byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/dsp returns with new iir/biquad.hpp and resampler/cubic.hpp files
- nall/queue.hpp added (simple ring buffer ... nall/vector wouldn't
cause too many moves with FIFO)
- audio streams now only buffer 20ms; so even if multiple audio streams
desync, latency can never exceed 20ms
- replaced blackman windwed sinc FIR hermite audio filter with transposed
direct form II biquadratic sixth-order IIR butterworth filter (better
attenuation of frequencies above 20KHz, faster, no need for decimation,
less code)
- put in experimental eight-tap echo filter (a lot better than what I
had before, but still rather weak)
- substantial cleanups to the SuperFX GSU processor core (slightly
faster, 479KB->100KB object file, 42.7KB->33.4KB source code size,
way less code duplication)
We'll definitely want to test the whole SuperFX library (not many games)
just to make sure there's no regressions caused by this one.
Not sure what I want to do with audio processing effects yet. I've always
really wanted lots of fun controls to customize audio, and now finally
with this new biquad filter, I can finally start implementing real
effects. For instance, an equalizer wouldn't be too complicated anymore.
The new reverb effect is still a poor man's version. I need to find human
readable source for implementing a comb-filter properly. I'm pretty sure
I can already treat nall::queue as an all-pass filter since all that
does is phase shift (fancy audio term for "delay audio"). What's really
going to be hard is figuring out how to expose user-friendly settings for
controlling it. It looks like you need a bunch of coprime coefficients,
and I don't think casual users are going to be able to hand-enter coprime
values to get the echo effect they want. I uh ... don't even know how
to calculate coprime values dynamically right now >_> But we're going
to have to, as they are correlated to the output sampling rate.
We'll definitely want to make some audio profiles so that users can
quickly select pre-configured themes that sound nice, but expose the
underlying coefficients so that they can tweak stuff to their liking. This
isn't just about higan, this is about me trying to learn digital signal
processing, so please don't be too upset about feature creep or anything
on this.
Anyway ... I'm having some difficulties with my audio right now. When
the reverb effect is enabled, there's a bunch of static on system
reset for just a moment. But this should not be possible. nall::queue
is initializing all previous reverb sample elements to 0.0. I don't
understand where static is coming in from. Further, we have the same
issue with both the windowed sinc and the biquad filters ... a bit of
a popping sound when starting a game. Any help tracking this down would
be appreciated.
There's also one really annoying issue ... I can't seem to do reverb
or volume adjustments with normalized samples. If I say "volume *= 0.5"
in higan/audio/audio.cpp line 68, it doesn't just halve the volume, it
adds a whole bunch of distortion. This makes absolutely zero sense to
me. The sample values are between 0.0 (mute) and 1.0 (full volume) here,
so multiplying a double by 0.5 shouldn't cause distortion. So right now,
I'm doing these adjustments with less precision after denormalizing back
to int16. Anyone ever see something like that? :/
byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulation cores now refresh video from host thread instead of
cothreads (fix AMD crash)
- SFC: fixed another bug with leap year months in SharpRTC emulation
- SFC: cleaned up camelCase on function names for
armdsp,epsonrtc,hitachidsp,mcc,nss,sharprtc classes
- GB: added MBC1M emulation (requires manually setting mapper=MBC1M in
manifest.bml for now, sorry)
- audio: implemented Emulator::Audio mixer and effects processor
- audio: implemented Emulator::Stream interface
- it is now possible to have more than two audio streams: eg SNES
+ SGB + MSU1 + Voicer-Kun (eventually)
- audio: added reverb delay + reverb level settings; exposed balance
configuration in UI
- video: reworked palette generation to re-enable saturation, gamma,
luminance adjustments
- higan/emulator.cpp is gone since there was nothing left in it
I know you guys are going to say the color adjust/balance/reverb stuff
is pointless. And indeed it mostly is. But I like the idea of allowing
some fun special effects and configurability that isn't system-wide.
Note: there seems to be some kind of added audio lag in the SGB
emulation now, and I don't really understand why. The code should be
effectively identical to what I had before. The only main thing is that
I'm sampling things to 48000hz instead of 32040hz before mixing. There's
no point where I'm intentionally introducing added latency though. I'm
kind of stumped, so if anyone wouldn't mind taking a look at it, it'd be
much appreciated :/
I don't have an MSU1 test ROM, but the latency issue may affect MSU1 as
well, and that would be very bad.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS/WSC: re-added support for screen rotation (code is inside WS core)
- ruby: changed sample(uint16_t left, uint16_t right) to sample(int16_t
left, int16_t right);
- requires casting to uint prior to shifting in each driver, but
I felt it was misleading to use uint16_t just to avoid that
- ruby: WASAPI is now built in by default; has wareya's improvements,
and now supports latency adjust
- tomoko: audio settings panel has new "Exclusive Mode" checkbox for
WASAPI driver only
- note: although the setting *does* take effect in real-time, I'd
suggest restarting the emulator after changing it
- tomoko: audio latency can now be set to 0ms (which in reality means
"the minimum supported by the driver")
- all: increased cothread size from 512KiB to 2MiB to see if it fixes
bullshit AMD driver crashes
- this appears to cause a slight speed penalty due to cache locality
going down between threads, though
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SFC: balanced profile removed
- SFC: performance profile removed
- SFC: code for handling non-threaded CPU, SMP, DSP, PPU removed
- SFC: Coprocessor, Controller (and expansion port) shared Thread code
merged to SFC::Cothread
- Cothread here just means "Thread with CPU affinity" (couldn't think
of a better name, sorry)
- SFC: CPU now has vector<Thread*> coprocessors, peripherals;
- this is the beginning of work to allow expansion port devices to be
dynamically changed at run-time
- ruby: all audio drivers default to 48000hz instead of 22050hz now if
no frequency is assigned
- note: the WASAPI driver can default to whatever the native frequency
is; doesn't have to be 48000hz
- tomoko: removed the ability to change the frequency from the UI (but
it will display the frequency used)
- tomoko: removed the timing settings panel
- the goal is to work toward smooth video via adaptive sync
- the model is broken by not being in control of the audio frequency
anyway
- it's further broken by PAL running at 50hz and WSC running at 75hz
- it was always broken anyway by SNES interlace timing varying from
progressive timing
- higan: audio/ stub created (for now, it's just nall/dsp/ moved here
and included as a header)
- higan: video/ stub created
- higan/GNUmakefile: now includes build rules for essential components
(libco, emulator, audio, video)
The audio changes are in preparation to merge wareya's awesome WASAPI
work without the need for the nall/dsp resampler.
byuu says:
Note: balanced/performance profiles still broken, sorry.
Changelog:
- added nall/GNUmakefile unique() function; used on linking phase of
higan
- added nall/unique_pointer
- target-tomoko and {System}::Video updated to use
unique_pointer<ClassName> instead of ClassName* [1]
- locate() updated to search multiple paths [2]
- GB: pass gekkio's if_ie_registers and boot_hwio-G test ROMs
- FC, GB, GBA: merge video/ into the PPU cores
- ruby: fixed ~AudioXAudio2() typo
[1] I expected this to cause new crashes on exit due to changing the
order of destruction of objects (and deleting things that weren't
deleted before), but ... so far, so good. I guess we'll see what crops
up, especially on OS X (which is already crashing for unknown reasons on
exit.)
[2] right now, the search paths are: programpath(), {configpath(),
"higan/"}, {localpath(), "higan/"}; but we can add as many more as we
want, and we can also add platform-specific versions.
byuu says:
This release features improvements to all emulation cores, but most
substantially for the Game Boy core. All of blargg's test ROMs that pass
in gambatte now either pass in higan, or are off by 1-2 clocks (the
actual behaviors are fully emulated.) I consider the Game Boy core to
now be fairly accurate, but there's still more improvements to be had.
Also, what's sure to be a major feature for some: higan now has full
support for loading and playing ordinary ROM files, whether they have
copier headers, weird extensions, or are inside compressed archives. You
can load these games from the command-line, from the main Library menu
(via Load ROM Image), or via drag-and-drop on the main higan window. Of
course, fans of game folders and the library need not worry: that's
still there as well.
Also new, you can drop the (uncompressed) Game Boy Advance BIOS onto the
higan main window to install it into the correct location with the
correct file name.
Lastly, this release technically restores Mac OS X support. However,
it's still not very stable, so I have decided against releasing binaries
at this time. I'd rather not rush this and leave a bad first impression
for OS X users.
Changelog (since v096):
- higan: project source code hierarchy restructured; icarus directly
integrated
- higan: added software emulation of color-bleed, LCD-refresh,
scanlines, interlacing
- icarus: you can now load and import ROM files/archives from the main
higan menu
- NES: fixed manifest parsing for board mirroring and VRC pinouts
- SNES: fixed manifest for Star Ocean
- SNES: fixed manifest for Rockman X2,X3
- GB: enabling LCD restarts frame
- GB: emulated extra OAM STAT IRQ quirk required for GBVideoPlayer
(Shonumi)
- GB: VBK, BGPI, OBPI are readable
- GB: OAM DMA happens inside PPU core instead of CPU core
- GB: fixed APU length and sweep operations
- GB: emulated wave RAM quirks when accessing while channel is enabled
- GB: improved timings of several CPU opcodes (gekkio)
- GB: improved timings of OAM DMA refresh (gekkio)
- GB: CPU uses open collector logic; return 0xFF for unmapped memory
(gekkio)
- GBA: fixed sequencer enable flags; fixes audio in Zelda - Minish Cap
(Jonas Quinn)
- GBA: fixed disassembler masking error (Lioncash)
- hiro: Cocoa support added; higan can now be compiled on Mac OS X 10.7+
- nall: improved program path detection on Windows
- higan/Windows: moved configuration data from %appdata% to
%localappdata%
- higan/Linux,BSD: moved configuration data from ~/.config/higan to
~/.local/higan
byuu says:
Changelog:
- configuration files are now stored in localpath() instead of configpath()
- Video gamma/saturation/luminance sliders are gone now, sorry
- added Video Filter->Blur Emulation [1]
- added Video Filter->Scanline Emulation [2]
- improvements to GBA audio emulation (fixes Minish Cap) [Jonas Quinn]
[1] For the Famicom, this does nothing. For the Super Famicom, this
performs horizontal blending for proper pseudo-hires translucency. For
the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, this performs
interframe blending (each frame is the average of the current and
previous frame), which is important for things like the GBVideoPlayer.
[2] Right now, this only applies to the Super Famicom, but it'll come to
the Famicom in the future. For the Super Famicom, this option doesn't
just add scanlines, it simulates the phosphor decay that's visible in
interlace mode. If you observe an interlaced game like RPM Racing on
a real SNES, you'll notice that even on perfectly still screens, the
image appears to shake. This option emulates that effect.
Note 1: the buffering right now is a little sub-optimal, so there will
be a slight speed hit with this new support. Since the core is now
generating native ARGB8888 colors, it might as well call out to the
interface to lock/unlock/refresh the video, that way it can render
directly to the screen. Although ... that might not be such a hot idea,
since the GBx interframe blending reads from the target buffer, and that
tends to be a catastrophic option for performance.
Note 2: the balanced and performance profiles for the SNES are
completely busted again. This WIP took 6 1/2 hours, and I'm exhausted.
Very much not looking forward to working on those, since those two have
all kinds of fucked up speedup tricks for non-interlaced and/or
non-hires video modes.
Note 3: if you're on Windows and you saved your system folders somewhere
else, now'd be a good time to move them to %localappdata%/higan
byuu says:
Changelog:
- restructured the project and removed a whole bunch of old/dead
directives from higan/GNUmakefile
- huge amounts of work on hiro/cocoa (compiles but ~70% of the
functionality is commented out)
- fixed a masking error in my ARM CPU disassembler [Lioncash]
- SFC: decided to change board cic=(411,413) back to board
region=(ntsc,pal) ... the former was too obtuse
If you rename Boolean (it's a problem with an include from ruby, not
from hiro) and disable all the ruby drivers, you can compile an
OS X binary, but obviously it's not going to do anything.
It's a boring WIP, I just wanted to push out the project structure
change now at the start of this WIP cycle.
Tim Allen