byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: split VCE from VDC
- HuC6280: changed bus from (uint21 addr) to (uint8 bank, uint13 addr)
- added SuperGrafx emulation (adds secondary VDC, plus new VPC)
The VDC now has no concept of the actual display raster timing, and
instead is driven by Vpulse (start of frame) and Hpulse (start of
scanline) signals from the VCE. One still can't render the start of the
next scanline onto the current scanline through overly aggressive
timings, but it shouldn't be too much more difficult to allow that to
occur now. This process incurs quite a major speed hit, so low-end
systems with Atom CPUs can't run things at 60fps anymore.
The timing needs a lot of work. The pixels end up very jagged if the VCE
doesn't output batches of 2-4 pixels at a time. But this should not be a
requirement at all, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there.
Yo, Bro and the 512-width mode of TV Sports Basketball is now broken as
a result of these changes, and I'm not sure why.
To load SuperGrafx games, you're going to have to change the .pce
extensions to .sg or .sgx. Or you can manually move the games from the
PC Engine folder to the SuperGrafx folder and change the game folder
extensions. I have no way to tell the games apart. Mednafen uses CRC32
comparisons, and I may consider that since there's only five games, but
I'm not sure yet.
The only SuperGrafx game that's playable right now is Aldynes. And the
priorities are all screwed up. I don't understand how the windows or the
priorities work at all from sgxtech.txt, so ... yeah. It's pretty
broken, but it's a start.
I could really use some help with this, as I'm very lost right now with
rendering :/
-----
Note that the SuperGrafx is technically its own system, it's not an
add-on.
As such, I'm giving it a separate .sys folder, and a separate library.
There's debate over how to name this thing. "SuperGrafx" appears more
popular than "Super Grafx". And you might also call it the "PC Engine
SuperGrafx", but I decided to leave off the prefix so it appears more
distinct.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: added cartridge ROM/RAM mirroring (fixes Alex Kidd)
- SMS: fixed 8x16 sprite mode (fixes Wonder Boy, Ys graphics)
- Z80: emulated "ex (sp),hl" instruction
- Z80: fixed INx NF (should be set instead of cleared)
- Z80: fixed loop condition check for CPxR, INxR, LDxR, OTxR (fixes
walking in Wonder Boy)
- SFC: removed Debugger and sfc/debugger.hpp
- icarus: connected MS, GG, MD importing to the scan dialog
- PCE: added emulation skeleton to higan and icarus
At this point, Master System games are fairly highly compatible, sans
audio. Game Gear games are running, but I need to crop the resolution
and support the higher color palette that they can utilize. It's really
something else the way they handled the resolution shrink on that thing.
The last change is obviously going to be the biggest news.
I'm very well aware it's not an ideal time to start on a new emulation
core, with the MS and MD cores only just now coming to life with no
audio support.
But, for whatever reason, my heart's really set on working on the PC
Engine. I wanted to write the final higan skeleton core, and get things
ready so that whenever I'm in the mood to work on the PCE, I can do so.
The skeleton is far and away the most tedious and obnoxious part of the
emulator development, because it's basically all just lots of
boilerplate templated code, lots of new files to create, etc.
I really don't know how things are going to proceed ... but I can say
with 99.9% certainty that this will be the final brand new core ever
added to higan -- at least one written by me, that is. This was
basically the last system from my childhood that I ever cared about.
It's the last 2D system with games that I really enjoy playing. No other
system is worth dividing my efforts and reducing the quality and amount
of time to work on the systems I have.
In the future, there will be potential for FDS, Mega CD and PCE-CD
support. But those will all be add-ons, and they'll all be really
difficult and challenge the entire design of higan's UI (it's entirely
cartridge-driven at this time.) None of them will be entirely new cores
like this one.
byuu says:
Sorry, two WIPs in one day. Got excited and couldn't wait.
Changelog:
- ADDQ, SUBQ shouldn't update flags when targeting an address register
- ADDA should sign extend effective address reads
- JSR was pushing the PC too early
- some improvements to 8-bit register reads on the VDP (still needs
work)
- added H/V counter reads to the VDP IO port region
- icarus: added support for importing Master System and Game Gear ROMs
- tomoko: added library sub-menus for each manufacturer
- still need to sort Game Gear after Mega Drive somehow ...
The sub-menu system actually isn't all that bad. It is indeed a bit more
annoying, but not as annoying as I thought it was going to be. However,
it looks a hell of a lot nicer now.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- moved Thread, Scheduler, Cheat functionality into emulator/ for
all cores
- start of actual Mega Drive emulation (two 68K instructions)
I'm going to be rather terse on MD emulation, as it's too early for any
meaningful dialogue here.
byuu says:
Sigh ... I'm really not a good person. I'm inherently selfish.
My responsibility and obligation right now is to work on loki, and
then on the Tengai Makyou Zero translation, and then on improving the
Famicom emulation.
And yet ... it's not what I really want to do. That shouldn't matter;
I should work on my responsibilities first.
Instead, I'm going to be a greedy, self-centered asshole, and work on
what I really want to instead.
I'm really sorry, guys. I'm sure this will make a few people happy,
and probably upset even more people.
I'm also making zero guarantees that this ever gets finished. As always,
I wish I could keep these things secret, so if I fail / give up, I could
just drop it with no shame. But I would have to cut everyone out of the
WIP process completely to make it happen. So, here goes ...
This WIP adds the initial skeleton for Sega Mega Drive / Genesis
emulation. God help us.
(minor note: apparently the new extension for Mega Drive games is .md,
neat. That's what I chose for the folders too. I thought it was .smd,
so that'll be fixed in icarus for the next WIP.)
(aside: this is why I wanted to get v100 out. I didn't want this code in
a skeleton state in v100's source. Nor did I want really broken emulation,
which the first release is sure to be, tarring said release.)
...
So, basically, I've been ruminating on the legacy I want to leave behind
with higan. 3D systems are just plain out. I'm never going to support
them. They're too complex for my abilities, and they would run too slowly
with my design style. I'm not willing to compromise my design ideals. And
I would never want to play a 3D game system at native 240p/480i resolution
... but 1080p+ upscaling is not accurate, so that's a conflict I want
to avoid entirely. It's also never going to emulate computer systems
(X68K, PC-98, FM-Towns, etc) because holy shit that would completely
destroy me. It's also never going emulate arcade machines.
So I think of higan as a collection of 2D emulators for consoles
and handhelds. I've gone over every major 2D gaming system there is,
looking for ones with games I actually care about and enjoy. And I
basically have five of those systems supported already. Looking at the
remaining list, I see only three systems left that I have any interest
in whatsoever: PC-Engine, Master System, Mega Drive. Again, I'm not in
any way committing to emulating any of these, but ... if I had all of
those in higan, I think I'd be content to really, truly, finally stop
writing more emulators for the rest of my life.
And so I decided to tackle the most difficult system first. If I'm
successful, the Z80 core should cover a lot of the work on the SMS. And
the HuC6280 should land somewhere between the NES and SNES in terms of
difficulty ... closer to the NES.
The systems that just don't appeal to me at all, which I will never touch,
include, but are not limited to:
* Atari 2600/5200/7800
* Lynx
* Jaguar
* Vectrex
* Colecovision
* Commodore 64
* Neo-Geo
* Neo-Geo Pocket / Color
* Virtual Boy
* Super A'can
* 32X
* CD-i
* etc, etc, etc.
And really, even if something were mildly interesting in there ... we
have to stop. I can't scale infinitely. I'm already way past my limit,
but I'm doing this anyway. Too many cores bloats everything and kills
quality on everything. I don't want higan to become MESS v2.
I don't know what I'll do about the Famicom Disk System, PC-Engine CD,
and Mega CD. I don't think I'll be able to achieve 60fps emulating the
Mega CD, even if I tried to.
I don't know what's going to happen here with even the Mega Drive. Maybe
I'll get driven crazy with the documentation and quit. Maybe it'll end
up being too complicated and I'll quit. Maybe the emulation will end up
way too slow and I'll give up. Maybe it'll take me seven years to get
any games playable at all. Maybe Steve Snake, AamirM and Mike Pavone
will pool money to hire a hitman to come after me. Who knows.
But this is what I want to do, so ... here goes nothing.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- hiro: BrowserDialog can navigate up to drive selection on Windows
- nall: (file,path,dir,base,prefix,suffix)name =>
Location::(file,path,dir,base,prefix,suffix)
- higan/tomoko: rename audio filter label from "Sinc" to "IIR - Biquad"
- higan/tomoko: allow loading files via icarus on the command-line
once again
- higan/tomoko: (begrudging) quick hack to fix presentation window focus
on startup
- higan/audio: don't divide output audio volume by number of streams
- processor/r65816: fix a regression in (read,write)DB; fixes Taz-Mania
- fixed compilation regressions on Windows and Linux
I'm happy with where we are at with code cleanups and stability, so I'd
like to release v100. But even though I'm not assigning any special
significance to this version, we should probably test it more thoroughly
first.
byuu says:
Absolutely major improvements to the WS/C emulation today.
Changelog: (all WS/C related)
- fixed channel 3 sweep pitch adjustment
- fixed channel 3 sweep value sign extension
- removed errant channel 5 speed setting (not what's really going on)
- fixed sign extension on channel 5 samples
- improved DAC mixing of all five audio channels
- fixed r26 regression with PPU timing loop
- fixed sprite windowing behavior (sprite attribute flag is window mode;
not window enable)
- added per-scanline register latching to the PPU
- IRQs should terminate HLT even when the IRQ enable register bits are
clear
- fixed PALMONO reads
- added blur emulation
- added color emulation (based on GBA, so it heavily desaturates colors;
not entirely correct, but it helps a lot)
- no longer decimating audio to 24KHz; running at full 3.072MHz through
the windowed sinc filter [1]
- cleaned up PPU portRead / portWrite functions significantly
- emulated a weird quirk as mentioned by trap15 regarding timer
frequency writes enabling said timers [2]
- emulated LCD_CTRL sleep bit; screen can now be disabled (always draws
black in this case for now)
- improved OAM caching; but it's still disabled because it causes huge
amounts of sprite glitches (unsure why)
- fixed rendering of sprites that wrap around the screen edges back to
the top/left of the display
- emulated keypad interrupts
- icarus: detect orientation bit in game header
- higan: use orientation setting in manifest to set default screen
rotation
[1] the 24KHz -> 3.072MHz sound change is huge. Sound is substantially
improved over the previous WIPs. It does come at a pretty major speed
penalty, though. This is the highest frequency of any system in higan
running through an incredibly (amazing, yet) demanding sinc resampler.
Frame rate dropped from around 240fps to 150fps with the sinc filter on.
If you choose a different audio filter, you'll get most of that speed
back, but audio will sound worse again.
[2] we aren't sure if this is correct hardware behavior or not. It seems
to very slightly help Magical Drop, but not much.
The blur emulation is brutal. It's absolutely required for Riviera's
translucency simulation of selected menu items, but it causes serious
headaches due to the WS's ~75hz refresh rate running on ~60hz monitors
without vsync. It's probably best to leave it off and just deal with the
awful flickering on Riviera's menu options.
Overall, WS/C emulation is starting to get quite usable indeed. Couple
of major bugs that I'd really like to get fixed before releasing it,
though. But they're getting harder and harder to fix ...
Major Bugs:
- Final Fantasy battle background music is absent. Sound effects still
work. Very weird.
- Final Fantasy IV scrolling during airship flight opening sequence is
horribly broken. Scrolls one screen at a time.
- Magical Drop flickers like crazy in-game. Basically unplayable like
this.
- Star Hearts character names don't appear in the smaller dialog box
that pops up.
Minor Bugs:
- Occasional flickering during Riviera opening scenes.
- One-frame flicker of Leda's sprite at the start of the first stage.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- icarus: WS/C detects RAM type/size heuristically now
- icarus: WS/C uses ram type=$type instead of $type
- WS: use back color instead of white for backdrop
- WS: fixed sprite count limit; removes all the garbled sprites from
GunPey
- WS: hopefully fixed sprite priority with screen 2
- WS: implemented keypad polling; GunPey is now fully playable
- SNES: added Super Disc expansion port device (doesn't do anything,
just for testing)
Note: WS is hard-coded to vertical orientation right now. But there's
basic code in there for all the horizontal stuff.
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:
More V30MZ implemented, a lot more to go.
icarus now supports importing WS and WSC games. It expects them to have
the correct file extension, same for GB and GBC.
> Ugh, apparently HiDPI icarus doesn't let you press the check boxes.
I set the flag value in the plist to false for now. Forgot to do it for
higan, but hopefully I won't forget before release.
byuu says:
A minor WIP to get us started.
Changelog:
- System::Video merged to PPU::Video
- System::Audio merged to DSP::Audio
- System::Configuration merged to Interface::Settings
- created emulator/emulator.cpp and accompanying object file for shared
code between all cores
Currently, emulator.cpp just holds a videoColor() function that takes
R16G16B16, performs gamma/saturation/luma adjust, and outputs
(currently) A8R8G8B8. It's basically an internal function call for cores
to use when generating palette entries. This code used to exist inside
ui-tomoko/program/interface.cpp, but we have to move it internal for
software display emulation. But in the future, we could add other useful
cross-core functionality here.
byuu says:
This WIP finally achieves the vision I've had for icarus.
I also fixed a mapping issue with Cx4 that, oddly enough, only caused
the "2" from the Mega Man X2 title screen to disappear.
[Editor's note - "the vision for icarus" was described in a separate,
public forum post: http://board.byuu.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?p=20584
Quoting for posterity:
icarus is now a full-fledged part of higan, and will be bundled with
each higan WIP as well. This will ensure that in the future, the
exact version of icarus you need to run higan will be included right
along with it. As of this WIP, physical manifest files are now truly
and entirely optional.
From now on, you can associate your ROM image files with higan's
main binary, or drop them directly on top of it, to load and play
your games.
Furthermore, there are two new menu options that appear under the
library menu when icarus is present:
- "Load ROM File ..." => gives you a single-file selection dialog to
import (and if possible) run the game
- "Import ROM Files ..." => gives you a multi-file import dialog
with checkboxes to pull in multiple games at once
Finally, as before, icarus can generate manifest.bml files for
folders that lack them.
For people who like the game folder and library system, nothing's
changed. Keep using higan as you have been.
For people who hate it, you can now use higan like your classic
emulators. Treat the "Library->{System Name}" entries as your
"favorites" list: the games you actually play. Treat the
"Library->Load ROM" as your standard open file dialog in other
emulators. And finally, treat "Advanced->Game Library" as your save
data path for cheat codes, save states, save RAM, etc.
]
byuu says:
higan supports Event mapping again.
Further, icarus can now detect Event ROMs and MSU1 games.
Event ROMs must be named "program.rom", "slot-(1,2,3).rom" MSU1 games
must contain "msu1.rom"; and tracks must be named "track-#.pcm"
When importing the CC'92, PF'94 ROMs, the program.rom and
slot-(1,2,3).rom files must be concatenated. The DSP firmware can
optionally be separate, but I'd recommend you go ahead and merge it all
to one file. Especially since that common "higan DSP pack" floating
around on the web left out the DSP1 ROMs (only has DSP1B) for god knows
what reason.
There is no support for loading "game.sfc+game.msu+game-*.pcm", because
I'm not going to support trying to pull in all of those files through
importing. Games will have to be distributed as game folders to use
MSU1. The MSU1 icarus support is simply so your game folders won't
require an unstable manifest.bml file to be played. So once they're in
there, they are good for life.
Note: the Event sizes in icarus' SFC heuristics are wrong for appended
firmware. Change from 0xXX8000 to 0xXX2000 and it works fine. Will be
fixed in r18.
Added Sintendo's flickering fixes. The window one's a big help for
regular controls, but the ListView double buffering does nothing for me
on Windows 7 :( Fairly sure I know why, but too lazy to try and fix that
now.
Also fixes the mMenu thing.
byuu says (in the WIP forum):
Changelog:
- satellaviewcartridge/SatellaviewCartridge is now bsmemory/BSMemory
- Emulation/BS-X Satellaview/ is now Emulation/BS Memory/
- masking is in for MCC's mcu (awful hack in the code, but that's
temporary)
- BS Memory types are now "flash" or "mrom"
- fixed loading Same Game - Tengai Hen
- icarus fixed up a lot; can load database entries for any supported
media type now (only the SFC DB exists currently)
mMenu::remove() fix will be in the next WIP.
byuu says (in the public beta thread):
Changelog:
- GBA emulation accuracy improved quite a bit
- video shaders are supported once again
- icarus shares settings.bml with higan; changing library path in
one now affects the other
- icarus manifest generation now uses my SNES game dumping database
for perfect mapping of US games
- major overhaul to manifest file format. As long as you have
v095-style folders without manifest.bml, you will be fine
- if not, go to higan->settings->configuration->advanced and check
"Ignore Manifests" before loading your first game
- new "Manifest Viewer" tool (not really meant for regular users;
more of a developer tool)
- experimental (but disabled in the binary) WASAPI driver. Help
stabilizing it would be *greatly* appreciated!
- lots of other stuff
r13 and r14 weren't posted as individual releases, but their changelogs
were posted.
byuu says about r13:
I'm not going to be posting WIPs for r13 and above for a while.
The reason is that I'm working on the major manifest overhaul I've
discussed previously on the icarus subforum.
I'm recreating my boards database from scratch using the map files
and the new map analyzer. The only games that will load are ones
I've created board definitions for, and updated
sfc/cartridge/markup.cpp to parse. Once I've finished all the
boards, then I'll update the heuristics.
Then finally, I'll sync the syntax changes over to the fc, gb, gba
cores.
Once that's done, I'll start posting WIPs again, along with a new
build of icarus.
But I'll still post changelogs as I work through things.
Changelog (r13):
- preservation: created new database-builder tool (merges
region-specific databases with boards)
- icarus: support new, external database format
(~/.config/icarus/Database/(Super Famicom.bml, ...)
- added 1A3B-(10,11,12); 1A3B-20
byuu says about r14:
r14 work:
I successfully created mappings for every board used in the US set.
I also updated icarus' heuristics to use the new mappings, and
created ones there for the boards that are only in the JP set.
Then I patched icarus to support pulling games out of the database
when it's used on a game folder to generate a manifest file.
Then I updated a lot of code in higan/sfc to support the new mapping
syntax. sfc/cartridge/markup.cpp is about half the size it used to
be with the new mappings, and I was able to kill off both map/id and
map/select entirely.
Then I updated all four emulated systems (and both subsystems) to
use "board" as the root node, and harmonized their syntax (made them
all more consistent with each other.)
Then I added a manifest viewer to the tools window+menu. It's kind
of an advanced user feature, but oh well. No reason to coddle people
when the feature is very useful for developers. The viewer will show
all manifests in order when you load multi-cart games as well.
Still not going to call any syntax 100% done right now, but
thankfully with the new manifest-free folders, nobody will have to
do anything to use the new format. Just download the new version and
go.
The Super Famicom Event stuff is currently broken (CC92/PF94
boards). That's gonna be fun to support.
byuu says about r15:
EDIT: small bug in icarus with heuristics. Edit
core/super-famicom.cpp line 27:
if(/*auto*/ markup = cartridge.markup) {
Gotta remove that "auto" so that it returns valid markup.
Resolved the final concerns I had with the new manifest format.
Right now there are two things that are definitely broken: MCC (BS-X
Town cart) and Event (CC '92 and PF'94).
And there are a few things that are untested: SPC7110, EpsonRTC,
SharpRTC, SDD1+RAM, SufamiTurbo, BS-X slotted carts.
byuu says:
This release adds a settings dialog that lets you control the library
path, optionally generate manifest.bml files, and optionally bypass the
internal games database (so far this is only the US SNES set.)
Also, the settings.bml file can exist in the same folder as the binary
now (portable mode). Plus it can share the same config file as
higan/tomoko itself does. This will allow you to change the library
location in either program and have it affect the other program as well.
It's a bit hackish, but it works >_>
Note: don't use this with higan v095.06 or earlier, or bad things will
happen.
byuu says:
- fixes checkboxes (-again- again [*again*])
- won't check folders with select all / unselect all
- won't crash anymore if the SNES ROM image is too small (Saturday Night
Slam Masters was crashing it before due to DB size error)
- corrected heuristics for Sufami Turbo base cart (mirrors the
absurdities of the real cart precisely, since it's one of a kind)
- corrected a few DB issues (BS-X name + PSRAM (again [*again*]), SNSM,
LAH) (_again_)
- these are temporary. Monkey patched in the generated .hpp source
rather than the actual DB
- not going to fix the SFT sizes because I want to verify what
happened there first
byuu says:
Changelog:
- return open bus instead of mirroring addresses on the bus (fixes
Mario&Luigi, Minish Cap, etc) [Jonas Quinn]
- add boolean flag to load requests for slotted game carts (fixes slot
load prompts)
- rename BS-X Town cart from psram to ram
- icarus: add support for game database
Note: I didn't rename "bsx" to "mcc" in the database for icarus before
uploading that. But I just fixed it locally, so it'll be in the next
WIP. For now, make it create the manifest for you and then rename it
yourself. I did fix the PSRAM size to 256kbit.
Tim Allen