(02-19-2014, 08:32 PM)Chalking Fenterbyte Wrote: If you don't mind me further asking, diverting this from the original firmware questioning, why don't the games display anything more than black screens?
I mean, assuming some portions of the emulated GPU exist (how else are the homebrews running?), and at least most opcodes are working right, what is the problem in that department? I mean, at least a title screen, perhaps?
Not a developer on this, but it mostly comes down to the fact that most commercial games are far more complex than any simple homebrew, and they try to do things which are not really done or working fully. You usually see a bunch of "TODO" in the log, or similar, which just crashes the games when they don't get the expected input. Or they use a function that should be working, but is bugged in some way. For instance Disgaea 3 should work (well, run further) if you look at what happens in the log, but for some reason some mutex/semaphore doesn't receive a signal and everything just stalls at this point while the other threads wait.
Most homebrew aren't even multithreaded, so this bug would not affect them.