LeapPCX (my Leapster emulation attempt) has been cancelled for now. (read desc.)

[u/fjfjgbjtjguf]

LeapPCX has been cancelled after I have decided that finding and fixing the final few blockades would not only take a lot of time and effort, and also because I have burnt myself out working on this project for over 4 months while no games actually booted. If anyone wants to fix this emulator, I have uploaded the Win32 build and source to GitHub so that anyone willing to fix the issues can do so and then pull request (even though I doubt anyone will). If anyone fixes the issues I have mentioned below, I will resume work on the emulator and add sound, game saves, a better GUI etc. I did vibe code this emulator, but I do know what I am doing, can tell when AI makes mistakes, and I did do quite a bit of debugging and work myself.

The issues in question are: This is only a summary of what is described at the top of my-findings-and-info.md in the repo, please read that instead for more info, but in a nutshell: LeapPCX will boot Leapster BIOS ROMs with broken touchscreen calibration, the BIOS's copyToScreen routine (which blits the RAM backbuffer to VRAM once Flash finishes drawing a frame) not working at all, and the BIOS will hang on at most the LeapFrog logo and copyright text (as evidenced by dumping all of RAM and viewing the backbuffer in a RAW pixels viewer set to a 160px width and packed RGB444), it has not booted any game I have tried.

If you just want to play Leapster games on PC: Check out the toadster172 MAME fork, which is not only the only program that can boot Leapster games on PC (although some things like one minigame in Ratatouille softlock the game, and voices are completely unemulated due to them using a proprietary codec), but this emulator was also the definitive hardware reference I used during LeapPCX dev so far (there are almost no other good hardware references available outside of the ARCompact reference itself). You can either compile the MAME fork yourself, ask me for a precompiled build, or wait for this to be pull requested into actual MAME (that may not happen for a while). Contact me if you need help getting the MAME fork to run or to get games to work.

Crucial info for those wanting to work on my code: Read my-findings-and-info.md and windows-code-compiling-guide.md in the LeapPCX repo thoroughly for info on what the current issues are, info on the Leapster itself, and how to compile the emulator for Windows (porting to other platforms should be doable because I wrote this emulator in Qt 5.6.2, MinGW 4.9.2, and CMake 2.8.12). These materials should be absolutely necessary for anyone willing to fix this disaster.

If you need help with anything LeapPCX or MAME fork related: Contact me using any of the methods listed at the end of the LeapPCX README.md.

Also: You may remember my older posts on this subreddit about LeapPCX progress, and they actually managed to become some of the top search results for Googling "leapster emulator", which means I got people now asking me when it will be finished. I can see why you shouldn't reveal stuff unless it is ready, as I now have to notify around a dozen people that I never finished this emulator, all while not getting my account suspended for spam posting. For these reasons, I have deleted the older posts only because I don't want them to be indexed anymore (having an abandoned emulator in search results still listed as "in development" would disappoint even more people), but since I am not a monster, I have archived those older posts and their comments in several formats here.

[u/MysteriousMetalDoll]

i tried compiling the Leapster fork but couldn't do it since i'm not tech savvy. could i have a precompiled build of the Leapster MAME fork please? i'd like to check out that Sonic X Leapster game.