byuu says:
Changelog:
- added 30 new PAL games to icarus (courtesy of Mikerochip)
- new version of libco no longer requires mprotect nor W|X permissions
- nall: default C compiler to -std=c11 instead of -std=c99
- nall: use `-fno-strict-aliasing` during compilation
- updated nall/certificates (hopefully for the last time)
- updated nall/http to newer coding conventions
- nall: improve handling of range() function
I didn't really work on higan at all, this is mostly just a release
because lots of other things have changed.
The most interesting is `-fno-strict-aliasing` ... basically, it joins
`-fwrapv` as being "stop the GCC developers from doing *really* evil
shit that could lead to security vulnerabilities or instabilities."
For the most part, it's a ~2% speed penalty for higan. Except for the
Sega Genesis, where it's a ~10% speedup. I have no idea how that's
possible, but clearly something's going very wrong with strict aliasing
on the Genesis core.
So ... it is what it is. If you need the performance for the non-Genesis
cores, you can turn it off in your builds. But I'm getting quite sick of
C++'s "surprises" and clever compiler developers, so I'm keeping it on
in all of my software going forward.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall::lstring -> nall::string_vector
- added IntegerBitField<type, lo, hi> -- hopefully it works correctly...
- Multitap 1-4 -> Super Multitap 2-5
- fixed SFC PPU CGRAM read regression
- huge amounts of SFC PPU IO register cleanups -- .bits really is lovely
- re-added the read/write(VRAM,OAM,CGRAM) helpers for the SFC PPU
- but they're now optimized to the realities of the PPU (16-bit data
sizes / no address parameter / where appropriate)
- basically used to get the active-display overrides in a unified place;
but also reduces duplicate code in (read,write)IO
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/vector rewritten from scratch
- higan/audio uses nall/vector instead of raw pointers
- higan/sfc/coprocessor/sdd1 updated with new research information
- ruby/video/glx and ruby/video/glx2: fuck salt glXSwapIntervalEXT!
The big change here is definitely nall/vector. The Windows, OS X and Qt
ports won't compile until you change some first/last strings to
left/right, but GTK will compile.
I'd be really grateful if anyone could stress-test nall/vector. Pretty
much everything I do relies on this class. If we introduce a bug, the
worst case scenario is my entire SFC game dump database gets corrupted,
or the byuu.org server gets compromised. So it's really critical that we
test the hell out of this right now.
The S-DD1 changes mean you need to update your installation of icarus
again. Also, even though the Lunar FMV never really worked on the
accuracy core anyway (it didn't initialize the PPU properly), it really
won't work now that we emulate the hard-limit of 16MiB for S-DD1 games.
byuu says:
New update. Most of the work today went into eliminating hiro::Image
from all objects in all ports, replacing with nall::image. That took an
eternity.
Changelog:
- fixed crashing bug when loading games [thanks endrift!!]
- toggling "show status bar" option adjusts window geometry (not
supposed to recenter the window, though)
- button sizes improved; icon-only button icons no longer being cut off
byuu says:
After 20 months of development, higan v095 is released at long last!
The most notable feature is vastly improved Game Boy Advance emulation.
With many thanks to endrift, Cydrak, Jonas Quinn and jchadwick, this
release contains substantially improved CPU timings and many bugfixes.
Being one of only two GBA emulators to offer ROM prefetch emulation,
higan is very near mGBA in terms of accuracy, and far ahead of all
others. As a result of these fixes, compatibility is also much higher
than in v094.
There are also several improvements to SNES emulation. Most
significantly is support for mid-scanline changes to the background mode
in the accuracy profile.
Due to substantial changes to the user interface library used by higan,
this release features yet again a brand-new UI. With the exception of
video shaders and NSS DIP switch selection, it is at feature-parity with
the previous UI. It also offers some new features that v094 lacked.
The cheat code database has also been updated to the latest version by
mightymo.
byuu says:
I'll post more detailed changes later, but basically:
- fixed Baldur's Gate bug
- guess if no flash ROM ID present (fixes Magical Vacation, many many
others)
- nall cleanups
- sfc/cartridge major cleanups
- bsxcartridge/"bsx" renamed to mcc/"mcc" after the logic chip it uses
(consistency with SGB/ICD2)
- ... and more!
byuu says:
Changelog:
- synchronizes lots of nall changes
- changes displayed program title from tomoko to higan(*)
- browser dialog sort is case-insensitive
- .sys folders look at user-selected library path; no longer hard-coded
Tried to get rid of the file modes from the Windows browser dialog, but
it was being a bitch so I left it on for now.
- The storage locations and binary still use tomoko. I'm not really sure
what to do here. The idea is there may be more than one "higan" UI in
the future, but I don't want people to go around calling the entire
program by the UI name. For official Windows releases, I can rename
the binaries to "higan-{profile}.exe", and by putting the config files
with the binary, they won't ever see the tomoko folder. Linux is of
course trickier.
Note: Windows users will need to edit hiro/components.hpp and comment
out these lines:
#define Hiro_Console
#define Hiro_IconView
#define Hiro_SourceView
#define Hiro_TreeView
I forgot to do that, and too lazy to upload another WIP.
byuu says:
This updates higan to use the new Markup::Node changes. This is a really
big change, and one slight typo anywhere could break certain classes of
games from playing.
I don't have ananke hooked up again yet, so I don't have the ability to
test this much. If anyone with some v094 game folders wouldn't mind
testing, I'd help out a great deal.
I'm most concerned about testing one of each SNES special chip game.
Most notably, systems like the SA-1, HitachiDSP and NEC-DSP were using
the fancier lookups, eg node["rom[0]/name"], which I had to convert to
a rather ugly node["rom"].at(0)["name"], which I'm fairly confident
won't work. I'm going to blame that on the fumes from the shelves I just
stained >.> Might work with node.find("rom[0]/name")(0) though ...? But
so ugly ... ugh.
That aside, this WIP adds the accuracy-PPU inlining, so the accuracy
profile should run around 7.5% faster than before.
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.
Tim Allen