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.
byuu says:
Not an official WIP (a WIP WIP? A meta-WIP?), just throwing in the new
fullscreen code, and I noticed that OpenGL colors in 30-bit mode are all
fucked up now for some strange reason. So I'm just using this snapshot
to debug the issue.
byuu says:
I've completely redone the ethos InputManager and ruby to work on
HID::Device objects instead of one giant scancode pool.
Currently only the udev driver supports the changes to ruby, so only
Linux users will be able to compile and run this WIP build.
The nice thing about the new system is that it's now possible to
uniquely identify controllers, so if you swap out gamepads, you won't
end up with it working but with all the mappings all screwed up. Since
higan lets you map multiple physical inputs to one emulated input, you
can now configure your keyboard and multiple gamepads to the same
emulated input, and then just use whatever controller you want.
Because USB gamepad makers failed to provide unique serial#s with each
controller, we have to limit the mapping to specific USB ports.
Otherwise, we couldn't distinguish two otherwise identical gamepads. So
basically your computer USB ports act like real game console input port
numbers. Which is kind of neat, I guess.
And the really nice thing about the new system is that we now have the
capability to support hotplugging input devices. I haven't yet added
this to any drivers, but I'm definitely going to add it to udev for v094
official.
Finally, with the device ID (vendor ID + product ID) exposed, we gain
one last really cool feature that we may be able to develop more in the
future. Say we created a joypad.bml file to include with higan. In it,
we'd store the Xbox 360 controller, and pre-defined button mappings for
each emulated system. So if higan detects you have an Xbox 360
controller, you can just plug it in and use it. Even better, we can
clearly specify the difference between triggers and analog axes, and
name each individual input. So you'd see "Xbox 360 Gamepad #1: Left
Trigger" instead of higan v093's "JP0::Axis2.Hi"
Note: for right now, ethos' input manager isn't filtering the device IDs
to look pretty. So you're going to see a 64-bit hex value for a device
ID right now instead of something like Joypad#N for now.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- GBA: SOUND_CTL_H is readable, fixes sound effects in Mario&Luigi
Superstar Saga [Cydrak] (note: game is still unplayable due to other
bugs)
- phoenix/Windows: workaround for Win32 API ListView bug, fixes slot
loading behavior
- ruby: added udev driver for Linux with rumble support, and added
rumble support to existing RawInput driver for XInput and DirectInput
- ethos: added new "Rumble" mapping to GBA input assignment, use it to
tell higan which controller to rumble (clear it to disable rumble)
- GBA: Game Boy Player rumble is now fully emulated
- core: added new normalized raw-color palette mode for Display
Emulation shaders
The way rumble was added to ethos was somewhat hackish. The support
doesn't really exist in nall.
I need to redesign the entire input system, but that's not a change
I want to make so close to a release.
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.
Tim Allen