v0.34

I just needed to get something for a public release. It was the re-implementation of the command-line that kept hanging me up (it was boring and I wanted to work on other things ;). I admit in my rush to just get something released, I sorta skimped on the code commenting. :P

Testing

Before releasing, I randomly tested jpsxdec on the dozen or so games that my friends let me borrow. As a result I threw in some last-minute changes to handle a couple new movie types. 'Last minute' means these may not even work right (I look forward to finding a way to save variable frame rate movies ^^).

I ran some quick tests on my Linux Mint machine. Compiz was often rendering the progress window without controls, so there was no way to close the program! And there's an annoying JFileChooser 'All Files' filter bug... :P (just wrote a work-around a moment ago).

My tests on a Mac were a little more promising. Rendering was slick--even looked better than Windows rendering.

After seeing how jpsxdec worked on Linux, I was worried about the quality of jpsxdec--then I saw iTunes for Windows and was feeling pretty good again.

AVI writing is faulty

Seems my AVI writer is getting something wrong because it is crashing or otherwise playing poorly on Linux by VLC ('this avi is broken'), mplayer (plays upside-down, stretched, or just crashes), Totem player (green gunk on the screen). On Windows and Mac, Quicktime is having problems (plays video too slowly or crashes). Real Player also crashes the good crash.

Speed

Since much of the core decoding work for jpsxdec is finished, I started looking for something a little more exciting to work on. So, following MrVacBob's suggestion, I began writing a crazy fast Java decoder. After doing everything I could think of, and examining the work of previous coders, I came to the conclusion that a real-time PSX Java decoder may be possible, but the resulting code would be so ugly, long, and annoying, it just isn't worth it. I hope to complete a faster Java decoder that'll cut the decoding time by maybe half, but also make a small, cross-platform native library will be fast enough for real-time playback.

My friends keep dropping games on me--more than I can keep up with. It takes so long to rip games that I went ahead and threw together raw cd reading on Windows. It's pretty buggy, and I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but it mostly worked. If ever I can get it more stable, I'll include it. For my Linux coding friends, the JNI Java class is in the source if you feel like writing a Linux version of the lib :)

Licenses

The LGPL of the Swing libraries included with jpsxdec don't require that I distribute the source code of the libraries (I haven't changed them, and I am linking them separately). But since jpsxdec is GPL, does that require me to include the LGPL sources with the distribution? I really didn't want the hassle of it, but just to be safe I included the source with the pre-combiled binaries together in the zip files.