 is good on my EM500 which is 60 / (4 + 1) = 12fps Country machine's national setting, default US CPU Speed not all games are power hungry and some of the CPU cycles are doing nothing at all. Reducing cpu clock to 80% is very playable on EM500 @ 150MHz. Enable Screen Shrink Most games use 320x256 resolution which is too big for PPC. Enable this will fit it as good as it can. Speed impact on scaling is negligible though.

As my sole objective is to get Nectaris works, not many games are playable under this intension. In addition the document I found on the net is rather incomplete and inaccurate, and I don't like to port other people's work either. So the emulation is not doing very well.

Nectaris	Parasol Star	Mr. Heli
Nectaris (Shrinked)	PC Kid	Ordyne (with bugs)
Download MIPS ARM SH3

Acknowledge

PC-Engine document, by Jens Ch. Restemeier

PC-Engine Video Display Controller Documentation revision 0.3, by Emanuel Schleussinger

6502 CPU core, by Marat Fayzullin

Disclaimer

This emulator is available as a freeware, no commercial use is allowed. The author do not whole any responsibility in any damage in any form and etc. Use it at your own risk! 

If this emulator offends any copyright, trademark or anyone's benefit, please inform me with email at bonelyfish@yahoo.com.