Ok, so I updated the spectrum emulator to run in Silverlight 3.
The performance is now amazing, due to GPU Acceleration, WriteableBitmap, and it also runs out of browser (right click and install).
I guess I will update it with more SL3 features at some point. Have fun writing spectrum basic, and playing manic miner etc.
http://www.voxpeeps.com/silverlightspectrumemulator/SL3Emulator.aspx
Instructions
Click your mouse within the emulator to begin
Symbol Shift is the Home Key, Remember Shift 0 is backspace, and Symbol Shift (home) P is a quote mark.
The emulator works with .SNA files, which you should be able to download from various sites and run via the Open File option, just search for .sna and whatever game.
Click here for an the layout of the spectrum keyboard
Play with it
6 comments:
Sad, not available
The version of Silverlight you have requested is not yet publicly available.
You will need to download Silverlight Beta 3 manually, rather than relying on the link. Actual link to SL3 Beta is below.
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=143433
I noticed Pete Brown used MediaStreamSource for his C64 emulator. Personally I would much prefer a WriteableBitmap approach, but I got the impression that you have to set each pixel one at a time. Is this true? If so, do you feel it's holding you back at all compared to array access to a whole raster or the entire bitmap? I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on this.
I haven't tried MediaStreamSource however the WriteableBitmap is working for me very well.
I am pretty happy with the perf to be honest. It is still a little slow on a netbook, but runs like a rocket on pretty much every other machine.
The reason I am pretty happy is that I haven't spent much time doing the conversion. I spent a lot of time with the SL2 version.
You do have to set every bit of the byte array, but it really isn't a big deal. The speed is superb.
No doubt I will take another look at it, at some point and try and performance tune it further.
Thanks for the reply - that's great to hear, on both the performance and ease of SL2->SL3 upgrade fronts. I'm looking forward to giving this a try myself.
Well, seems it's still faster to encode each frame as a PNG... *sigh*
http://silverlight.net/forums/p/23520/192413.aspx#192413
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