Cygne/SDL is powered by the Simple DirectMedia Layer Library

INTRODUCTION

• What is Cygne/SDL?

Cygne/SDL is the Simple Directmedia Layer (or SDL) port of the Windows version of Cygne, a free and now OpenSource (since 12-03-2002) Bandai Wonderswan Color handheld software based emulator. The Bandai Wonderswan Color is a nifty handheld device with features similar to Nintendo's Gameboy Advance handheld. The main problem only is that the Bandai Wonderswan Color was (and still is) released only in Japan, thus most games are for the Japanses consumers while some of them are for foreign (read : outside of Japan) consumers to. The goal of Cygne/SDL is to produce a portable version of the Cygne emulator using the SDL library for graphics, keyhandling, joystick support, etc. Cygne/SDL uses ROM images to play those wonderfull Bandai Wonderswan Color games, see the topic "What are ROM images?" for more information about this topic.

Cygne/SDL uses the sources (allthough a bit modified) from the Cygne 2.1a WIN32 version as well as the NEC CPU core from the MAME project (released under the MAME license) which is available from the official Cygne website.

Cygne/SDL is released as OpenSource under the GPL license which means you may hack and use the code from Cygne/SDL if you send your contributions to the Cygne/SDL project and give is some curtosy as well.

• What is SDL?

The Simple Directmedia Layer (or SDL for short) is a library designed for multimedia applications and gives us multimedia API's and more! Windows users should be familiar with Microsoft's DirectX, well SDL is kind of an OpenSource variant but then usuable for many platforms (BeOS, FreeBSD, Linux, Sun Solaris, etc to name a few) which means that most code written with SDL is cross-platform.

SDL is for use with Cygne/SDL as our main graphical and keyhandling library which allows us to port Cygne to various platform. Currently BeOS, UN*X clones and WIN32 version compiles out of the box without modifications done to the source.

For more information about SDL, see the official SDL website.

• What are ROM images?

As stated before, Cygne/SDL (and Cygne) is a software based Bandai Wonderswan Color handheld emulator. To allow you playing games on Cygne/SDL it requires a binary dump of the original gamecartrdidge designed for this handheld device. These binary dumps are called ROM images or ROM's. These binary dumps are widely available as .wsc and/or .ws format and mostly zipped (.ZIP extension). All these binary dumps can be used with Cygne/SDL.

Beware, in most countries you may use these binary dumps only (but only!) if you own the original cartridge itself. The use of binary dumps without owning the original cartridge or without approval from Bandai is a act of piracy. In most countries this is an act of copyright violation and could result in punishment. So please only use images if you own the original cartridge, if you do not you hurt the game-industry as well as this project and other emulation projects as well!

First, don't e-mail use with questions like where to get these images! We are against piracy and there for these questions will NOT be anwsered!

PROJECT INFORMATION

Now you know what Cygne/SDL is and what it does, here's the project information. As written before (if you've read it ofcourse) Cygne/SDL has some requirements since it's released in source format to the public. To make sure you understand it correctly, here is a list of what's needed :

• GNU C/C++ compiler (version 2.95.2 or higher, GCC 3.0 is NOT tested!) or similar;

• Installed development runtime of the SDL libary (version 1.2.3 was used for development) see http://www.libsdl.org for more information about this subject;

• Installed development runtime of the Z compression library (version 1.1.3 was used for development), see http://www.zlib.org for more information about this subject;

• An Operating System which supports the above :), tested Operating Systems are BeOS R5, Linux, FreeBSD 4.4 and WIN32 (through Cygwin and/or Mingw32)

• Some Bandai Wonderswan Color ROM images (Commercial if you own the game, Public domain if you want to try the emulator out -> http://www.pdroms.com)

If you are sure you've checked the list and think that all is ok, you can download Cygne/SDL in source distribution or grab the source from CVS. With great help from Ryan "Icculus" Gordon we finally have a CVS repository here at www.icculus.org :)

TODO LIST :

• Add Joystick support;

• Add non-i386 scaling routines for portability;

• Add configfile support;

• Add different keyhandling (solve sticky keys problem);

• Autoconf scripts;

• Much more :)

RELEASES :

• Current version :

Cygne/SDL v0.1 - Teaser release :

- Keyboard handling implented;
- (i386) assembly scaling/scanline routines;
- In emulator rotation support;
- ZIP and GZIP compressed ROM images supported.
- Some extra tweaks.

Grab the Cygne/SDL 0.1 Source in tar.gz form from this place (106448 bytes);
Grab the Cygne/SDL 0.1 Source in ZIP form from this place (121172 bytes);

Uncompress the files and read the documents in the source distribution. If you have binary distributions available, feel free to e-mail us at [email protected] with the link and the Operating System it was compiled on!

• CVS repository :

  To use CVS get a decent CVS client from the CVS website. If you're sure you've get CVS, use the following information to grab the latest CVS sources (beware, it *COULD* be broken!) :

  cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvs/cvsroot login
  (password is "anonymous", without the quotes.)

  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvs/cvsroot co Cygne-SDL

  We'll make new versions available based upon CVS changes in the future :)
  

• Contributions :

If you should have contributions (like code changes, makefiles for different OS', etc) please e-mail them to [email protected]. You'll be given full credit and the changes will be integrated in CVS as soon everything is tested.

• History downloads :

Not yet!

CREDITS, CONTACT INFO, ETC

- Emulator Core : Dox <[email protected]>, http://cygne.emuunlim.com
- Windows Source : Dox <[email protected]>, http://cygne.emuunlim.com
- MAME NEC CPU Core : Bryan McPhail, Oliver Bergmann, Fabrice Frances and David Hedley
- Cygne/SDL Source : Carwyn "Caz" Jones <[email protected]>,Niels "nwagenaar" Wagenaar <[email protected]>, http://sdlemu.ngemu.com <[email protected]>

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, including:

- Dox, the original author of Cygne WIN, for releasing the source to the public.
- NGEMU.COM for giving us host space for the file distro's;
- Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL) developers team for there cool library;
- Ryan "Icculus" Gordon for providing us CVS space for Cygne/SDL at his website http://www.icculus.org;

THANKS! :)