byuu says:
Don't let the point release fool you, there are many significant changes in this
release. I will be keeping bsnes releases using a point system until the new
higan release is ready.
Changelog:
- GUI: added high DPI support
- GUI: fixed the state manager image preview
- Windows: added a new waveOut driver with support for dynamic rate control
- Windows: corrected the XAudio 2.1 dynamic rate control support [BearOso]
- Windows: corrected the Direct3D 9.0 fullscreen exclusive window centering
- Windows: fixed XInput controller support on Windows 10
- SFC: added high-level emulation for the DSP1, DSP2, DSP4, ST010, and Cx4
coprocessors
- SFC: fixed a slight rendering glitch in the intro to Megalomania
If the coprocessor firmware is missing, bsnes will fallback on HLE where it is
supported, which is everything other than SD Gundam GX and the two Hayazashi
Nidan Morita Shougi games.
The Windows dynamic rate control works best with Direct3D in fullscreen
exclusive mode. I recommend the waveOut driver over the XAudio 2.1 driver, as it
is not possible to target a single XAudio2 version on all Windows OS releases.
The waveOut driver should work everywhere out of the box.
Note that with DRC, the synchronization source is your monitor, so you will
want to be running at 60hz (NTSC) or 50hz (PAL). If you have an adaptive sync
monitor, you should instead use the WASAPI (exclusive) or ASIO audio driver.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulator/video,audio: various cleanups
- emulator/audio: removed reverb effect (it breaks very badly on
high-frequency systems)
- emulator/audio: the Nyquist anti-aliasing lowpass filter is now
generated automatically instead of set per-core
- at 44.1KHz output, it's set to 22KHz; at 48KHz, it's set to
22KHz; at 96KHz, it's set to 25KHz
- this filter now takes the bsnes emulation speed setting into
account
- all system/video.cpp files removed; inlined in System::power() and
Interface::set() instead
- sfc/cpu: pre-compute `HTIME` as `HTIME+1<<2` for faster comparisons of
HIRQs
- sfc/cpu: re-add check to block IRQs on the last dot of each frame
(minor speed hit)
- hiro/gtk3: fixed headers for Linux compilation finally
- hiro/gtk,qt: fixed settings.cpp logic so initial values are used
when no settings.bml file exists
- hiro/gtk: started a minor experiment to specify theming information
in settings.bml files
- nall/dsp: allow the precision type (double) to be overridden (to
float)
- nall: add some helpers for generating pre-compiled headers
- it was a failure to try using them for higan, however ...
- nall: add some helpers for reading fallback values from empty
`Markup::Node[search]` statements
Todo:
- CRITICAL: a lot of my IRQ/NMI/HDMA timing tests are failing with the
fast PPU ... need to figure out why
- space between Emulator::video functions and Emulator::audio
functions in gb/system/system.cpp
- remove Audio/Reverb/Enable from settings.bml in target-bsnes
byuu says:
Changelog:
- hiro: added Qt5 support
- hiro: added GTK3 support (currently runs very poorly)
- bsnes: number of recent games and quick state slots can be changed
programmatically now
- I may expose this as a configuration file setting, but probably
not within the GUI
- nall: use -Wno-everything when compiling with Clang
- sorry, Clang's meaningless warning messages are just endless ...
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall: merged Path::config() and Path::local() to Path::userData()
- ~/.local/share or %appdata or ~/Library/ApplicationSupport
- higan, bsnes: render main window icon onto viewport instead of
canvas
- should hopefully fix a brief flickering glitch that appears on
Windows
- icarus: improved Super Famicom heuristics for Starfox / Starwing RAM
- ruby/Direct3D: handle viewport size changes in lock() instead of
output()
- fixes icon disappearing when resizing main window
- hiro/Windows: remove WS_DISABLED from StatusBar to fix window
resize grip
- this is experimental: I initially used WS_DISABLED to work
around a focus bug
- yet trying things now, said bug seems(?) to have gone away at
some point ...
- bsnes: added advanced settings panel with real-time driver change
support
I'd like feedback on the real-time driver change, for possible
consideration into adding this to higan as well.
Some drivers just crash, it's a fact of life. The ASIO driver in
particular likes to crash inside the driver itself, without any error
messages ever returned to try and catch.
When you try to change a driver with a game loaded, it gives you a scary
warning, asking if you want to proceed.
When you change a driver, it sets a crash flag, and if the driver
crashes while initializing, then restarting bsnes will disable the
errant driver. If it fails in a recoverable way, then it sets the driver
to “None” and warns you that the driver cannot be used.
What I'm thinking of further adding is to call emulator→save() to
write out the save RAM contents beforehand (although the periodic
auto-saving RAM will handle this anyway when it's enabled), and possibly
it might be wise to capture an emulator save state, although those can't
be taken without advancing the emulator to the next frame, so that might
not be a good idea.
I'm also thinking we should show some kind of message somewhere when a
driver is set to “None”. The status bar can be hidden, so perhaps on the
title bar? Or maybe just a warning on startup that a driver is set to
“None”.
byuu says:
(Windows users may need to include <sys/time.h> at the top of
nall/chrono.hpp, not sure.)
Unchangelog:
- forgot to add the Scheduler clock=0 fix because I have the memory of
a goldfish
Changelog:
- new icarus database with nine additional games
- hiro(GTK,Qt) won't constantly write its settings.bml file to disk
anymore
- added latency simulator for fun (settings.bml => Input/Latency in
milliseconds)
So the last one ... I wanted to test out nall::chrono, and I was also
thinking that by polling every emulated frame, it's pretty wasteful when
you are using Fast Forward and hitting 200+fps. As I've said before,
calls to ruby::input::poll are not cheap.
So to get around this, I added a limiter so that if you called the
hardware poll function within N milliseconds, it'll return without
doing any actual work. And indeed, that increases my framerate of Zelda
3 uncapped from 133fps to 142fps. Yay. But it's not a "real" speedup,
as it only helps you when you exceed 100% speed (theoretically, you'd
need to crack 300% speed since the game itself will poll at 16ms at 100%
speed, but yet it sped up Zelda 3, so who am I to complain?)
I threw the latency value into the settings file. It should be 16,
but I set it to 5 since that was the lowest before it started negatively
impacting uncapped speeds. You're wasting your time and CPU cycles setting
it lower than 5, but if people like placebo effects it might work. Maybe
I should let it be a signed integer so people can set it to -16 and think
it's actually faster :P (I'm only joking. I took out the 96000hz audio
placebo effect as well. Not really into psychological tricks anymore.)
But yeah seriously, I didn't do this to start this discussion again for
the billionth time. Please don't go there. And please don't tell me this
WIP has higher/lower latency than before. I don't want to hear it.
The only reason I bring it up is for the fun part that is worth
discussing: put up or shut up time on how sensitive you are to
latency! You can set the value above 5 to see how games feel.
I personally can't really tell a difference until about 50. And I can't
be 100% confident it's worse until about 75. But ... when I set it to
150, games become "extra difficult" ... the higher it goes, the worse
it gets :D
For this WIP, I've left no upper limit cap. I'll probably set a cap of
something like 500ms or 1000ms for the official release. Need to balance
user error/trolling with enjoyability. I'll think about it.
[...]
Now, what I worry about is stupid people seeing it and thinking it's an
"added latency" setting, as if anyone would intentionally make things
worse by default. This is a limiter. So if 5ms have passed since the
game last polled, and that will be the case 99.9% of the time in games,
the next poll will happen just in time, immediately when the game polls
the inputs. Thus, a value below 1/<framerate>ms is not only pointless,
if you go too low it will ruin your fast forward max speeds.
I did say I didn't want to resort to placebo tricks, but I also don't
want to spark up public discussion on this again either. So it might
be best to default Input/Latency to 0ms, and internally have a max(5,
latency) wrapper around the value.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- updated to newest hiro API
- SFC performance profile builds once again
- hiro: Qt port completed
Errata 1: the hiro/Qt target won't run tomoko just yet. Starts by
crashing inside InputSettings because hiro/Qt isn't forcefully selecting
the first item added to a ComboButton just yet. Even with a monkey patch
to get around that, the UI is incredibly unstable. Lots of geometry
calculation bugs, and a crash when you try and access certain folders in
the browser dialog. Lots of work left to be done there, sadly.
Errata 2: the hiro/Windows port has black backgrounds on all ListView
items. It's because I need to test for unassigned colors and grab the
default Windows brush colors in those cases.
Note: alternating row colors on multi-column ListView widgets is gone
now. Not a bug. May add it back later, but I'm not sure. It doesn't
interact nicely with per-cell background colors.
Things left to do:
First, I have to fix the Windows and Qt target bugs.
Next, I need to go through and revise the hiro API even more (nothing
too major.)
Next, I need to update icarus to use the new hiro API, and add support
for the SFC games database.
Next, I have to rewrite my TSV->BML cheat code tool.
Next, I need to post a final WIP of higan+icarus publicly and wait a few
days.
Next, I need to fix any bugs reported from the final WIP that I can.
Finally, I should be able to release v095.
byuu says:
This will easily be the biggest diff in the history of higan. And not in
a good way.
* target-higan and target-loki have been blown away completely
* nall and ruby massively updated
* phoenix replaced with hiro (pretty near a total rewrite)
* target-higan restarted using hiro (just a window for now)
* all emulation cores updated to compile again
* installation changed to not require root privileges (installs locally)
For the foreseeable future (maybe even permanently?), the new higan UI
will only build under Linux/BSD with GTK+ 2.20+. Probably the most
likely route for Windows/OS X will be to try and figure out how to build
hiro/GTK on those platforms, as awful as that would be. The other
alternative would be to produce new UIs for those platforms ... which
would actually be a good opportunity to make something much more user
friendly.
Being that I just started on this a few hours ago, that means that for
at least a few weeks, don't expect to be able to actually play any
games. Right now, you can pretty much just compile the binary and that's
it. It's quite possible that some nall changes didn't produce
compilation errors, but will produce runtime errors. So until the UI can
actually load games, we won't know if anything is broken. But we should
mostly be okay. It was mostly just trim<1> -> trim changes, moving to
Hash::SHA256 (much cleaner), and patching some reckless memory copy
functions enough to compile.
Progress isn't going to be like it was before: I'm now dividing my time
much thinner between studying and other hobbies.
My aim this time is not to produce a binary for everyone to play games
on. Rather, it's to keep the emulator alive. I want to be able to apply
critical patches again. And I would also like the base of the emulator
to live on, for use in other emulator frontends that utilize higan.
byuu