byuu says:
Changelog:
- SFC: fixed behavior of 21fx $21fe register when no device is connected
(must return zero)
- SFC: reduced 21fx buffer size to 1024 bytes in both directions to
mirror the FT232H we are using
- SFC: eliminated dsp/modulo-array.hpp [1]
- higan: implemented higan/video interface and migrated all cores to it
[2]
[1] the echo history buffer was 8-bytes, so there was no need for it at
all here. Not sure what I was thinking. The BRR buffer was 12-bytes, and
has very weird behavior ... but there's only a single location in the
code where it actually writes to this buffer. It's much easier to just
write to the buffer three times there instead of implementing an entire
class just to abstract away two lines of code. This change actually
boosted the speed from ~124.5fps to around ~127.5fps, but that's within
the margin of error for GCC. I doubt it's actually faster this way.
The DSP core could really use a ton of work. It comes from a port of
blargg's spc_dsp to my coding style, but he was extremely fond of using
32-bit signed integers everywhere. There's a lot of opportunity to
remove red tape masking by resizing the variables to their actual state
sizes.
I really need to find where I put spc_dsp6.sfc from blargg. It's a great
test to verify if I've made any mistakes in my implementation that would
cause regressions. Don't suppose anyone has it?
[2] so again, the idea is that higan/audio and higan/video are going to
sit between the emulation cores and the user interfaces. The hope is to
output raw encoding data from the emulation cores without having to
worry about the video display format (generally 24-bit RGB) of the host
display. And also to avoid having to repeat myself with eg three
separate implementations of interframe blending, and so on.
Furthermore, the idea is that the user interface can configure its side
of the settings, and the emulation cores can configure their sides.
Thus, neither has to worry about the other end. And now we can spin off
new user interfaces much easier without having to mess with all of these
things.
Right now, I've implemented color emulation, interframe blending and
SNES horizontal color bleed. I did not implement scanlines (and
interlace effects for them) yet, but I probably will at some point.
Further, for right now, the WonderSwan/Color screen rotation is busted
and will only show games in the horizontal orientation. Obviously this
must be fixed before the next official release, but I'll want to think
about how to implement it.
Also, the SNES light gun pointers are missing for now.
Things are a bit messy right now as I've gone through several revisions
of how to handle these things, so a good house cleaning is in order once
everything is feature-complete again. I need to sit down and think
through how and where I want to handle things like light gun cursors,
LCD icons, and maybe even rasterized text messages.
And obviously ... higan/audio is still just nall::DSP's headers. I need
to revamp that whole interface. I want to make it quite powerful with
a true audio mixer so I can handle things like
SNES+SGB+MSU1+Voicer-Kun+SNES-CD (five separate audio streams at once.)
The video system has the concept of "effects" for things like color
bleed and interframe blending. I want to extend on this with useful
other effects, such as NTSC simulation, maybe bringing back my mini-HQ2x
filter, etc. I'd also like to restore the saturation/gamma/luma
adjustment sliders ... I always liked allowing people to compensate for
their displays without having to change settings system-wide. Lastly,
I've always wanted to see some audio effects. Although I doubt we'll
ever get my dream of CoreAudio-style profiles, I'd like to get some
basic equalizer settings and echo/reverb effects in there.
byuu says:
Absolutely major improvements to the WS/C emulation today.
Changelog: (all WS/C related)
- fixed channel 3 sweep pitch adjustment
- fixed channel 3 sweep value sign extension
- removed errant channel 5 speed setting (not what's really going on)
- fixed sign extension on channel 5 samples
- improved DAC mixing of all five audio channels
- fixed r26 regression with PPU timing loop
- fixed sprite windowing behavior (sprite attribute flag is window mode;
not window enable)
- added per-scanline register latching to the PPU
- IRQs should terminate HLT even when the IRQ enable register bits are
clear
- fixed PALMONO reads
- added blur emulation
- added color emulation (based on GBA, so it heavily desaturates colors;
not entirely correct, but it helps a lot)
- no longer decimating audio to 24KHz; running at full 3.072MHz through
the windowed sinc filter [1]
- cleaned up PPU portRead / portWrite functions significantly
- emulated a weird quirk as mentioned by trap15 regarding timer
frequency writes enabling said timers [2]
- emulated LCD_CTRL sleep bit; screen can now be disabled (always draws
black in this case for now)
- improved OAM caching; but it's still disabled because it causes huge
amounts of sprite glitches (unsure why)
- fixed rendering of sprites that wrap around the screen edges back to
the top/left of the display
- emulated keypad interrupts
- icarus: detect orientation bit in game header
- higan: use orientation setting in manifest to set default screen
rotation
[1] the 24KHz -> 3.072MHz sound change is huge. Sound is substantially
improved over the previous WIPs. It does come at a pretty major speed
penalty, though. This is the highest frequency of any system in higan
running through an incredibly (amazing, yet) demanding sinc resampler.
Frame rate dropped from around 240fps to 150fps with the sinc filter on.
If you choose a different audio filter, you'll get most of that speed
back, but audio will sound worse again.
[2] we aren't sure if this is correct hardware behavior or not. It seems
to very slightly help Magical Drop, but not much.
The blur emulation is brutal. It's absolutely required for Riviera's
translucency simulation of selected menu items, but it causes serious
headaches due to the WS's ~75hz refresh rate running on ~60hz monitors
without vsync. It's probably best to leave it off and just deal with the
awful flickering on Riviera's menu options.
Overall, WS/C emulation is starting to get quite usable indeed. Couple
of major bugs that I'd really like to get fixed before releasing it,
though. But they're getting harder and harder to fix ...
Major Bugs:
- Final Fantasy battle background music is absent. Sound effects still
work. Very weird.
- Final Fantasy IV scrolling during airship flight opening sequence is
horribly broken. Scrolls one screen at a time.
- Magical Drop flickers like crazy in-game. Basically unplayable like
this.
- Star Hearts character names don't appear in the smaller dialog box
that pops up.
Minor Bugs:
- Occasional flickering during Riviera opening scenes.
- One-frame flicker of Leda's sprite at the start of the first stage.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS: fixed bug when IRQs triggered during a rep string instruction
- WS: added sprite attribute caching (per-scanline); absolutely massive
speed-up
- WS: emulated limit of 32 sprites per scanline
- WS: emulated the extended PPU register bit behavior based on the
DISP_CTRL tile bit-depth setting
- WS: added "Rotate" key binding; can be used to flip the WS display
between horizontal and vertical in real-time
The prefix emulation may not be 100% hardware-accurate, but the edge
cases should be extreme enough to not come up in the WS library. No way
to get the emulation 100% down without intensive hardware testing.
trap15 pointed me at a workflow diagram for it, but that diagram is
impossible without a magic internal stack frame that grows with every
IRQ, and can thus grow infinitely large.
The rotation thing isn't exactly the most friendly set-up, but oh well.
I'll see about adding a default rotation setting to manifests, so that
games like GunPey can start in the correct orientation. After that, if
the LCD orientation icon turns out to be reliable, then I'll start using
that. But if there are cases where it's not reliable, then I'll leave it
to manual button presses.
Speaking of icons, I'll need a set of icons to render on the screen.
Going to put them to the top right on vertical orientation, and on the
bottom left for horizontal orientation. Just outside of the video
output, of course.
Overall, WS is getting pretty far along, but still some major bugs in
various games. I really need sound emulation, though. Nobody's going to
use this at all without that.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS: fixed lods, scas instructions
- WS: implemented missing GRP4 instructions
- WS: fixed transparency for screen one
- WSC: added color-mode PPU rendering
- WS+WSC: added packed pixel mode support
- WS+WSC: added dummy sound register reads/writes
- SFC: added threading to SuperDisc (it's hanging for right now; need to
clear IRQ on $21e2 writes)
SuperDisc Timer and Sound Check were failing before due to not turning
off IRQs on $21e4 clear, so I'm happy that's fixed now.
Riviera starts now, and displays the first intro screen before crashing.
Huge, huge amounts of corrupted graphics, though. This game's really
making me work for it :(
No color games seem fully playable yet, but a lot of monochrome and
color games are now at least showing more intro screen graphics before
dying.
This build defaults to horizontal orientation, but I left the inputs
bound to vertical orientation. Whoops. I still need to implement
a screen flip key binding.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- 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:
I refactored my schedulers. Added about ten lines to each scheduler, and
removed about 100 lines of calling into internal state in the scheduler
for the FC,SFC cores and about 30-40 lines for the other cores. All of
its state is now private.
Also reworked all of the entry points to static auto Enter() and auto
main(). Where Enter() handles all the synchronization stuff, and main()
doesn't need the while(true); loop forcing another layer of indentation
everywhere.
Took a few hours to do, but totally worth it. I'm surprised I didn't do
this sooner.
Also updated icarus gmake install rule to copy over the database.
byuu says:
Lots of improvements. We're now able to start executing some V30MZ
instructions. 32 of 256 opcodes implemented so far.
I hope this goes without saying, but there's absolutely no point in
loading WS/WSC games right now. You won't see anything until I have the
full CPU and partial PPU implemented.
ROM bank 2 works properly now, the I/O map is 16-bit (address) x 16-bit
(data) as it should be*, and I have a basic disassembler in place
(adding to it as I emulate new opcodes.)
(* I don't know what happens if you access an 8-bit port in 16-bit mode
or vice versa, so for now I'm just treating the handlers as always being
16-bit, and discarding the upper 8-bits when not needed.)
byuu says:
So, this WIP starts work on something new for higan. Obviously, I can't
keep it a secret until it's ready, because I want to continue daily WIP
releases, and of course, solicit feedback as I go along.
Tim Allen