byuu says:
I've added tool tips to hiro for Windows, GTK, and Qt. I'm unsure how to
add them for Cocoa. I wasted am embarrassing ~14 hours implementing tool
tips from scratch on Windows, because the `TOOLTIPS_CLASS` widget just
absolutely refused to show up, no matter what I tried. As such, they're
not quite 100% native, but I would really appreciate any patch
submissions to help improve my implementation.
I added tool tips to all of the confusing settings in bsnes. And of
course, for those of you who don't like them, there's a configuration
file setting to turn them off globally.
I also improved Mega Drive handling of the Game Genie a bit, and
restructured the way the Settings class works in bsnes.
Starting now, I'm feature-freezing bsnes and higan. From this point
forward:
- polishing up and fixing bugs caused by the ruby/hiro changes
- adding DRC to XAudio2, and maybe exclusive mode to WGL
- correcting FEoEZ (English) to load and work again out of the box
Once that's done, a final beta of bsnes will go out, I'll fix any
reported bugs that I'm able to, and then v107 should be ready. This time
with higan being functional, but marked as v107 beta. v108 will restore
higan to production status again, alongside bsnes.
byuu says:
Everything *should* be working again, but of course that won't
actually be the case. Here's where things stand:
- bsnes, higan, icarus, and genius compile and run fine on FreeBSD
with GTK
- ruby video and audio drivers are untested on Windows, macOS, and
Linux
- hiro is untested on macOS
- bsnes' status bar is not showing up properly with hiro/qt
- bsnes and higan's about screen is not showing up properly with
hiro/qt (1x1 window size)
- bsnes on Windows crashes often when saving states, and I'm not sure
why ... it happens inside Encode::RLE
- bsnes on Windows crashes with ruby.input.windows (unsure why)
- bsnes on Windows fails to show the verified emblem on the status bar
properly
- hiro on Windows flickers when changing tabs
To build the Windows bsnes and higan ports, use
ruby="video.gdi audio.directsound"
Compilation error logs for Linux will help me fix the inevitable list of
typos there. I can fix the typos on other platforms, I just haven't
gotten to it yet.
byuu says:
Okay, so the WIPs-within-WIPs thing wasn't achieving its desired effect,
and it ended up causing me to have to redo some work on hiro since my
last local snapshot was of r52. So, heck it. I'll just do mostly
non-functional WIPs for a bit, and worry about the fallout years later
when I'm trying to find an emulation regression and cursing that the
WIPs aren't compiling.
I ported all of the ruby input drivers to the new syntax, as well as the
OpenAL driver. If you patch the ruby drivers for Linux with this in
mind, bsnes should compile and run there again.
Also, the bsnes program icon has returned, now that the new hiro layout
code is mature enough and I can simply add and remove the icon as a
Canvas instead of having to try and render into a viewport. The icon
shows up instantly with the main window.
byuu says:
I've completed moving all the class objects from `unique_pointer<T>` to
just T. The one exception is the Emulator::Interface instance. I can
absolutely make that a global object, but only in bsnes where there's
just the one emulation core.
I also moved all the SettingsWindow and ToolsWindow panels out to their
own global objects, and fixed a very difficult bug with GTK TabFrame
controls.
The configuration settings panel is now the emulator settings panel. And
I added some spacing between bold label sections on both the emulator
and driver settings panels.
I gave fixing ComboButtonItem my best shot, given I can't reproduce the
crash. Probably won't work, though.
Also made a very slight consistency improvement to ruby and renamed
driverName() to driver().
...
An important change ... as a result of moving bsnes to global objects,
this means that the constructors for all windows run before the
presentation window is displayed. Before this change, only the
presentation window was constructed first berore displaying it, followed
by the construction of the rest of the GUI windows.
The upside to this is that as soon as you see the main window, the GUI
is ready to go without a period where it's unresponsive.
The downside to this is it takes about 1.5 seconds to show the main
window, compared to around 0.75 seconds before.
I've no intention of changing that back. So if the startup time becomes
a problem, then we'll just have to work on optimizing hiro, so that it
can construct all the global Window objects quicker. The main way to do
that would be to not do calls to the Layout::setGeometry functions for
every widget added, and instead wait until the window is displayed. But
I don't have an easy way to do that, because you want the widget
geometry values to be sane even before the window is visible to help
size certain things.
byuu says:
These WIPs-within-WIPs are getting more and more broken ... this isn't
going the way I wanted.
But ... this time around, I've revamped the entire ruby API again, to
solve a bunch of tough problems that have always made using ruby really
clunky.
But there are *so many* ruby drivers that it's going to take a long
time to work through them all. This WIP is only going to run bsnes, and
only on FreeBSD, and only with some drivers.
hiro's Application::initialize() now calls hiro::initialize(), which you
define inside of your hiro apps. This lets you call
Application::setName(...) before anything else in hiro runs. This is
essential on Xorg to set program icons, for instance.
With the ruby rewrite and the change to hiro, I can get away from the
need to make everything in bsnes/higan pointers to objects, and can now
just declare them as regular objects.
byuu wrote:
Sigh ...
asio.hpp needs #include <nall/windows/registry.hpp>
[Since the last WIP, byuu also posted the following message. -Ed.]
ruby drivers have all been updated (but not tested outside of BSD), and
I redesigned the settings window. The driver functionality all exists on
a new "Drivers" panel, the emulator/hack settings go to a
"Configuration" panel, and the video/audio panels lose driver settings.
As does the settings menu and its synchronize options.
I want to start pushing toward a v107 release. Critically, I will need
DirectSound and ALSA to support dynamic rate control. I'd also like to
eliminate the other system manifest.bml files. I need to update the
cheat code database format, and bundle at least a few quark shaders --
although I still need to default to Direct3D on Windows.
Turbo keys would be nice, if it's not too much effort. Aside from
netplay, it's the last significant feature I'm missing.
I think for v107, higan is going to be a bit rough around the edges
compared to bsnes. And I don't think it's practical to finish the bsnes
localization support.
I'm thinking we probably want another WIP to iron out any critical
issues, but this time there should be a feature freeze with the next
WIP.
byuu says:
Sigh, I seem to be spiraling a bit here ... but the work is very
important. Hopefully I can get a solid WIP together soon. But for now...
I've integrated dynamic rate control into ruby::Audio via
setDynamic(bool) for now. It's very demanding, as you would expect. When
it's not in use, I realized the OSS driver's performance was pretty bad
due to calling write() for every sample for every channel. I implemented
a tiny 256-sample buffer and bsnes went from 290fps to 330fps on my
FreeBSD desktop. It may be possible to do the same buffering with DRC,
but for now, I'm not doing so, and adjusting the audio input frequency
on every sample.
I also added ruby::Video::setFlush(bool), which is available only in the
OpenGL drivers, and this causes glFinish() to be called after swapping
display buffers. I really couldn't think of a good name for this, "hard
GPU sync" sounds kind of silly. In my view, flush is what commits queued
events. Eg fflush(). OpenGL of course treats glFlush differently (I
really don't even know what the point of it is even after reading the
manual ...), and then has glFinish ... meh, whatever. It's
setFlush(bool) until I come up with something better. Also as expected,
this one's a big hit to performance.
To implement the DRC, I started putting helper functions into the ruby
video/audio/input core classes. And then the XVideo driver started
crashing. It took hours and hours and hours to track down the problem:
you have to clear XSetWindowAttributes to zero before calling
XCreateWindow. No amount of `--sync`, `gdb break gdk_x_error`, `-Og`,
etc will make Xlib be even remotely helpful in debugging errors like
this.
The GLX, GLX2, and XVideo drivers basically worked by chance before. If
the stack frame had the right memory cleared, it worked. Otherwise it'd
crash with BadValue, and my changing things broke that condition on the
XVideo driver. So this has been fixed in all three now.
Once XVideo was running again, I realized that non-power of two video
sizes were completely broken for the YUV formats. It took a while, but I
managed to fix all of that as well.
At this point, most of ruby is going to be broken outside of FreeBSD, as
I still need to finish updating all the drivers.
byuu says:
I stand corrected, I managed to create and even larger diff than ever.
This one weighs in at 309KiB `>__>`
I'll have to create a changelog later, I'm too tired right now to go
through all of that.
byuu says:
This release provides several major improvements to Mega Drive emulation
which enhances compatibility a good deal. It also includes important
Super Famicom mosaic emulation improvements, plus a much-needed SuperFX
save state issue fix.
Changelog (since v104):
- higan: many improvements to Emulator::Interface to support
forks/frontends
- higan: refreshed program icon
- icarus: new program icon
- Game Boy Advance: slight emulation speedup over v104
- Game Boy Advance: synchronize APU FIFO updates better
- Mega Drive: added automatic region detection [hex_usr]
- Mega Drive: support 8-bit SRAM
- Game Boy Advance: fixed bug when changing to THUMB mode via MSR
[MerryMage]
- Master System: fix bug in backdrop color and background 0 priority
[hex_usr]
- Mega Drive: backgrounds always update output priority bit [Cydrak]
- Mega Drive: emulated interlaced video output
- Mega Drive: emulated shadow/highlight mode [Cydrak]
- Super Famicom: auto joypad polling clears the shift register when
starting
- Super Famicom: added new low-entropy RAM initialization mode to more
closely match hardware
- Game Boy Advance: rumble will now time out after being left on for
500ms
- ruby: improved rumble support in udev input driver [ma_rysia]
- M68K: `move.b (a7)[+/-]` adjust a7 by two
- M68K: illegal/lineA/lineF opcodes do not modify the stack register
- Mega Drive: emulate VIP status bit
- uPD7725: improved emulation of OV1/S1 flags [byuu, AWJ, Lord
Nightmare]
- uPD7725: improved handling of DP, RP updates [Jonas Quinn]
- Super Famicom: improved emulation of mosaic effects in hires,
interlace, and offset-per-tile modes [byuu, Cydrak]
- ruby: improved Direct3D exclusive mode monitor selection [Cydrak]
- Super Famicom: fixed save state bug affecting SuperFX games
[Cydrak]
- Mega Drive: added workaround for Clang compiler bug; allowing this
core to work on macOS [Cydrak, Sintendo]
- higan: hotkeys now also trigger when the main window lacks focus yet
higan is set to allow input on focus loss
- higan: fixed an edge case where `int16_t` ↔ `double` audio
conversion could possibly result in overflows
- higan: fixed a crash on macOS when choosing quit from the
application menu [ncbncb]
Changelog (since the previous WIP):
- higan: restored `make console=true`
- tomoko: if you allow input when main window focus is lost, hotkeys
can now be triggered without focus as well
- hiro/cocoa: fix crash on exit from menu [ncbncb]
- ruby: smarter `double` → `int16_t` conversion to prevent
underflow/overflow
byuu says:
Changelog:
- gba,ws: removed Thread::step() override¹
- processor/m68k: move.b (a7)+ and move.b (a7)- adjust a7 by two, not
by one²
- tomoko: created new initialize(Video,Audio,Input)Driver() functions³
- ruby/audio: split Audio::information into
Audio::available(Devices,Frequencies,Latencies,Channels)³
- ws: added Model::(WonderSwan,WonderSwanColor,SwanCrystal)()
functions for consistency with other cores
¹: this should hopefully fix GBA Pokemon Pinball. Thanks to
SuperMikeMan for pointing out the underlying cause.
²: this fixes A Ressaha de Ikou, Mega Bomberman, and probably more
games.
³: this is the big change: so there was a problem with WASAPI where
you might change your device under the audio settings panel. And your
new device may not support the frequency that your old device used. This
would end up not updating the frequency, and the pitch would be
distorted.
The old Audio::information() couldn't tell you what frequencies,
latencies, or channels were available for all devices simultaneously, so
I had to split them up. The new initializeAudioDriver() function
validates you have a correct driver, or it defaults to none. Then it
validates a correct device name, or it defaults to the first entry in
the list. Then it validates a correct frequency, or defaults to the
first in the list. Then finally it validates a correct latency, or
defaults to the first in the list.
In this way ... we have a clear path now with no API changes required to
select default devices, frequencies, latencies, channel counts: they
need to be the first items in their respective lists.
So, what we need to do now is go through and for every audio driver that
enumerates devices, we need to make sure the default device gets added
to the top of the list. I'm ... not really sure how to do this with most
drivers, so this is definitely going to take some time.
Also, when you change a device, initializeAudioDriver() is called again,
so if it's a bad device, it will disable the audio driver instead of
continuing to send samples at it and hoping that the driver blocked
those API calls when it failed to initialize properly.
Now then ... since it was a decently-sized API change, it's possible
I've broken compilation of the Linux drivers, so please report any
compilation errors so that I can fix them.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- ruby: ported all remaining drivers to new API¹
- ruby/wasapi: fix for dropping one sample per period [SuperMikeMan]
- gb: emulated most of the TAMA RTC; but RTC state is still volatile²
¹: the new ports are:
- audio/{directsound, alsa, pulseaudio, pulseaudiosimple, ao}
- input/{udev, quartz, carbon}
It's pretty much guaranteed many of them will have compilation errors.
Please paste the error logs and I'll try to fix them up. It may take a
WIP or two to get there.
It's also possible things broke from the updates. If so, I could use
help comparing the old file to the new file, looking for mistakes, since
I can't test on these platforms apart from audio/directsound.
Please report working drivers in this list, so we can mark them off the
list. I'll need both macOS and Linux testers.
audio/directsound.cpp:112:
if(DirectSoundCreate(0, &_interface, 0) != DS_OK) return terminate(), false;
²: once I get this working, I'll add load/save support for the RTC
values. For now, the RTC data will be lost when you close the emulator.
Right now, you can set the date/time in real-time mode, and when you
start the game, the time will be correct, and the time will tick
forward. Note that it runs off emulated time instead of actual real
time, so if you fast-forward to 300%, one minute will be 20 seconds.
The really big limitation right now is that when you exit the game, and
restart it, and resume a new game, the hour spot gets corrupted, and
this seems to instantly kill your pet. Fun. This is crazy because the
commands the game sends to the TAMA interface are identical between
starting a new game and getting in-game versus loading a game.
It's likely going to require disassembling the game's code and seeing
what in the hell it's doing, but I am extremely bad at LR35092 assembly.
Hopefully endrift can help here :|
byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulator/audio: added the ability to change the output frequency at
run-time without emulator reset
- tomoko: display video synchronize option again¹
- tomoko: Settings→Configuration expanded to Settings→{Video,
Audio, Input, Hotkey, Advanced} Settings²
- tomoko: fix default population of audio settings tab
- ruby: Audio::frequency is a double now (to match both
Emulator::Audio and ASIO)³
- tomoko: changing the audio device will repopulate the frequency and
latency lists
- tomoko: changing the audio frequency can now be done in real-time
- ruby/audio/asio: added missing device() information, so devices can
be changed now
- ruby/audio/openal: ported to new API; added device selection support
- ruby/audio/wasapi: ported to new API, but did not test yet (it's
assuredly still broken)⁴
¹: I'm uneasy about this ... but, I guess if people want to disable
audio and just have smooth scrolling video ... so be it. With
Screwtape's documentation, hopefully that'll help people understand that
video synchronization always breaks audio synchronization. I may change
this to a child menu that lets you pick between {no synchronization,
video synchronization, audio synchronization} as a radio selection.
²: given how much more useful the video and audio tabs are now, I
felt that four extra menu items were worth saving a click and going
right to the tab you want. This also matches the behavior of the Tools
menu displaying all tool options and taking you directly to each tab.
This is kind of a hard change to get used to ... but I think it's for
the better.
³: kind of stupid because I've never seen a hardware sound card where
floor(frequency) != frequency, but whatever. Yay consistency.
⁴: I'm going to move it to be event-driven, and try to support 24-bit
sample formats if possible. Who knows which cards that'll fix and which
cards that'll break. I may end up making multiple WASAPI drivers so
people can find one that actually works for them. We'll see.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- ruby: rewrote the API interfaces for Video, Audio, Input
- ruby/audio: can now select the number of output channels (not useful
to higan, sorry)
- ruby/asio: various improvements
- tomoko: audio settings panel can now select separate audio devices
(for ASIO, OSS so far)
- tomoko: audio settings panel frequency and latency lists are
dynamically populated now
Note: due to the ruby API rewrite, most drivers will not compile. Right
now, the following work:
- video: Direct3D, XShm
- audio: ASIO, OSS
- input: Windows, SDL, Xlib
It takes a really long time to rewrite these (six hours to do the
above), so it's going to be a while before we're back at 100%
functionality again.
Errata:
- ASIO needs device(), setDevice()
- need to call setDevice() at program startup to populate
frequency/latency settings properly
- changing the device and/or frequency needs to update the emulator
resampler rates
The really hard part is going to be the last one: the only way to change
the emulator frequency is to flush all the audio streams and then
recompute all the coefficients for the resamplers. If this is called
during emulation, all audio streams will be erased and thus no sound
will be output. I'll most likely be forced to simply ignore
device/frequency changes until the user loads another game. It is at
least possible to toggle the latency dynamically.
byuu says:
Added VDP sprite rendering. Can't get any games far enough in to see if
it actually works. So in other words, it doesn't work at all and is 100%
completely broken.
Also added 68K exceptions and interrupts. So far only the VDP interrupt
is present. It definitely seems to be firing in commercial games, so
that's promising. But the implementation is almost certainly completely
wrong. There is fuck all of nothing for documentation on how interrupts
actually work. I had to find out the interrupt vector numbers from
reading the comments from the Sonic the Hedgehog disassembly. I have
literally no fucking clue what I0-I2 (3-bit integer priority value in
the status register) is supposed to do. I know that Vblank=6, Hblank=4,
Ext(gamepad)=2. I know that at reset, SR.I=7. I don't know if I'm
supposed to block interrupts when I is >, >=, <, <= to the interrupt
level. I don't know what level CPU exceptions are supposed to be.
Also implemented VDP regular DMA. No idea if it works correctly since
none of the commercial games run far enough to use it. So again, it's
horribly broken for usre.
Also improved VDP fill mode. But I don't understand how it takes
byte-lengths when the bus is 16-bit. The transfer times indicate it's
actually transferring at the same speed as the 68K->VDP copy, strongly
suggesting it's actually doing 16-bit transfers at a time. In which case,
what happens when you set an odd transfer length?
Also, both DMA modes can now target VRAM, VSRAM, CRAM. Supposedly there's
all kinds of weird shit going on when you target VSRAM, CRAM with VDP
fill/copy modes, but whatever. Get to that later.
Also implemented a very lazy preliminary wait mechanism to to stall out
a processor while another processor exerts control over the bus. This
one's going to be a major work in progress. For one, it totally breaks
the model I use to do save states with libco. For another, I don't
know if a 68K->VDP DMA instantly locks the CPU, or if it the CPU could
actually keep running if it was executing out of RAM when it started
the DMA transfer from ROM (eg it's a bus busy stall, not a hard chip
stall.) That'll greatly change how I handle the waiting.
Also, the OSS driver now supports Audio::Latency. Sound should be
even lower latency now. On FreeBSD when set to 0ms, it's absolutely
incredible. Cannot detect latency whatsoever. The Mario jump sound seems
to happen at the very instant I hear my cherry blue keyswitch activate.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS/WSC: re-added support for screen rotation (code is inside WS core)
- ruby: changed sample(uint16_t left, uint16_t right) to sample(int16_t
left, int16_t right);
- requires casting to uint prior to shifting in each driver, but
I felt it was misleading to use uint16_t just to avoid that
- ruby: WASAPI is now built in by default; has wareya's improvements,
and now supports latency adjust
- tomoko: audio settings panel has new "Exclusive Mode" checkbox for
WASAPI driver only
- note: although the setting *does* take effect in real-time, I'd
suggest restarting the emulator after changing it
- tomoko: audio latency can now be set to 0ms (which in reality means
"the minimum supported by the driver")
- all: increased cothread size from 512KiB to 2MiB to see if it fixes
bullshit AMD driver crashes
- this appears to cause a slight speed penalty due to cache locality
going down between threads, though
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SFC: balanced profile removed
- SFC: performance profile removed
- SFC: code for handling non-threaded CPU, SMP, DSP, PPU removed
- SFC: Coprocessor, Controller (and expansion port) shared Thread code
merged to SFC::Cothread
- Cothread here just means "Thread with CPU affinity" (couldn't think
of a better name, sorry)
- SFC: CPU now has vector<Thread*> coprocessors, peripherals;
- this is the beginning of work to allow expansion port devices to be
dynamically changed at run-time
- ruby: all audio drivers default to 48000hz instead of 22050hz now if
no frequency is assigned
- note: the WASAPI driver can default to whatever the native frequency
is; doesn't have to be 48000hz
- tomoko: removed the ability to change the frequency from the UI (but
it will display the frequency used)
- tomoko: removed the timing settings panel
- the goal is to work toward smooth video via adaptive sync
- the model is broken by not being in control of the audio frequency
anyway
- it's further broken by PAL running at 50hz and WSC running at 75hz
- it was always broken anyway by SNES interlace timing varying from
progressive timing
- higan: audio/ stub created (for now, it's just nall/dsp/ moved here
and included as a header)
- higan: video/ stub created
- higan/GNUmakefile: now includes build rules for essential components
(libco, emulator, audio, video)
The audio changes are in preparation to merge wareya's awesome WASAPI
work without the need for the nall/dsp resampler.
byuu says:
This WIP substantially restructures the ruby API for the first time
since that project started.
It is my hope that with this restructuring, destruction of the ruby
objects should now be deterministic, which should fix the crashing on
closing the emulator on Linux. We'll see I guess ... either way, it
removed two layers of wrappers from ruby, so it's a pretty nice code
cleanup.
It won't compile on Windows due to a few issues I didn't see until
uploading the WIP, too lazy to upload another. But I fixed all the
compilation issues locally, so it'll work on Windows again with the next
WIP (unless I break something else.)
(Kind of annoying that Linux defines glActiveTexture but Windows
doesn't.)
byuu says:
The library window is gone, and replaced with
hiro::BrowserWindow::openFolder(). This gives navigation capabilities to
game loading, and it also completes our slotted cart selection code. As
an added bonus, it's less code this way, too.
I also set the window size to consistent sizes between all emulated
systems, so that switching between SFC and GB don't cause the window
size to keep changing, and so that the scaling size is consistent (eg at
normal scale, GB @ 3x is closer to SNES @ 2x.) This means black borders
in GB/GBA mode, but it doesn't look that bad, and it's not like many
people ever use these modes anyway.
Finally, added the placeholder tabs for video, audio and timing. I don't
intend to add the timing calculator code to v095 (it might be better as
a separate tool), but I'll add the ability to set video/audio rates, at
least.
Glitch 1: despite selecting the first item in the BrowserDialog list, if
you press enter when the window appears, it doesn't activate the item
until you press an arrow key first.
Glitch 2: in Game Boy mode, if you set the 4x window size, it's not
honoring the full requested height because the viewport is smaller than
the window. 8+ years of trying to get GTK+ and Qt to simply set the god
damned window size I ask for, and I still can't get them to do it
reliably.
Remaining issues:
- finish configuration panels (video, audio, timing)
- fix ruby driver compilation on Windows
- add DIP switch selection window (NSS) [I may end up punting this one
to v096]
byuu says:
I fixed the hiro layout enable bug, so when you go to assign joypad
input, the window disables itself so your input doesn't mess with the
controls.
I added "reset" to the hotkeys, in case you feel like clearing all of
them at once.
I added device selection support and the ability to disable audio
synchronization (run > 60fps) to the ruby/OSS driver. This is exposed in
tomoko's configuration file.
I added checks to stringify so that assigning null char* strings to
nall::string won't cause crashes anymore (technically the crash was in
strlen(), which doesn't check for null strings, but whatever ... I'll do
the check myself.)
I hooked up BrowserDialog::folderSelect() to loading slotted media for
now. Tested it by loading a Game Boy game successfully through the Super
Game Boy. Definitely want to write a custom window for this though, that
looks more like the library dialog.
Remaining issues:
- finish slotted cart loader (SGB, BSX, ST)
- add DIP switch selection window (NSS) [I may end up punting this one
to v096]
- add more configuration panels (video, audio, timing)
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added Cocoa target: higan can now be compiled for OS X Lion
[Cydrak, byuu]
- SNES/accuracy profile hires color blending improvements - fixes
Marvelous text [AWJ]
- fixed a slight bug in SNES/SA-1 VBR support caused by a typo
- added support for multi-pass shaders that can load external textures
(requires OpenGL 3.2+)
- added game library path (used by ananke->Import Game) to
Settings->Advanced
- system profiles, shaders and cheats database can be stored in "all
users" shared folders now (eg /usr/share on Linux)
- all configuration files are in BML format now, instead of XML (much
easier to read and edit this way)
- main window supports drag-and-drop of game folders (but not game files
/ ZIP archives)
- audio buffer clears when entering a modal loop on Windows (prevents
audio repetition with DirectSound driver)
- a substantial amount of code clean-up (probably the biggest
refactoring to date)
One highly desired target for this release was to default to the optimal
drivers instead of the safest drivers, but because AMD drivers don't
seem to like my OpenGL 3.2 driver, I've decided to postpone that. AMD
has too big a market share. Hopefully with v093 officially released, we
can get some public input on what AMD doesn't like.
byuu describes the changes since v067:
This release officially introduces the accuracy and performance cores,
alongside the previously-existing compatibility core. The accuracy core
allows the most accurate SNES emulation ever seen, with every last
processor running at the lowest possible clock synchronization level.
The performance core allows slower computers the chance to finally use
bsnes. It is capable of attaining 60fps in standard games even on an
entry-level Intel Atom processor, commonly found in netbooks.
The accuracy core is absolutely not meant for casual gaming at all. It
is meant solely for getting as close to 100% perfection as possible, no
matter the cost to speed. It should only be used for testing,
development or debugging.
The compatibility core is identical to bsnes v067 and earlier, but is
now roughly 10% faster. This is the default and recommended core for
casual gaming.
The performance core contains an entirely new S-CPU core, with
range-tested IRQs; and uses blargg's heavily-optimized S-DSP core
directly. Although there are very minor accuracy tradeoffs to increase
speed, I am confident that the performance core is still more accurate
and compatible than any other SNES emulator. The S-CPU, S-SMP, S-DSP,
SuperFX and SA-1 processors are all clock-based, just as in the accuracy
and compatibility cores; and as always, there are zero game-specific
hacks. Its compatibility is still well above 99%, running even the most
challenging games flawlessly.
If you have held off from using bsnes in the past due to its system
requirements, please give the performance core a try. I think you will
be impressed. I'm also not finished: I believe performance can be
increased even further.
I would also strongly suggest Windows Vista and Windows 7 users to take
advantage of the new XAudio2 driver by OV2. Not only does it give you
a performance boost, it also lowers latency and provides better sound by
way of skipping an API emulation layer.
Changelog:
- Split core into three profiles: accuracy, compatibility and
performance
- Accuracy core now takes advantage of variable-bitlength integers (eg
uint24_t)
- Performance core uses a new S-CPU core, written from scratch for speed
- Performance core uses blargg's snes_dsp library for S-DSP emulation
- Binaries are now compiled using GCC 4.5
- Added a workaround in the SA-1 core for a bug in GCC 4.5+
- The clock-based S-PPU renderer has greatly improved OAM emulation;
fixing Winter Gold and Megalomania rendering issues
- Corrected pseudo-hires color math in the clock-based S-PPU renderer;
fixing Super Buster Bros backgrounds
- Fixed a clamping bug in the Cx4 16-bit triangle operation [Jonas
Quinn]; fixing Mega Man X2 "gained weapon" star background effect
- Updated video renderer to properly handle mixed-resolution screens
with interlace enabled; fixing Air Strike Patrol level briefing screen
- Added mightymo's 2010-08-19 cheat code pack
- Windows port: added XAudio2 output support [OV2]
- Source: major code restructuring; virtual base classes for processor
- cores removed, build system heavily modified, etc.
Moonchild