MiSTer GBA Core Now Passed All AGS Aging Cartridge Tests

[Xbytez]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39vJLbpIRU0

[charmless]

That's awesome!

[Alkadian]

Indeed! I have just tried it! Very cool!

[Moondandy]

Can someone explain what this means or has a link explaining it? I'm sure this is great but not sure what it actually means!

[FPGAzumSpass]

The link is in the first post: i try to explain it in the video.

There is a page containing that rom and telling something more, but as it has the rom inside, i'm sure i shouldn't link it here,
but searching for "ags aging cartridge" should bring you right there.

TLDR:
- Nintendo Test rom
- available for 20 years
- first emulator(Nanoboy advance) to pass all test in september this year
- GBA core and Nanoboy are still the only to pass it.

[Moondandy]

My apologies, I didn't see the youtube link. I advise everyone else spend 3 mins and watch the video, this is great work - well done!

I am guessing not passing these tests was in relation to Kevtris saying the core didn't pass the tests he had made?

Brilliant that the core is no even more accurate, great stuff!

[FPGAzumSpass]

No connection to Kevtris.

There is a quiet active GBA emudev community on discord.
In the last weeks they often discussed this aging cartridge,which i didn't know about before, and how they try to get all tests running.

I thought it was a good time to also work on it and solve things together.
All of them except Fleroviux/Nanoboy don't have all tests passed, but i could get hints for subtests, which is very valueable.

[ItalianGrandma]

Really cool!!

[Newsdee]

Congratulations! This is a testament of all the amazing work put in the core!

[vgesoterica]

awesome news for the core

[badvision]

Question: Does it work if you subject it to random rewind/fast forward? I've had some games (Aria of Sorrow mainly) freeze up or glitch using that feature. Then again, it could be my bargin-bin 32mb sim purchased from ali express. But in the event that there is a bug in the state handling of rewind/ff it might not hurt to give it a try.

[FPGAzumSpass]

Fast Forward is known to shift timer events by maximum 1 clock cycle in rare cases. You can see that e.g. with the mGBA test suite timer tests.
That being said, i'm using fastforward very very often, both always on and holding the buttons for some second and never noticed a problem with it.(played several times through Aria of Sorrow and often used it)
The only way make it identical, would be to reduce the FF speed.

With rewind capture I'm not so sure. Savestates are tricky and as i don't save 100% of the state, they could be unloadable.
However, I used savestates a lot on Aria without a problem.
If you like, you can try to take savestates instead of rewind and if it happens, send me an unloadable savestate and i will try fix the problem.

If you think your RAM might be faulty, you can use DDR3 RAM instead.

Regardless, i just tried the Aging test with both fastforward and rewind without a problem.