byuu says (in the public announcement):
Not a large changelog this time, sorry. This release is mostly to fix
the SA-1 issue, and to get some real-world testing of the new scheduler
model. Most of the work in the past month has gone into writing a 68000
CPU core; yet it's still only about half-way finished.
Changelog (since the previous release):
- fixed SNES SA-1 IRQ regression (fixes Super Mario RPG level-up
screen)
- new scheduler for all emulator cores (precision of 2^-127)
- icarus database adds nine new SNES games
- added Input/Frequency to settings file (allows simulation of
latency)
byuu says (in the WIP forum):
Changelog:
- in 32-bit mode, Thread uses uint64\_t with 2^-63 time units (10^-7
precision in the worst case)
- nearly ten times the precision of an attosecond
- in 64-bit mode, Thread uses uint128\_t with 2^-127 time units
(10^-26 precision in the worst case)
- far more accurate than yoctoseconds; almost closing in on planck
time
Note: a quartz crystal is accurate to 10^-4 or 10^-5. A cesium fountain
atomic clock is accurate to 10^-15. So ... yeah. 2^-63 was perfectly
fine; but there was no speed penalty whatsoever for using uint128\_t in
64-bit mode, so why not?
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:
- higan/profile/ => higan/systems/ [temporary; unless we can't think of
a better base folder name]
- god-damn-better-have fixed the input polling bug
- re-added command-line and drag-and-drop loading
- command-line loading can now load multiple folders at once (SGB+GB
game; Sufami Turbo+Slot A+Slot B; etc)
- if you load just the base cart, it'll present you with a dialog to
optionally load slotted cart(s)
- MSU1 now goes through nall/vfs instead of directly accessing the
filesystem
- Famicom Cartridge, PPU cores updated to newer programming style
- there's countless opportunity for BitField and .bits() in the PPU
... but I'm worried about breaking things
If anyone has a working MSU1 game and can test the changes out, that'd
be appreciated. I still don't have a test ROM on my dev box.
I wouldn't worry too much about extensively testing the Famicom PPU
changes just yet ... I'm still struggling with what to name the structs
inside the classes between all of my emulators, and the BitField/.bits()
changes will be much more important to test at a later date.
The only use case left for Emulator::Interface::path(uint id) is for
21fx emulation. This peripheral loads a DLL/SO via LoadLibrary/dlopen,
which do not have any official ways to open a file in RAM. I'm
very hesitant to use the portable trick of writing the memory to a
temporary file, loading it, and deleting the temporary file once done
... it's a real waste of disk activity. I might make something like
vfs::file::isVirtual->bool,path()->string to get around this. But even
once I do, the underlying LoadLibrary/dlopen call is still going to be
direct disk access.
byuu says:
This is a few days old, but oh well.
This WIP changes nall,hiro,ruby,icarus back to (u)int(8,16,32,64)_t.
I'm slowly pushing for (u)int(8,16,32,64) to use my custom
Integer<Size>/Natural<Size> classes instead. But it's going to be one
hell of a struggle to get that into higan.
byuu says:
Note: balanced/performance profiles still broken, sorry.
Changelog:
- added nall/GNUmakefile unique() function; used on linking phase of
higan
- added nall/unique_pointer
- target-tomoko and {System}::Video updated to use
unique_pointer<ClassName> instead of ClassName* [1]
- locate() updated to search multiple paths [2]
- GB: pass gekkio's if_ie_registers and boot_hwio-G test ROMs
- FC, GB, GBA: merge video/ into the PPU cores
- ruby: fixed ~AudioXAudio2() typo
[1] I expected this to cause new crashes on exit due to changing the
order of destruction of objects (and deleting things that weren't
deleted before), but ... so far, so good. I guess we'll see what crops
up, especially on OS X (which is already crashing for unknown reasons on
exit.)
[2] right now, the search paths are: programpath(), {configpath(),
"higan/"}, {localpath(), "higan/"}; but we can add as many more as we
want, and we can also add platform-specific versions.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- restructured the project and removed a whole bunch of old/dead
directives from higan/GNUmakefile
- huge amounts of work on hiro/cocoa (compiles but ~70% of the
functionality is commented out)
- fixed a masking error in my ARM CPU disassembler [Lioncash]
- SFC: decided to change board cic=(411,413) back to board
region=(ntsc,pal) ... the former was too obtuse
If you rename Boolean (it's a problem with an include from ruby, not
from hiro) and disable all the ruby drivers, you can compile an
OS X binary, but obviously it's not going to do anything.
It's a boring WIP, I just wanted to push out the project structure
change now at the start of this WIP cycle.
Tim Allen