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: added HblankTimer and VblankTimer IRQs; although they don't appear
to have any effect on any games that use them :/
- WS: added sound emulation; works perfectly in some games (eg Riviera);
is completely silent in most games (eg GunPey)
The sound emulation only partially supports the hypervoice (headphone
only) channel. I need to implement the SDMA before it'll actually do
anything useful. I'm a bit confused about how exactly things work. It
looks like the speaker volume shift and clamp only applies to speaker
mode and not headphone mode, which is very weird. Then there's the
software possibility of muting the headphones and/or the speaker.
Preferably, I want to leave the emulator always in headphone mode for
the extra audio channel. If there are games that force-mute the
headphones, but not speakers, then I may need to force headphones back
on but with the hypervoice channel disabled. I guess we'll see how
things go.
Rough guess is probably that the channels default to enabled after the
IPLROM, and games aren't bothering to manually enable them or something.
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:
- WS: fixed a major CPU bug where I was using the wrong bits for
ModR/M's memory mode
- WS: added grayscale PPU emulation (exceptionally buggy)
GunPey now runs, as long as you add:
eeprom name=save.ram size=0x800
to the manifest after importing with icarus.
Right now, you can't control the game due to missing keypad polling.
There's also a lot of glitchiness with the sprites. Seems like they're
not getting properly cleared sometimes or something.
Also, the PPU emulation is totally unrealistic bullshit. I decode and
evaluate every single tile and sprite on every single pixel of output.
No way in hell the hardware could ever come close to that. The speed's
around 500fps without the insane sprite evaluations, and around 90fps
with it. Obviously, I'll fix this in time.
Nothing else seems to run that I've tried. Not even far enough to
display any output whatsoever. Tried Langrisser Millenium, Rockman
& Forte and Riviera. I really need to update icarus to try and encode
eeprom/sram sizes, because that's going to break a lot of stuff if it's
missing.
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:
All 256 instructions implemented fully. Fixed a major bug with
instructions that both read and write to ModRM with displacement.
Riviera now runs into an infinite loop ... possibly crashed, possibly
waiting on interrupts or in to return something. Added a bunch of PPU
settings registers, but nothing's actually rendering with them yet.
Tim Allen