byuu says:
I failed to complete a WIP, have five of eight cores updated with some
major changes to Emulator::Interface. I'll just post a quick temporary
WIP in the off chance someone wants to look over the new interface and
comment on it.
Also implemented screen saver suppression into hiro/GTK.
I should also add ... a plan of mine is to develop target-bsnes into a
more generic user interface, with the general idea being that
target-higan is for multiple Emulator::Interface cores at the same time,
and target-bsnes is for just one Emulator::Interface core.
The idea being that if one were to compile target-bsnes with the GBA
core, it'd become bgba, for instance.
I don't plan on releasing single-core emulators like this, but ... I don't see any downsides to being more flexible.
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:
(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:
Note: for Windows users, please go to nall/intrinsics.hpp line 60 and
correct the typo from "DISPLAY_WINDOW" to "DISPLAY_WINDOWS" before
compiling, otherwise things won't work at all.
This will be a really major WIP for the core SNES emulation, so please
test as thoroughly as possible.
I rewrote the 65816 CPU core's dispatcher from a jump table to a switch
table. This was so that I could pass class variables as parameters to
opcodes without crazy theatrics.
With that, I killed the regs.r[N] stuff, the flag_t operator|=, &=, ^=
stuff, and all of the template versions of opcodes.
I also removed some stupid pointless flag tests in xcn and pflag that
would always be true.
I sure hope that AWJ is happy with this; because this change was so that
my flag assignments and branch tests won't need to build regs.P into
a full 8-bit variable anymore.
It does of course incur a slight performance hit when you pass in
variables by-value to functions, but it should help with binary size
(and thus cache) by reducing a lot of extra functions. (I know I could
have used template parameters for some things even with a switch table,
but chose not to for the aforementioned reasons.)
Overall, it's about a ~1% speedup from the previous build. The CPU core
instructions were never a bottleneck, but I did want to fix the P flag
building stuff because that really was a dumb mistake v_v'
byuu says:
Finally!! Compilation works once again on Windows.
However, it's pretty buggy. Modality isn't really working right, you can
still poke at other windows, but when you select ListView items, they
redraw as empty boxes (need to process WM_DRAWITEM before checking
modality.)
The program crashes when you close it (probably a ruby driver's term()
function, that's what it usually is.)
The Layout::setEnabled(false) call isn't working right, so you get that
annoying chiming sound and cursor movement when mapping keyboard keys to
game inputs.
The column sizing seems off a bit on first display for the Hotkeys tab.
And probably lots more.
byuu says:
Main reason for this WIP was because of all the added lines to hiro for
selective component disabling. May as well get all the diff-noise apart
from code changes.
It also merges something I've been talking to Cydrak about ... making
nall::string::(integer,decimal) do built-in binary,octal,hex decoding
instead of just failing on those. This will have fun little side effects
all over the place, like being able to view a topic on my forum via
"forum.byuu.org/topic/0b10010110", heh.
There are two small changes to higan itself, though. First up, I fixed
the resampler ratio when loading non-SNES games. Tested and I can play
Game Boy games fine now. Second, I hooked up menu option hiding for
reset and controller selection. Right now, this works like higan v094,
but I'm thinking I might want to show the "Device -> Controller" even if
that's all that's there. It kind of jives nicer with the input settings
window to see the labels there, I think. And if we ever do add more
stuff, it'll be nice that people already always expect that menu there.
Remaining issues:
* add slotted cart loader (SGB, BSX, ST)
* add DIP switch selection window (NSS)
* add timing configuration (video/audio sync)
byuu says:
This version polishes up the input dialogue (reset, erase, disable
button when item not focused, split device ID from mapping name), adds
color emulation toggle, and add dummy menu items for remaining features
(to be filled in later.)
Also, it now compiles cleanly on Windows with GTK.
I didn't test with TDM-GCC-32, because for god knows what reason, the
32-bit version ships with headers from Windows 95 OSR2 only. So I built
with TDM-GCC-64 with arch=x86.
And uh, apparently, moving or resizing a window causes a Visual C++
runtime exception in the GTK+ DLLs. This doesn't happen with trance or
renshuu built with TDM-GCC-32. So, yeah, like I said, don't use -m32.
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