byuu says:
Changelog:
- removed Emulator::Interface::videoFrequency(), audioFrequency()¹
- (MS,GG,MD)/PSG: removed inversion on noise channel LFSR update
[mic_]
- MD/PSG: lowered volume to match YM2612 volume
- MD/YM2612: added Cydrak's emulation of FM channels and LFO²
¹: These were no longer used by the UI. The video frequency is
adaptive on many systems. And the audio frequency is meaningless due to
Emulator::Audio always outputting a consistent frequency specified by
the UI. Plus, take the Genesis where there's two sound chips running at
different frequencies. So, these had to go.
²: Due to some lurking bugs, the audio is completely broken
unfortunately. Will need to be debugged :(
First pass looking for any typos didn't yield any obvious results.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- MD/PSG: fixed 68K bus Z80 status read address location
- MS, GG, MD/PSG: channels post-decrement their counters, not
pre-decrement [Cydrak]¹
- MD/VDP: cache screen width registers once per scanline; screen
height registers once per frame
- MD/VDP: support 256-width display mode (used in Shining Force, etc)
- MD/YM2612: implemented timers²
- MD/YM2612: implemented 8-bit PCM DAC²
- 68000: TRAP instruction should index the vector location by 32 (eg
by 128 bytes), fixes Shining Force
- nall: updated hex(), octal(), binary() functions to take uintmax
instead of template<typename T> parameter³
¹: this one makes an incredible difference. Sie noticed that lots of
games set a period of 0, which would end up being a really long period
with pre-decrement. By fixing this, noise shows up in many more games,
and sounds way better in games even where it did before. You can hear
extra sound on Lunar - Sanposuru Gakuen's title screen, the noise in
Sonic The Hedgehog (Mega Drive) sounds better, etc.
²: this also really helps sound. The timers allow PSG music to play
back at the correct speed instead of playing back way too quickly. And
the PCM DAC lets you hear a lot of drum effects, as well as the
"Sega!!" sound at the start of Sonic the Hedgehog, and the infamous,
"Rise from your grave!" line from Altered Beast.
Still, most music on the Mega Drive comes from the FM channels, so
there's still not a whole lot to listen to.
I didn't implement Cydrak's $02c test register just yet. Sie wasn't 100%
certain on how the extended DAC bit worked, so I'd like to play it a
little conservative and get sound working, then I'll go back and add a
toggle or something to enable undocumented registers, that way we can
use that to detect any potential problems they might be causing.
³: unfortunately we lose support for using hex() on nall/arithmetic
types. If I have a const Pair& version of the function, then the
compiler gets confused on whether Natural<32> should use uintmax or
const Pair&, because compilers are stupid, and you can't have explicit
arguments in overloaded functions. So even though either function would
work, it just decides to error out instead >_>
This is actually really annoying, because I want hex() to be useful for
printing out nall/crypto keys and hashes directly.
But ... this change had to be made. Negative signed integers would crash
programs, and that was taking out my 68000 disassembler.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- MD: connected 32KB cartridge RAM up to every Genesis game under 2MB
loaded¹
- MS, GG, MD: improved PSG noise channel emulation, hopefully²
- MS, GG, MD: lowered PSG volume so that the lowpass doesn't clamp
samples³
- MD: added read/write handlers for VRAM, VSRAM, CRAM
- MD: block VRAM copy when CD4 is clear⁴
- MD: rewrote VRAM fill, VRAM copy to be byte-based⁵
- MD: VRAM fill byte set should fall through to regular data port
write handler⁶
¹: the header parsing for backup RAM is really weird. It's spaces
when not used, and seems to be 0x02000001-0x02003fff for the Shining
games. I don't understand why it starts at 0x02000001 instead of
0x02000000. So I'm just forcing every game to have 32KB of RAM for now.
There's also special handling for ROMs > 2MB that also have RAM
(Phantasy Star IV, etc) where there's a toggle to switch between ROM and
RAM. For now, that's not emulated.
I was hoping the Shining games would run after this, but they're still
dead-locking on me :(
²: Cydrak pointed out some flaws in my attempt to implement what he
had. I was having trouble understanding what he meant, so I went back
and read the docs on the sound chip and tried implementing the counter
the way the docs describe. Hopefully I have this right, but I don't know
of any good test ROMs to make sure my noise emulation is correct. The
docs say the shifted-out value goes to the output instead of the low bit
of the LFSR, so I made that change as well.
I think I hear the noise I'm supposed to in Sonic Marble Zone now, but
it seems like it's not correct in Green Hill Zone, adding a bit of an
annoying buzz to the background music. Maybe it sounds better with the
YM2612, but more likely, I still screwed something up :/
³: it's set to 50% range for both cores right now. For the MD, it
will need to be 25% once YM2612 emulation is in.
⁴: technically, this deadlocks the VDP until a hard reset. I could
emulate this, but for now I just don't do the VRAM copy in this case.
⁵: VSRAM fill and CRAM fill not supported in this new mode. They're
technically undocumented, and I don't have good notes on how they work.
I've been seeing conflicting notes on whether the VRAM fill buffer is
8-bits or 16-bits (I chose 8-bits), and on whether you write the low
byte and then high byte of each words, or the high byte and then low
byte (I chose the latter.)
The VRAM copy improvements fix the opening text in Langrisser II, so
that's great.
⁶: Langrisser II sets the transfer length to one less than needed to
fill the background letter tile on the scenario overview screen. After
moving to byte-sized transfers, a black pixel was getting stuck there.
So effectively, VRAM fill length becomes DMA length + 1, and the first
byte uses the data port so it writes a word value instead of just a byte
value. Hopefully this is all correct, although it probably gets way more
complicated with the VDP FIFO.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- removed Emulator::Interface::Capabilities¹
- MS: improved the PSG emulation a bit
- MS: added cheat code support
- MS: added save state support²
- MD: emulated the PSG³
¹: there's really no point to it anymore. I intend to add cheat codes
to the GBA core, as well as both cheat codes and save states to the Mega
Drive core. I no longer intend to emulate any new systems, so these
values will always be true. Further, the GUI doesn't respond to these
values to disable those features anymore ever since the hiro rewrite, so
they're double useless.
²: right now, the Z80 core is using a pointer for HL-\>(IX,IY)
overrides. But I can't reliably serialize pointers, so I need to convert
the Z80 core to use an integer here. The save states still appear to
work fine, but there's the potential for an instruction to execute
incorrectly if you're incredibly unlucky, so this needs to be fixed as
soon as possible. Further, I still need a way to serialize
array<T, Size> objects, and I should also add nall::Boolean
serialization support.
³: I don't have a system in place to share identical sound chips. But
this chip is so incredibly simple that it's not really much trouble to
duplicate it. Further, I can strip out the stereo sound support code
from the Game Gear portion, so it's even tinier.
Note that the Mega Drive only just barely uses the PSG. Not at all in
Altered Beast, and only for a tiny part of the BGM music on Sonic 1,
plus his jump sound effect.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- MD: restructured DMA to a subclass of VDP
- MD: implemented VRAM copy mode (fixes Langrisser II ... mostly)
- MS: implemened PSG support [Cydrak]
- GG: implemented PSG stereo sound support
- MS: use the new struct Model {} design that other cores use
The MS/GG PSG should be feature complete, but I don't have good tests
for Game Gear stereo mode, nor for the noise channel. There's also a
really weird behavior with when to reload the channel counters on volume
register writes. I can confirm what Cydrak observed in that following
the docs and reloading always creates serious audio distortion problems.
So, more research is needed there.
To get the correct sound out of the PSG, I have to run it at 3.58MHz /
16, which seems really weird to me. The docs make it sound like it's
supposed to run at the full 3.58MHz. If we can really run it at
223.7KHz, then that's help reduce the overhead of PSG emulation, which
will definitely come in handy for Mega Drive, and possibly later Mega
CD, emulation.
I have not implemented the PSG into the Mega Drive just yet. Nor have I
implemented save states or cheat code support into the MS/GG cores yet.
The latter is next on my list.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: restructured VCE, VDCs to run one scanline at a time
- PCE: bound VDCs to 1365x262 timing (in order to decouple the VDCs
from the VCE)
- PCE: the two changes above allow save states to function; also
grants a minor speed boost
- PCE: added cheat code support (uses 21-bit bus addressing; compare
byte will be useful here)
- 68K: fixed `mov *,ccr` to read two bytes instead of one [Cydrak]
- Z80: emulated /BUSREQ, /BUSACK; allows 68K to suspend the Z80
[Cydrak]
- MD: emulated the Z80 executing instructions [Cydrak]
- MD: emulated Z80 interrupts (triggered during each Vblank period)
[Cydrak]
- MD: emulated Z80 memory map [Cydrak]
- MD: added stubs for PSG, YM2612 accesses [Cydrak]
- MD: improved bus emulation [Cydrak]
The PCE core is pretty much ready to go. The only major feature missing
is FM modulation.
The Mega Drive improvements let us start to see the splash screens for
Langrisser II, Shining Force, Shining in the Darkness. I was hoping I
could get them in-game, but no such luck. My Z80 implementation is
probably flawed in some way ... now that I think about it, I believe I
missed the BusAPU::reset() check for having been granted access to the
Z80 first. But I doubt that's the problem.
Next step is to implement Cydrak's PSG core into the Master System
emulator. Once that's in, I'm going to add save states and cheat code
support to the Master System core.
Next, I'll add the PSG core into the Mega Drive. Then I'll add the
'easy' PCM part of the YM2612. Then the rest of the beastly YM2612 core.
Then finally, cap things off with save state and cheat code support.
Should be nearing a new release at that point.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: emulated PSG volume controls (vastly enhances audio quality)
- PCE: emulated PSG noise as a square wave (somewhat enhances audio
quality)
- PCE: added save state support (currently broken and deadlocks the
emulator though)
Thankfully, MAME had some rather easy to read code on how the volume
adjustment works, which they apparently ripped out of expired patents.
Hooray!
The two remaining sound issues are:
1. the random number generator for the noise channel is definitely not
hardware accurate. But it won't affect the sound quality at all. You'd
only be able to tell the difference by looking at hex bytes of a stream
rip.
2. I have no clue how to emulate the LFO (frequency modulation). A comment
in MAME's code (they also don't emulate it) advises that they aren't
aware of any games that even use it. But I'm there has to be at least one?
Given LFO not being used, and the RNG not really mattering all that much
... the sound's pretty close to perfect now.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added higan/emulator/platform.hpp (moved out Emulator::Platform from
emulator/interface.hpp)
- moved gmake build paramter to nall/GNUmakefile; both higan and
icarus use it now
- added build=profile mode
- MD: added the region select I/O register
- MD: started to add region selection support internally (still no
external select or PAL support)
- PCE: added cycle stealing when reading/writing to the VDC or VCE;
and when using ST# instructions
- PCE: cleaned up PSG to match the behavior of Mednafen (doesn't
improve sound at all ;_;)
- note: need to remove loadWaveSample, loadWavePeriod
- HuC6280: ADC/SBC decimal mode consumes an extra cycle; does not set
V flag
- HuC6280: block transfer instructions were taking one cycle too many
- icarus: added code to strip out PC Engine ROM headers
- hiro: added options support to BrowserDialog
The last one sure ended in failure. The plan was to put a region
dropdown directly onto hiro::BrowserDialog, and I had all the code for
it working. But I forgot one important detail: the system loads
cartridges AFTER powering on, so even though I could technically change
the system region post-boot, I'd rather not do so.
So that means we have to know what region we want before we even select
a game. Shit.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan: added Makefile option,
`build=(release|debug|instrument|optimize)` , defaults to release
- PCE: added preliminary PSG (sound) emulation
The Makefile thing is just to make it easier to build debug releases
without having to hand-edit the Makefile. Just say "gmake build=debug"
and you'll get -g, otherwise you'll get -O3 -s. I'll probably start
adding these build= blocks to my other projects. Or maybe I'll put it
into nall, in which case release will need a different name ... a stable
-01, and a fast -03 mode. I also want to add a mode to generate
profiling information (via gprof.)
Unfortunately, the existing documentation on the PCE's PSG is as
barebones as humanly possible.
Right now, I support waveform mode, direct D/A mode, and noise
generation mode. However for noise, I'm not actually generating a proper
square wave, and I don't know the PRNG algorithm used for choosing the
random values. So for now, I'm just feeding in nall::random() values to
it.
I'm also not sure about the noise mode's frequency counter. Magic Kit is
implying it's 64*~frequency, but that results in an 11-bit period. It
seems only logical that we'd want a 12-bit period. So my guess is that
it's actually 12-bit, and halfway through it alternates between two
randomly generated values every 32 samples, and the two values are
generated every time the period hits zero.
Next up, it's not clear when the period counter is reloaded, either for
the waveform or the noise mode. So for now, when enabling the channel, I
reload the waveform period. And when enabling noise mode, I reload the
noise period. I don't know if you need to do it when writing to the
frequency registers or not.
Next, it's not clear whether the period is a decrement-and-compare, or a
compare-and-decrement, and whether we reload with frequency,
frequency-1, or frequency+1. There's this cryptic note in
pcetext.txt:
> The PSG channel frequency is 12 bits, $001 is the highest frequency,
> $FFF is the next to lowest frequency, and $000 is the lowest frequency.
As best I can tell, he's trying to say that it's decrement-and-compare.
Whatever the case, there's periodic popping noises every few seconds. I
thought it might be because this is the first system with a fractional
sampling rate (~3.57MHz), but rounding the frequency to a whole number
doesn't help at all, and emulator/audio should be able to handle
fractional resampling rates anyway.
The popping noises could also be due to PSG writes being cycle-timed,
and my HuC6280 cycle timings not being very great yet. The PSG has no
kind of interrupts, so I think careful timing is the only way to do
certain things, especially D/A mode.
Next up, I really don't understand the frequency modulation mode at all.
I don't have any idea whatsoever how to support that. It also has a
frequency value that we'll need to understand how the period works and
reloads. Basic idea though is the channel 1 output turns into a value to
modulate channel 0's frequency by, and channel 1's output gets muted.
Next up, I don't know how the volume controls work at all. There's a
master volume left+right, per-channel volume left+right, and per-channel
overall volume. The documentation lists their effects in terms of
decibels. I have no fucking clue how to turn decibels into multiply-by
values. Let alone how to stack THREE levels of audio volume controls
>_>
Next, it looks like the output is always 5-bit unsigned per-channel, but
there's also all the volume adjustments. So I don't know the final
bit-depth of the final output to normalize the value into a signed
floating point value between -1.0 and +1.0. So for now, half the
potential speaker range (anything below zero) isn't used in the
generated output.
As bad as all this sounds, and it is indeed bad ... the audio's about
~75% correct, so you can definitely play games like this, it just won't
be all that much fun.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Super Game Boy support is functional once again
- new GameBoy::SuperGameBoyInterface class
- system.(dmg,cgb,sgb) is now Model::(Super)GameBoy(Color) ala the PC
Engine
- merged WonderSwanInterface, WonderSwanColorInterface shared
functions to WonderSwan::Interface
- merged GameBoyInterface, GameBoyColorInterface shared functions to
GameBoy::Interface
- Interface::unload() now calls Interface::save() for Master System,
Game Gear, Mega Drive, PC Engine, SuperGrafx
- PCE: emulated PCE-CD backup RAM; stored per-game as save.ram (2KiB
file)
- this means you can now save your progress in games like Neutopia
- the PCE-CD I/O registers like BRAM write protect are not
emulated yet
- PCE: IRQ sources now hold the IRQ line state, instead of the CPU
holding it
- this fixes most SuperGrafx games, which were fighting over the
VDC IRQ line previously
- PCE: CPU I/O $14xx should return the pending IRQ bits even if IRQs
are disabled
- PCE: VCE and the VDCs now synchronize to each other; fixes pixel
widths in all games
- PCE: greatly increased the accuracy of the VPC priority selection
code (windows may be buggy still)
- HuC6280: PLA, PLX, PLY should set Z, N flags; fixes many game bugs
[Jonas Quinn]
The big thing I wanted to do was enslave the VDC(s) to the VCE. But
unfortunately, I forgot about the asynchronous DMA channels that each
VDC supports, so this isn't going to be possible I'm afraid.
In the most demanding case, Daimakaimura in-game, we're looking at 85fps
on my Xeon E3 1276v3. So ... not great, and we don't even have sound
connected yet.
We are going to have to profile and optimize this code once sound
emulation and save states are in.
Basically, think of it like this: the VCE, VDC0, and VDC1 all have the
same overhead, scheduling wise (which is the bulk of the performance
loss) as the dot-renderer for the SNES core. So it's like there's three
bsnes-accuracy PPU threads running just for video.
-----
Oh, just a fair warning ... the hooks for the SGB are a work in
progress.
If anyone is working on higan or a fork and want to do something similar
to it, don't use it as a template, at least not yet.
Right now, higan looks like this:
- Emulator::Video handles the platform→videoRefresh calls
- Emulator::Audio handles the platform→audioSample calls
- each core hard-codes the platform→inputPoll, inputRumble calls
- each core hard-codes calls to path, open, load to process files
- dipSettings and notify are specialty hacks, neither are even hooked
up right now to anything
With the SGB, it's an emulation core inside an emulation core, so
ideally you want to hook all of those functions. Emulator::Video and
Emulator::Audio aren't really abstractions over that, as the GB core
calls them and we have to special case not calling them in SGB mode.
The path, open, load can be implemented without hooks, thanks to the UI
only using one instance of Emulator::Platform for all cores. All we have
to do is override the folder path ID for the "Game Boy.sys" folder, so
that it picks "Super Game Boy.sfc/" and loads its boot ROM instead.
That's just a simple argument to GameBoy::System::load() and we're done.
dipSettings, notify and inputRumble don't matter. But we do also have to
hook inputPoll as well.
The nice idea would be for SuperFamicom::ICD2 to inherit from
Emulator::Platform and provide the desired functions that we need to
overload. After that, we'd just need the GB core to keep an abstraction
over the global Emulator::platform\* handle, to select between the UI
version and the SFC::ICD2 version.
However ... that doesn't work because of Emulator::Video and
Emulator::Audio. They would also have to gain an abstraction over
Emulator::platform\*, and even worse ... you'd have to constantly swap
between the two so that the SFC core uses the UI, and the GB core uses
the ICD2.
And so, for right now, I'm checking Model::SuperGameBoy() -> bool
everywhere, and choosing between the UI and ICD2 targets that way. And
as such, the ICD2 doesn't really need Emulator::Platform inheritance,
although it certainly could do that and just use the functions it needs.
But the SGB is even weirder, because we need additional new signals
beyond just Emulator::Platform, like joypWrite(), etc.
I'd also like to work on the Emulator::Stream for the SGB core. I don't
see why we can't have the GB core create its own stream, and let the
ICD2 just use that instead. We just have to be careful about the ICD2's
CPU soft reset function, to make sure the GB core's Stream object
remains valid. What I think that needs is a way to release an
Emulator::Stream individually, rather than calling
Emulator::Audio::reset() to do it. They are shared\_pointer objects, so
I think if I added a destructor function to remove it from
Emulator::Audio::streams, then that should work.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: split VCE from VDC
- HuC6280: changed bus from (uint21 addr) to (uint8 bank, uint13 addr)
- added SuperGrafx emulation (adds secondary VDC, plus new VPC)
The VDC now has no concept of the actual display raster timing, and
instead is driven by Vpulse (start of frame) and Hpulse (start of
scanline) signals from the VCE. One still can't render the start of the
next scanline onto the current scanline through overly aggressive
timings, but it shouldn't be too much more difficult to allow that to
occur now. This process incurs quite a major speed hit, so low-end
systems with Atom CPUs can't run things at 60fps anymore.
The timing needs a lot of work. The pixels end up very jagged if the VCE
doesn't output batches of 2-4 pixels at a time. But this should not be a
requirement at all, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there.
Yo, Bro and the 512-width mode of TV Sports Basketball is now broken as
a result of these changes, and I'm not sure why.
To load SuperGrafx games, you're going to have to change the .pce
extensions to .sg or .sgx. Or you can manually move the games from the
PC Engine folder to the SuperGrafx folder and change the game folder
extensions. I have no way to tell the games apart. Mednafen uses CRC32
comparisons, and I may consider that since there's only five games, but
I'm not sure yet.
The only SuperGrafx game that's playable right now is Aldynes. And the
priorities are all screwed up. I don't understand how the windows or the
priorities work at all from sgxtech.txt, so ... yeah. It's pretty
broken, but it's a start.
I could really use some help with this, as I'm very lost right now with
rendering :/
-----
Note that the SuperGrafx is technically its own system, it's not an
add-on.
As such, I'm giving it a separate .sys folder, and a separate library.
There's debate over how to name this thing. "SuperGrafx" appears more
popular than "Super Grafx". And you might also call it the "PC Engine
SuperGrafx", but I decided to leave off the prefix so it appears more
distinct.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- I caved on the `samples[] = {0.0}` thing, but I'm very unhappy about it
- if it's really invalid C++, then GCC needs to stop accepting it
in strict `-std=c++14` mode
- Emulator::Interface::Information::resettable is gone
- Emulator::Interface::reset() is gone
- FC, SFC, MD cores updated to remove soft reset behavior
- split GameBoy::Interface into GameBoyInterface,
GameBoyColorInterface
- split WonderSwan::Interface into WonderSwanInterface,
WonderSwanColorInterface
- PCE: fixed off-by-one scanline error [hex_usr]
- PCE: temporary hack to prevent crashing when VDS is set to < 2
- hiro: Cocoa: removed (u)int(#) constants; converted (u)int(#)
types to (u)int_(#)t types
- icarus: replaced usage of unique with strip instead (so we don't
mess up frameworks on macOS)
- libco: added macOS-specific section marker [Ryphecha]
So ... the major news this time is the removal of the soft reset
behavior. This is a major!! change that results in a 100KiB diff file,
and it's very prone to accidental mistakes!! If anyone is up for
testing, or even better -- looking over the code changes between v102r01
and v102r02 and looking for any issues, please do so. Ideally we'll want
to test every NES mapper type and every SNES coprocessor type by loading
said games and power cycling to make sure the games are all cleanly
resetting. It's too big of a change for me to cover there not being any
issues on my own, but this is truly critical code, so yeah ... please
help if you can.
We technically lose a bit of hardware documentation here. The soft reset
events do all kinds of interesting things in all kinds of different
chips -- or at least they do on the SNES. This is obviously not ideal.
But in the process of removing these portions of code, I found a few
mistakes I had made previously. It simplifies resetting the system state
a lot when not trying to have all the power() functions call the reset()
functions to share partial functionality.
In the future, the goal will be to come up with a way to add back in the
soft reset behavior via keyboard binding as with the Master System core.
What's going to have to happen is that the key binding will have to send
a "reset pulse" to every emulated chip, and those chips are going to
have to act independently to power() instead of reusing functionality.
We'll get there eventually, but there's many things of vastly greater
importance to work on right now, so it'll be a while. The information
isn't lost ... we'll just have to pull it out of v102 when we are ready.
Note that I left the SNES reset vector simulation code in, even though
it's not possible to trigger, for the time being.
Also ... the Super Game Boy core is still disconnected. To be honest, it
totally slipped my mind when I released v102 that it wasn't connected
again yet. This one's going to be pretty tricky to be honest. I'm
thinking about making a third GameBoy::Interface class just for SGB, and
coming up with some way of bypassing platform-> calls when in this
mode.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- MS, MD, PCE: remove controllers from scheduler in destructor
[hex_usr]
- PCE: no controller should return all bits set (still causing errant
key presses when swapping gamepads)
- PCE: emulate MDR for hardware I/O $0800-$17ff
- PCE: change video resolution to 1140x242
- PCE: added tertiary background Vscroll register (secondary cache)
- PCE: create classes out of VDC VRAM, SATB, CRAM for cleaner access
and I/O registers
- PCE: high bits of CRAM read should be set
- PCE: partially emulated VCE display registers: color frequency, HDS,
HDW, VDS, VDW
- PCE: 32-width sprites now split to two 16-width sprites to handle
overflow properly
- PCE: hopefully emulated sprite zero hit correctly (it's not well
documented, and not often used)
- PCE: trigger line coincidence interrupts during the previous
scanline's Hblank period
- tomoko: raise viewport from 320x240 to 326x242 to accommodate PC
Engine's max resolution
- nall: workaround for Clang compilation bug that can't figure out
that a char is an integral data type
byuu says (in the public announcement):
This release adds very preliminary emulation of the Sega Master System
(Mark III), Sega Game Gear, Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), and NEC PC Engine
(Turbografx-16). These cores do not yet offer sound emulation, save
states or cheat codes.
I'm always very hesitant to release a new emulation core in its alpha
stages, as in the past this has resulted in lasting bad impressions
of cores that have since improved greatly. For instance, the Game Boy
Advance emulation offered today is easily the second most accurate around,
yet it is still widely judged by its much older alpha implementation.
However, it's always been tradition with higan to not hold onto code
in secret. Rather than delay future releases for another year or two,
I'll put my faith in you all to understand that the emulation of these
systems will improve over time.
I hope that by releasing things as they are now, I might be able to
receive some much needed assistance in improving these cores, as the
documentation for these new systems is very much less than ideal.
byuu says (in the WIP forum):
Changelog:
- PCE: latch background scroll registers (fixes Neutopia scrolling)
- PCE: clip background attribute table scrolling (fixes Blazing Lazers
scrolling)
- PCE: support background/sprite enable/disable bits
- PCE: fix large sprite indexing (fixes Blazing Lazers title screen
sprites)
- HuC6280: wrap zeropage accesses to never go beyond $20xx
- HuC6280: fix alternating addresses for block move instructions
(fixes Neutopia II)
- HuC6280: block move instructions save and restore A,X,Y registers
- HuC6280: emulate BCD mode (may not be 100% correct, based on SNES
BCD) (fixes Blazing Lazers scoring)
byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: added 384KB HuCard ROM mirroring mode
- PCE: corrected D-pad polling order
- PCE: corrected palette color ordering (GRB, not RGB -- yes,
seriously)
- PCE: corrected SATB DMA -- should write to SATB, not to VRAM
- PCE: broke out Background, Sprite VDC settings to separate
subclasses
- PCE: emulated VDC backgrounds
- PCE: emulated VDC sprites
- PCE: emulated VDC sprite overflow, collision interrupts
- HuC6280: fixed disassembler output for STi instructions
- HuC6280: added missing LastCycle check to interrupt()
- HuC6280: fixed BIT, CMP, CPX, CPY, TRB, TSB, TST flag testing and
result
- HuC6280: added extra cycle delays to the block move instructions
- HuC6280: fixed ordering for flag set/clear instructions (happens
after LastCycle check)
- HuC6280: removed extra cycle from immediate instructions
- HuC6280: fixed indirectLoad, indirectYStore absolute addressing
- HuC6280: fixed BBR, BBS zeropage value testing
- HuC6280: fixed stack push/pull direction
Neutopia looks okay until the main title screen, then there's some
gibberish on the bottom. The game also locks up with some gibberish once
you actually start a new game. So, still not playable just yet =(
byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: emulated gamepad polling
- PCE: emulated CPU interrupt sources
- PCE: emulated timer
- PCE: smarter emulation of ST0,ST1,ST2 instructions
- PCE: better structuring of CPU, VDP IO registers
- PCE: connected palette generation to the interface
- PCE: emulated basic VDC timing
- PCE: emulated VDC Vblank, Coincidence, and DMA completion IRQs
- PCE: emulated VRAM, SATB DMA transfers
- PCE: emulated VDC I/O registers
Everything I've implemented today likely has lots of bugs, and is
untested for obvious reasons.
So basically, after I fix many horrendous bugs, it should now be
possible to implement the VDC and start getting graphical output.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: HuC6280 core completed
There's bound to be a countless stream of bugs, and the cycle counts are
almost certainly not exact yet, but ... all instructions are implemented.
So at this point, I can start comparing trace logs against Mednafen's
debugger output.
Of course, we're very likely to immediately slam into a wall of needing
I/O registers implemented for the VDC in order to proceed further.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: fixed controller connection bug
- SMS: fixed Z80 reset bug
- PCE: emulated HuC6280 MMU
- PCE: emulated HuC6280 RAM
- PCE: emulated HuCard ROM reading
- PCE: implemented 178 instructions
- tomoko: removed "soft reset" functionality
- tomoko: moved "power cycle" to just above "unload" option
I'm not sure of the exact number of HuC6280 instructions, but it's less
than 260.
Many of the ones I skipped are HuC6280-originals that I don't know how
to emulate just yet.
I'm also really unsure about the zero page stuff. I believe we should be
adding 0x2000 to the addresses to hit page 1, which is supposed to be
mapped to the zero page (RAM). But when I look at turboEMU's source, I
have no clue how the hell it could possibly be doing that. It looks to
be reading from page 0, which is almost always ROM, which would be ...
really weird.
I also don't know if I've emulated the T mode opcodes correctly or not.
The documentation on them is really confusing.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- converted Emulator::Interface::Bind to Emulator::Platform
- temporarily disabled SGB hooks
- SMS: emulated Game Gear palette (latching word-write behavior not
implemented yet)
- SMS: emulated Master System 'Reset' button, Game Gear 'Start' button
- SMS: removed reset() functionality, driven by the mappable input now
instead
- SMS: split interface class in two: one for Master System, one for
Game Gear
- SMS: emulated Game Gear video cropping to 160x144
- PCE: started on HuC6280 CPU core—so far only registers, NOP
instruction has been implemented
Errata:
- Super Game Boy support is broken and thus disabled
- if you switch between Master System and Game Gear without
restarting, bad things happen:
- SMS→GG, no video output on the GG
- GG→SMS, no input on the SMS
I'm not sure what's causing the SMS\<-\>GG switch bug, having a hard
time debugging it. Help would be very much appreciated, if anyone's up
for it. Otherwise I'll keep trying to track it down on my end.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: added cartridge ROM/RAM mirroring (fixes Alex Kidd)
- SMS: fixed 8x16 sprite mode (fixes Wonder Boy, Ys graphics)
- Z80: emulated "ex (sp),hl" instruction
- Z80: fixed INx NF (should be set instead of cleared)
- Z80: fixed loop condition check for CPxR, INxR, LDxR, OTxR (fixes
walking in Wonder Boy)
- SFC: removed Debugger and sfc/debugger.hpp
- icarus: connected MS, GG, MD importing to the scan dialog
- PCE: added emulation skeleton to higan and icarus
At this point, Master System games are fairly highly compatible, sans
audio. Game Gear games are running, but I need to crop the resolution
and support the higher color palette that they can utilize. It's really
something else the way they handled the resolution shrink on that thing.
The last change is obviously going to be the biggest news.
I'm very well aware it's not an ideal time to start on a new emulation
core, with the MS and MD cores only just now coming to life with no
audio support.
But, for whatever reason, my heart's really set on working on the PC
Engine. I wanted to write the final higan skeleton core, and get things
ready so that whenever I'm in the mood to work on the PCE, I can do so.
The skeleton is far and away the most tedious and obnoxious part of the
emulator development, because it's basically all just lots of
boilerplate templated code, lots of new files to create, etc.
I really don't know how things are going to proceed ... but I can say
with 99.9% certainty that this will be the final brand new core ever
added to higan -- at least one written by me, that is. This was
basically the last system from my childhood that I ever cared about.
It's the last 2D system with games that I really enjoy playing. No other
system is worth dividing my efforts and reducing the quality and amount
of time to work on the systems I have.
In the future, there will be potential for FDS, Mega CD and PCE-CD
support. But those will all be add-ons, and they'll all be really
difficult and challenge the entire design of higan's UI (it's entirely
cartridge-driven at this time.) None of them will be entirely new cores
like this one.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: background VDP clips partial tiles on the left (math may not be
right ... it's hard to reason about)
- SMS: fix background VDP scroll locks
- SMS: fix VDP sprite coordinates
- SMS: paint black after the end of the visible display
- todo: shouldn't be a brute force at the end of the main VDP
loop, should happen in each rendering unit
- higan: removed emulator/debugger.hpp
- higan: removed privileged: access specifier
- SFC: removed debugger hooks
- todo: remove sfc/debugger.hpp
- Z80: fixed disassembly of (fd,dd) cb (displacement) (opcode)
instructions
- Z80: fix to prevent interrupts from firing between ix/iy prefixes
and opcodes
- todo: this is a rather hacky fix that could, if exploited, crash
the stack frame
- Z80: fix BIT flags
- Z80: fix ADD hl,reg flags
- Z80: fix CPD, CPI flags
- Z80: fix IND, INI flags
- Z80: fix INDR, INIT loop flag check
- Z80: fix OUTD, OUTI flags
- Z80: fix OTDR, OTIR loop flag check
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: emulated the remaining 240 instructions in the (0xfd, 0xdd)
0xcb (displacement) (opcode) set
- 1/8th of these were "legal" instructions, and apparently games
use them a lot
- SMS: emulated the standard gamepad controllers
- reset button not emulated yet
The reset button is tricky. In every other case, reset is a hardware
thing that instantly reboots the entire machine.
But on the SMS, it's more like a gamepad button that's attached to the
front of the device. When you press it, it fires off a reset vector
interrupt and the gamepad polling routine lets you query the status of
the button.
Just having a reset option in the "Master System" hardware menu is not
sufficient to fully emulate the behavior. Even more annoying is that the
Game Gear doesn't have such a button, yet the core information structs
aren't flexible enough for the Master System to have it, and the Game
Gear to not have it, in the main menu. But that doesn't matter anyway,
since it won't work having it in the menu for the Master System.
So as a result, I'm going to have to have a new "input device" called
"Hardware" that has the "Reset" button listed under there. And for the
sake of consistency, I'm not sure if we should treat the other systems
the same way or not :/
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: emulated the generic Sega memory mapper (none of the more
limited forms of it yet)
- (missing ROM shift, ROM write enable emulation -- no commercial
games use either, though)
- SMS: bus I/O returns 0xff instead of 0x00 so games don't think every
key is being pressed at once
- (this is a hack until I implement proper controller pad reading)
- SMS: very limited protection against reading/writing past the end of
ROM/RAM (todo: should mirror)
- SMS: VDP background HSCROLL subtracts, rather than adds, to the
offset (unlike VSCROLL)
- SMS: VDP VSCROLL is 9-bit, modulates voffset+vscroll to 224 in
192-line mode (32x28 tilemap)
- SMS: VDP tiledata for backgrounds and sprites use `7-(x&7)` rather
than `(x&7)`
- SMS: fix output color to be 6-bit rather than 5-bit
- SMS: left clip uses register `#7`, not palette color `#7`
- (todo: do we want `color[reg7]` or `color[16 + reg7]`?)
- SMS: refined handling of 0xcb, 0xed prefixes in the Z80 core and its
disassembler
- SMS: emulated (0xfd, 0xdd) 0xcb opcodes 0x00-0x0f (still missing
0x10-0xff)
- SMS: fixed 0xcb 0b-----110 opcodes to use direct HL and never allow
(IX,IY)+d
- SMS: fixed major logic bug in (IX,IY)+d displacement
- (was using `read(x)` instead of `operand()` for the displacement
byte fetch before)
- icarus: fake there always being 32KiB of RAM in all SMS cartridges
for the time being
- (not sure how to detect this stuff yet; although I've read it's
not even really possible `>_>`)
TODO: remove processor/z80/dissassembler.cpp code block at line 396 (as it's unnecessary.)
Lots of commercial games are starting to show trashed graphical output now.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Makefile: added $(windres), -lpthread to Windows port
- GBA: WAITCNT.prefetch is not writable (should fix Donkey Kong: King
of Swing) \[endrift\]
- SMS: fixed hcounter shift value \[hex\_usr\]
- SMS: emulated interrupts (reset button isn't hooked up anywhere, not
sure where to put it yet)
This WIP actually took a really long time because the documentation on
SMS interrupts was all over the place. I'm hoping I've emulated them
correctly, but I honestly have no idea. It's based off my best
understanding from four or five different sources. So it's probably
quite buggy.
However, a few interrupts fire in Sonic the Hedgehog, so that's
something to start with. Now I just have to hope I've gotten some games
far enough in that I can start seeing some data in the VDP VRAM. I need
that before I can start emulating graphics mode 4 to get some actual
screen output.
Or I can just say to hell with it and use a "Hello World" test ROM.
That'd probably be smarter.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: extended bus mapping of in/out ports: now decoding them fully
inside ms/bus
- SMS: moved Z80 disassembly code from processor/z80 to ms/cpu
(cosmetic)
- SMS: hooked up non-functional silent PSG sample generation, so I can
cap the framerate at 60fps
- SMS: hooked up the VDP main loop: 684 clocks/scanline, 262
scanlines/frame (no PAL support yet)
- SMS: emulated the VDP Vcounter and Hcounter polling ... hopefully
it's right, as it's very bizarre
- SMS: emulated VDP in/out ports (data read, data write, status read,
control write, register write)
- SMS: decoding and caching all VDP register flags (variable names
will probably change)
- nall: \#undef IN on Windows port (prevent compilation warning on
processor/z80)
Watching Sonic the Hedgehog, I can definitely see some VDP register
writes going through, which is a good sign.
Probably the big thing that's needed before I can get enough into the
VDP to start showing graphics is interrupt support. And interrupts are
never fun to figure out :/
What really sucks on this front is I'm flying blind on the Z80 CPU core.
Without a working VDP, I can't run any Z80 test ROMs to look for CPU
bugs. And the CPU is certainly too buggy still to run said test ROM
anyway. I can't find any SMS emulators with trace logging from reset.
Such logs vastly accelerate tracking down CPU logic bugs, so without
them, it's going to take a lot longer.
byuu says:
This is a really tiny WIP. Just wanted to add the known fixes before I start debugging it against Mednafen in a fork.
Changelog:
- Z80: fixed flag calculations on 8-bit ADC, ADD, SBC, SUB
- Z80: fixed flag calculations on 16-bit ADD
- Z80: simplified DAA logic \[AWJ\]
- Z80: RETI sets IFF1=IFF2 (same as RETN)
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Z80: emulated 83 new instructions
- Z80: timing improvements
DAA is a skeleton implementation to complete the normal opcode set. Also
worth noting that I don't know exactly what the hell RETI is doing,
so for now it acts like RET. RETN probably needs some special handling
besides just setting IFF1=IFF2 as well.
I'm now missing 24 ED-prefix instructions, plus DAA, for a total of 25
opcodes remaining. And then, of course, several weeks worth of debugging
all of the inevitable bugs in the core.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added \~130 new PAL games to icarus (courtesy of Smarthuman
and aquaman)
- added all three Korean-localized games to icarus
- sfc: removed SuperDisc emulation (it was going nowhere)
- sfc: fixed MSU1 regression where the play/repeat flags were not
being cleared on track select
- nall: cryptography support added; will be used to sign future
databases (validation will always be optional)
- minor shims to fix compilation issues due to nall changes
The real magic is that we now have 25-30% of the PAL SNES library in
icarus!
Signing will be tricky. Obviously if I put the public key inside the
higan archive, then all anyone has to do is change that public key for
their own releases. And if you download from my site (which is now over
HTTPS), then you don't need the signing to verify integrity. I may just
put the public key on my site on my site and leave it at that, we'll
see.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added 30 new PAL games to icarus (courtesy of Mikerochip)
- new version of libco no longer requires mprotect nor W|X permissions
- nall: default C compiler to -std=c11 instead of -std=c99
- nall: use `-fno-strict-aliasing` during compilation
- updated nall/certificates (hopefully for the last time)
- updated nall/http to newer coding conventions
- nall: improve handling of range() function
I didn't really work on higan at all, this is mostly just a release
because lots of other things have changed.
The most interesting is `-fno-strict-aliasing` ... basically, it joins
`-fwrapv` as being "stop the GCC developers from doing *really* evil
shit that could lead to security vulnerabilities or instabilities."
For the most part, it's a ~2% speed penalty for higan. Except for the
Sega Genesis, where it's a ~10% speedup. I have no idea how that's
possible, but clearly something's going very wrong with strict aliasing
on the Genesis core.
So ... it is what it is. If you need the performance for the non-Genesis
cores, you can turn it off in your builds. But I'm getting quite sick of
C++'s "surprises" and clever compiler developers, so I'm keeping it on
in all of my software going forward.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Z80: added most opcodes between 0x00 and 0x3f (two or three hard
ones missing still)
- Z80: redid register declaration *again* to handle AF', BC', DE',
HL' (ugggggh, the fuck? Alternate registers??)
- basically, using `#define <register name>` values to get around
horrendously awful naming syntax
- Z80: improved handling of displace() so that it won't ever trigger
on (BC) or (DE)
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Z80: implemented 113 new instructions (all the easy
LD/ADC/ADD/AND/OR/SBC/SUB/XOR ones)
- Z80: used alternative to castable<To, With> type (manual cast inside
instruction() register macros)
- Z80: debugger: used register macros to reduce typing and increase
readability
- Z80: debugger: smarter way of handling multiple DD/FD prefixes
(using gotos, yay!)
- ruby: fixed crash with Windows input driver on exit (from SuperMikeMan)
I have no idea how the P/V flag is supposed to work on AND/OR/XOR, so
that's probably wrong for now. HALT is also mostly a dummy function for
now. But I typically implement those inside instruction(), so it
probably won't need to be changed? We'll see.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added (poorly-named) castable<To, With> template
- Z80 debugger rewritten to make declaring instructions much simpler
- Z80 has more instructions implemented; supports displacement on
(IX), (IY) now
- added `Processor::M68K::Bus` to mirror `Processor::Z80::Bus`
- it does add a pointer indirection; so I'm not sure if I want to
do this for all of my emulator cores ...
byuu says:
Changelog:
- rewrote the Z80 core to properly handle 0xDD (IX0 and 0xFD (IY)
prefixes
- added Processor::Z80::Bus as a new type of abstraction
- all of the instructions implemented have their proper T-cycle counts
now
- added nall/certificates for my public keys
The goal of `Processor::Z80::Bus` is to simulate the opcode fetches being
2-read + 2-wait states; operand+regular reads/writes being 3-read. For
now, this puts the cycle counts inside the CPU core. At the moment, I
can't think of any CPU core where this wouldn't be appropriate. But it's
certainly possible that such a case exists. So this may not be the
perfect solution.
The reason for having it be a subclass of Processor::Z80 instead of
virtual functions for the MasterSystem::CPU core to define is due to
naming conflicts. I wanted the core to say `in(addr)` and have it take
the four clocks. But I also wanted a version of the function that didn't
consume time when called. One way to do that would be for the core to
call `Z80::in(addr)`, which then calls the regular `in(addr)` that goes to
`MasterSystem::CPU::in(addr)`. But I don't want to put the `Z80::`
prefix on all of the opcodes. Very easy to forget it, and then end up not
consuming any time. Another is to use uglier names in the
`MasterSystem::CPU` core, like `read_`, `write_`, `in_`, `out_`, etc. But,
yuck.
So ... yeah, this is an experiment. We'll see how it goes.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- MS: added ms/bus
- Z80: implemented JP/JR/CP/DI/IM/IN instructions
- MD/VDP: added window layer emulation
- MD/controller/gamepad: fixed d2,d3 bits (Altered Beast requires
this)
The Z80 is definitely a lot nastier than the LR35902. There's a lot of
table duplication with HL→IX→IY; and two of them nest two levels deep
(eg FD CB xx xx), so the design may change as I implement more.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- new md/bus/ module for bus reads/writes
- abstracts byte/word accesses wherever possible (everything but
RAM; forces all but I/O to word, I/O to byte)
- holds the system RAM since that's technically not part of the
CPU anyway
- added md/controller and md/system/peripherals
- added emulation of gamepads
- added stub PSG audio output (silent) to cap the framerate at 60fps
with audio sync enabled
- fixed VSRAM reads for plane vertical scrolling (two bugs here: add
instead of sub; interlave plane A/B)
- mask nametable read offsets (can't exceed 8192-byte nametables
apparently)
- emulated VRAM/VSRAM/CRAM reads from VDP data port
- fixed sprite width/height size calculations
- added partial emulation of 40-tile per scanline limitation (enough
to fix Sonic's title screen)
- fixed off-by-one sprite range testing
- fixed sprite tile indexing
- Vblank happens at Y=224 with overscan disabled
- unsure what happens when you toggle it between Y=224 and Y=240
... probably bad things
- fixed reading of address register for ADDA, CMPA, SUBA
- fixed sign extension for MOVEA effect address reads
- updated MOVEM to increment the read addresses (but not writeback)
for (aN) mode
With all of that out of the way, we finally have Sonic the Hedgehog
(fully?) playable. I played to stage 1-2 and through the special stage,
at least. EDIT: yeah, we probably need HIRQs for Labyrinth Zone.
Not much else works, of course. Most games hang waiting on the Z80, and
those that don't (like Altered Beast) are still royally screwed. Tons of
features still missing; including all of the Z80/PSG/YM2612.
A note on the perihperals this time around: the Mega Drive EXT port is
basically identical to the regular controller ports. So unlike with the
Famicom and Super Famicom, I'm inheriting the exension port from the
controller class.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- 68K: fixed NEG/NEGX operand order
- 68K: fixed bug in disassembler that was breaking trace logging
- VDP: improved sprite rendering (still 100% broken)
- VDP: added horizontal/vertical scrolling (90% broken)
Forgot:
- 68K: fix extension word sign bit on indexed modes for disassembler
as well
- 68K: emulate STOP properly (use r.stop flag; clear on IRQs firing)
I'm really wearing out fast here. The Genesis documentation is somehow
even worse than Game Boy documentation, but this is a far more complex
system.
It's a massive time sink to sit here banging away at every possible
combination of how things could work, only to see no positive
improvements. Nothing I do seems to get sprites to do a goddamn thing.
squee says the sprite Y field is 10-bits, X field is 9-bits. genvdp says
they're both 10-bits. BlastEm treats them like they're both 10-bits,
then masks off the upper bit so it's effectively 9-bits anyway.
Nothing ever bothers to tell you whether the horizontal scroll values
are supposed to add or subtract from the current X position. Probably
the most basic detail you could imagine for explaining horizontal
scrolling and yet ... nope. Nothing.
I can't even begin to understand how the VDP FIFO functionality works,
or what the fuck is meant by "slots".
I'm completely at a loss as how how in the holy hell the 68K works with
8-bit accesses. I don't know whether I need byte/word handlers for every
device, or if I can just hook it right into the 68K core itself. This
one's probably the most major design detail. I need to know this before
I go and implement the PSG/YM2612/IO ports-\>gamepads/Z80/etc.
Trying to debug the 68K is murder because basically every game likes to
start with a 20,000,000-instruction reset phase of checksumming entire
games, and clearing out the memory as agonizingly slowly as humanly
possible. And like the ARM, there's too many registers so I'd need three
widescreen monitors to comfortably view the entire debugger output lines
onscreen.
I can't get any test ROMs to debug functionality outside of full games
because every **goddamned** test ROM coder thinks it's acceptable to tell
people to go fetch some toolchain from a link that died in the late '90s
and only works on MS-DOS 6.22 to build their fucking shit, because god
forbid you include a 32KiB assembled ROM image in your fucking archives.
... I may have to take a break for a while. We'll see.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- 68K: MOVEQ is 8-bit signed
- 68K: disassembler was print EOR for OR instructions
- 68K: address/program-counter indexed mode had the signed-word/long
bit backward
- 68K: ADDQ/SUBQ #n,aN always works in long mode; regardless of size
- 68K→VDP DMA needs to use `mode.bit(0)<<22|dmaSource`; increment by
one instead of two
- Z80: added registers and initial two instructions
- MS: hooked up enough to load and start running games
- Sonic the Hedgehog can execute exactly one instruction... whoo.
byuu says:
Sorry, two WIPs in one day. Got excited and couldn't wait.
Changelog:
- ADDQ, SUBQ shouldn't update flags when targeting an address register
- ADDA should sign extend effective address reads
- JSR was pushing the PC too early
- some improvements to 8-bit register reads on the VDP (still needs
work)
- added H/V counter reads to the VDP IO port region
- icarus: added support for importing Master System and Game Gear ROMs
- tomoko: added library sub-menus for each manufacturer
- still need to sort Game Gear after Mega Drive somehow ...
The sub-menu system actually isn't all that bad. It is indeed a bit more
annoying, but not as annoying as I thought it was going to be. However,
it looks a hell of a lot nicer now.
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:
I reworked the video sizing code. Ended up wasting five fucking hours
fighting GTK. When you call `gtk_widget_set_size_request`, it doesn't
actually happen then. This is kind of a big deal because when I then go
to draw onto the viewport, the actual viewport child window is still the
old size, so the image gets distorted. It recovers in a frame or so with
emulation, but if we were to put a still image on there, it would stay
distorted.
The first thought is, `while(gtk_events_pending())
gtk_main_iteration_do(false);` right after the `set_size_request`. But
nope, it tells you there's no events pending. So then you think, go
deeper, use `XPending()` instead. Same thing, GTK hasn't actually issued
the command to Xlib yet. So then you think, if the widget is realized,
just call a blocking `gtk_main_iteration`. One call does nothing, two
calls results in a deadlock on the second one ... do it before program
startup, and the main window will never appear. Great.
Oh, and it's not just the viewport. It's also the widget container area
of the windows, as well as the window itself, as well as the fullscreen
mode toggle effect. They all do this.
For the latter three, I couldn't find anything that worked, so I just
added 20ms loops of constantly calling `gtk_main_iteration_do(false)`
after each one of those things. The downside here is toggling the status
bar takes 40ms, so you'll see it and it'll feel a tiny bit sluggish.
But I can't have a 20ms wait on each widget resize, that would be
catastrophic to performance on windows with lots of widgets.
I tried hooking configure-event and size-allocate, but they were very
unreliable. So instead I ended up with a loop that waits up to a maximm
of 20ms that inspects the `widget->allocation.(width,height)` values
directly and waits for them to be what we asked for with
`set_size_request`.
There was some extreme ugliness in GTK with calling
`gtk_main_iteration_do` recursively (`hiro::Widget::setGeometry` is
called recursively), so I had to lock it to only happen on the top level
widgets (the child ones should get resized while waiting on the
top-level ones, so it should be fine in practice), and also only run it
on realized widgets.
Even still, I'm getting ~3 timeouts when opening the settings dialog in
higan, but no other windows. But, this is the best I can do for now.
And the reason for all of this pain? Yeah, updated the video code.
So the Emulator::Interface now has this:
struct VideoSize { uint width, height; }; //or requiem for a tuple
auto videoSize() -> VideoSize;
auto videoSize(uint width, uint height, bool arc) -> VideoSize;
The first function, for now, is just returning the literal surface size.
I may remove this ... one thing I want to allow for is cores that send
different texture sizes based on interlace/hires/overscan/etc settings.
The second function is more interesting. Instead of having the UI trying
to figure out sizing, I figure the emulation cores can do a better job
and we can customize it per-core now. So it gets the window's width and
height, and whether the user asked for aspect correction, and then
computes the best width/height ratio possible. For now they're all just
doing multiples of a 1x scale to the UI 2x,3x,4x modes.
We still need a third function, which will probably be what I repurpose
videoSize() for: to return the 'effective' size for pixel shaders, to
then feed into ruby, to then feed into quark, to then feed into our
shaders. Since shaders use normalized coordinates for pixel fetching,
this should work out just fine. The real texture size will be exposed to
quark shaders as well, of course.
Now for the main window ... it's just hard-coded to be 640x480, 960x720,
1280x960 for now. It works nicely for some cores on some modes, not so
much for others. Work in progress I guess.
I also took the opportunity to draw the about dialog box logo on the
main window. Got a bit fancy and used the old spherical gradient and
impose functionality of nall/image on it. Very minor highlight, nothing
garish. Just something nicer than a solid black window.
If you guys want to mess around with sizes, placements, and gradient
styles/colors/shapes ... feel free. If you come up with something nicer,
do share.
That's what led to all the GTK hell ... the logo wasn't drawing right as
you resized the window. But now it is, though I am not at all happy with
the hacking I had to do.
I also had to improve the video update code as a result of this:
- when you unload a game, it blacks out the screen
- if you are not quitting the emulator, it'll draw the logo; if
you are, it won't
- when you load a game, it black out the logo
These options prevent any unsightliness from resizing the viewport with
image data on it already
I need to redraw the logo when toggling fullscreen with no game loaded
as well for Windows, it seems.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- 68K: fixed bug that affected BSR return address
- VDP: added very preliminary emulation of planes A, B, W (W is
entirely broken though)
- VDP: added command/address stuff so you can write to VRAM, CRAM,
VSRAM
- VDP: added VRAM fill DMA
I would be really surprised if any commercial games showed anything at
all, so I'd probably recommend against wasting your time trying, unless
you're really bored :P
Also, I wanted to add: I am accepting patches\! So if anyone wants to
look over the 68K core for bugs, that would save me untold amounts of
time in the near future :D
byuu says:
Changelog:
- pulled the (u)intN type aliases into higan instead of leaving them
in nall
- added 68K LINEA, LINEF hooks for illegal instructions
- filled the rest of the 68K lambda table with generic instance of
ILLEGAL
- completed the 68K disassembler effective addressing modes
- still unsure whether I should use An to decode absolute
addresses or not
- pro: way easier to read where accesses are taking place
- con: requires An to be valid; so as a disassembler it does a
poor job
- making it optional: too much work; ick
- added I/O decoding for the VDP command-port registers
- added skeleton timing to all five processor cores
- output at 1280x480 (needed for mixed 256/320 widths; and to handle
interlace modes)
The VDP, PSG, Z80, YM2612 are all stepping one clock at a time and
syncing; which is the pathological worst case for libco. But they also
have no logic inside of them. With all the above, I'm averaging around
250fps with just the 68K core actually functional, and the VDP doing a
dumb "draw white pixels" loop. Still way too early to tell how this
emulator is going to perform.
Also, the 320x240 mode of the Genesis means that we don't need an aspect
correction ratio. But we do need to ensure the output window is a
multiple 320x240 so that the scale values work correctly. I was
hard-coding aspect correction to stretch the window an additional \*8/7.
But that won't work anymore so ... the main higan window is now 640x480,
960x720, or 1280x960. Toggling aspect correction only changes the video
width inside the window.
It's a bit jarring ... the window is a lot wider, more black space now
for most modes. But for now, it is what it is.
byuu says:
The 68K core now implements all 88 instructions. It ended up being 111
instructions in my core due to splitting up opcodes with the same name
but different addressing modes or directions (removes conditions at the
expense of more code.)
Technically, I don't have exceptions actually implemented yet, and
RESET/STOP don't do anything but set flags. So there's still more to
go. But ... close enough for statistics time!
The M68K core source code is 124,712 bytes in size. The next largest
core is the ARM7 core at 70,203 bytes in size.
The M68K object size is 942KiB; with the next largest being the V30MZ
core at 173KiB.
There are a total of 19,656 invalid opcodes in the 68000 revision (unless
of course I've made mistakes in my mappings, which is very probably.)
Now the fun part ... figuring out how to fix bugs in this core without
VDP emulation :/
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Emulator: use `(uintmax)-1 >> 1` for the units of time
- MD: implemented 13 new 68K instructions (basically all of the
remaining easy ones); 21 remain
- nall: replaced `(u)intmax_t` (64-bit) with *actual* `(u)intmax` type
(128-bit where available)
- this extends to everything: atoi, string, etc. You can even
print 128-bit variables if you like
22,552 opcodes still don't exist in the 68K map. Looking like quite a
few entries will be blank once I finish.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added eight more 68K instructions
- split ADD(direction) into two separate ADD functions
I now have 54 out of 88 instructions implemented (thus, 34 remaining.)
The map is missing 25,182 entries out of 65,536. Down from 32,680 for
v101.00
Aside: this version number feels really silly. r10 and r11 surely will
as well ...
Tim Allen