byuu says:
Changelog: (all WSC unless otherwise noted)
- fixed LINECMP=0 interrupt case (fixes FF4 world map during airship
sequence)
- improved CPU timing (fixes Magical Drop flickering and FF1 battle
music)
- added per-frame OAM caching (fixes sprite glitchiness in Magical Drop,
Riviera, etc.)
- added RTC emulation (fixes Dicing Knight and Judgement Silversword)
- added save state support
- added cheat code support (untested because I don't know of any cheat
codes that exist for this system)
- icarus: can now detect games with RTC chips
- SFC: bugfix to SharpRTC emulation (Dai Kaijuu Monogatari II)
- ( I was adding the extra leap year day to all 12 months instead of
just February ... >_< )
Note that the RTC emulation is very incomplete. It's not really
documented at all, and the two games I've tried that use it never even
ask you to set the date/time (so they're probably just using it to count
seconds.) I'm not even sure if I've implement the level-sensitive
behavior correctly (actually, now that I think about it, I need to mask
the clear bit in INT_ACK for the level-sensitive interrupts ...)
A bit worried about the RTC alarm, because it seems like it'll fire
continuously for a full minute. Or even if you turn it off after it
fires, then that doesn't seem to be lowering the line until the next
second ticks on the RTC, so that likely needs to happen when changing
the alarm flag.
Also not sure on this RTC's weekday byte. On the SharpRTC, it actually
computes this for you. Because it's not at all an easy thing to
calculate yourself in 65816 or V30MZ assembler. About 40 lines of code
to do it in C. For now, I'm requiring the program to calculate the value
itself.
Also note that there's some gibberish tiles in Judgement Silversword,
sadly. Not sure what's up there, but the game's still fully playable at
least.
Finally, no surprise: Beat-Mania doesn't run :P
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:
- WS: fixed bug when IRQs triggered during a rep string instruction
- WS: added sprite attribute caching (per-scanline); absolutely massive
speed-up
- WS: emulated limit of 32 sprites per scanline
- WS: emulated the extended PPU register bit behavior based on the
DISP_CTRL tile bit-depth setting
- WS: added "Rotate" key binding; can be used to flip the WS display
between horizontal and vertical in real-time
The prefix emulation may not be 100% hardware-accurate, but the edge
cases should be extreme enough to not come up in the WS library. No way
to get the emulation 100% down without intensive hardware testing.
trap15 pointed me at a workflow diagram for it, but that diagram is
impossible without a magic internal stack frame that grows with every
IRQ, and can thus grow infinitely large.
The rotation thing isn't exactly the most friendly set-up, but oh well.
I'll see about adding a default rotation setting to manifests, so that
games like GunPey can start in the correct orientation. After that, if
the LCD orientation icon turns out to be reliable, then I'll start using
that. But if there are cases where it's not reliable, then I'll leave it
to manual button presses.
Speaking of icons, I'll need a set of icons to render on the screen.
Going to put them to the top right on vertical orientation, and on the
bottom left for horizontal orientation. Just outside of the video
output, of course.
Overall, WS is getting pretty far along, but still some major bugs in
various games. I really need sound emulation, though. Nobody's going to
use this at all without that.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS: fixed lods, scas instructions
- WS: implemented missing GRP4 instructions
- WS: fixed transparency for screen one
- WSC: added color-mode PPU rendering
- WS+WSC: added packed pixel mode support
- WS+WSC: added dummy sound register reads/writes
- SFC: added threading to SuperDisc (it's hanging for right now; need to
clear IRQ on $21e2 writes)
SuperDisc Timer and Sound Check were failing before due to not turning
off IRQs on $21e4 clear, so I'm happy that's fixed now.
Riviera starts now, and displays the first intro screen before crashing.
Huge, huge amounts of corrupted graphics, though. This game's really
making me work for it :(
No color games seem fully playable yet, but a lot of monochrome and
color games are now at least showing more intro screen graphics before
dying.
This build defaults to horizontal orientation, but I left the inputs
bound to vertical orientation. Whoops. I still need to implement
a screen flip key binding.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- icarus: WS/C detects RAM type/size heuristically now
- icarus: WS/C uses ram type=$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:
Changelog:
- sfc/ppu/sprite updated to use new .bit(s) functions; masked sizes
better; added valid flags instead of using magic numbers
- ws/ppu updates to use new .bit(s) functions
- ws/ppu: added line compare interrupt support
- added ws/eeprom; emulation of WS/WSC internal EEPROM and cartridge
EEPROM (1kbit - 16kbit supported)
- added basic read/write handlers for remaining WS/WSC PPU registers
WS EEPROM emulation is basically a direct copy of trap15's code. Still
some unknown areas in there, but hopefully it's enough to get further
into games that depend on EEPROM support. Note that you'll have to
manually add the eeprom line to the manifest for now, as icarus doesn't
know how to detect EEPROM/sizes yet.
I figured the changes to the SNES PPU sprites would slow it down a tad,
but it actually sped it up. Most of the impact from the integer classes
are gone now.
byuu says:
Got it. Wow, that didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it was going
to.
Dropped from 127.5fps to 123.5fps to use Natural/Integer for
(u)int(8,16,32,64).
That's totally worth the cost.
byuu says:
Nothing WS-related this time.
First, I fixed expansion port device mapping. On first load, it was
mapping the expansion port device too late, so it ended up not taking
effect. I had to spin out the logic for that into
Program::connectDevices(). This was proving to be quite annoying while
testing eBoot (SNES-Hook simulation.)
Second, I fixed the audio->set(Frequency, Latency) functions to take
(uint) parameters from the configuration file, so the weird behavior
around changing settings in the audio panel should hopefully be gone
now.
Third, I rewrote the interface->load,unload functions to call into the
(Emulator)::System::load,unload functions. And I have those call out to
Cartridge::load,unload. Before, this was inverted, and Cartridge::load()
was invoking System::load(), which I felt was kind of backward.
The Super Game Boy really didn't like this change, however. And it took
me a few hours to power through it. Before, I had the Game Boy core
dummying out all the interface->(load,save)Request calls, and having the
SNES core make them for it. This is because the folder paths and IDs
will be different between the two cores.
I've redesigned things so that ICD2's Emulator::Interface overloads
loadRequest and saveRequest, and translates the requests into new
requests for the SuperFamicom core. This allows the Game Boy code to do
its own loading for everything without a bunch of Super Game Boy special
casing, and without any awkwardness around powering on with no cartridge
inserted.
This also lets the SNES side of things simply call into higher-level
GameBoy::interface->load,save(id, stream) functions instead of stabbing
at the raw underlying state inside of various Game Boy core emulation
classes. So things are a lot better abstracted now.
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:
Lots of improvements. We're now able to start executing some V30MZ
instructions. 32 of 256 opcodes implemented so far.
I hope this goes without saying, but there's absolutely no point in
loading WS/WSC games right now. You won't see anything until I have the
full CPU and partial PPU implemented.
ROM bank 2 works properly now, the I/O map is 16-bit (address) x 16-bit
(data) as it should be*, and I have a basic disassembler in place
(adding to it as I emulate new opcodes.)
(* I don't know what happens if you access an 8-bit port in 16-bit mode
or vice versa, so for now I'm just treating the handlers as always being
16-bit, and discarding the upper 8-bits when not needed.)
byuu says:
So, this WIP starts work on something new for higan. Obviously, I can't
keep it a secret until it's ready, because I want to continue daily WIP
releases, and of course, solicit feedback as I go along.
Tim Allen