byuu says:
Changelog:
- Super Famicom: added support for loading manifests without embedded
mapping information¹
- genius: initial commit
- various Makefile cleanups
¹: so the idea here is to try and aim for a stable manifest format,
and to allow direct transposition of icarus/genius database entries into
manifest files. The exact mechanics of how this is going to work is
currently in flux, but we'll get there.
For right now, `Super Famicom.sys` gains `boards.bml`, which is the raw
database from my board-editor tool, and higan itself tries to load
`boards.bml`, match an entry to game/board from the game's `manifest.bml`
file, and then transform it into the format currently used by higan. It
does this only when the game's `manifest.bml` file lacks a board node.
When such a board node exists, it works as previous versions of higan
did.
The only incompatible change right now is information/title is now
located at game/label. I may transition window title display to just use
the filenames instead.
Longer term, some thought is going to need to go into the format of the
`boards.bml` database itself, and at which point in the process I should
be transforming things.
Give it time, we'll refine this into something nicer.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Z80: infinite DD/FD prefixes will no longer cause an emulator crash;
but will still deadlock savestates
- Z80: emulated R incrementing on M1 cycles
- Z80: `LD a, [ir]` should update flags [hex_usr]
- Z80: minor code cleanups
- tomoko: added “Pause Emulation” toggle to Tools menu
- you can still use the hotkey to pause emulation before starting
a game if you really want to
- this will be useful if and when I re-add trace logging to
capture instructions from power-on
- icarus: more PAL games added to the SNES database
I hope I've implemented R correctly. It should only increment twice on
DD,FD CB xx instructions. LDI/LDD/LDIR/LDDR should work as expected as
well. It increments once when interrupts are executed (and not maksed.)
The top bit is ignored in increments.
byuu says:
Changelog (since v105tr1):
Changelog:
- added Emulation/AutoSaveMemory/Interval setting to specify number of
seconds between auto-saves
- added Game Notes tool
- added 64 new SNES PAL games to the icarus preservation database
The Games Notes tool is a new feature that gives you a blank text box to
enter notes about a game that you're playing: so you can write down
things like level select codes for games with save RAM, combo moves, or
whatever other information you'd like quick and easy access to.
This is kind of an experiment. Ideally, we'd wanna allow more
personalized information, drawings, etc. But hey, let's try it out and
see what people think.
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:
(Windows users may need to include <sys/time.h> at the top of
nall/chrono.hpp, not sure.)
Unchangelog:
- forgot to add the Scheduler clock=0 fix because I have the memory of
a goldfish
Changelog:
- new icarus database with nine additional games
- hiro(GTK,Qt) won't constantly write its settings.bml file to disk
anymore
- added latency simulator for fun (settings.bml => Input/Latency in
milliseconds)
So the last one ... I wanted to test out nall::chrono, and I was also
thinking that by polling every emulated frame, it's pretty wasteful when
you are using Fast Forward and hitting 200+fps. As I've said before,
calls to ruby::input::poll are not cheap.
So to get around this, I added a limiter so that if you called the
hardware poll function within N milliseconds, it'll return without
doing any actual work. And indeed, that increases my framerate of Zelda
3 uncapped from 133fps to 142fps. Yay. But it's not a "real" speedup,
as it only helps you when you exceed 100% speed (theoretically, you'd
need to crack 300% speed since the game itself will poll at 16ms at 100%
speed, but yet it sped up Zelda 3, so who am I to complain?)
I threw the latency value into the settings file. It should be 16,
but I set it to 5 since that was the lowest before it started negatively
impacting uncapped speeds. You're wasting your time and CPU cycles setting
it lower than 5, but if people like placebo effects it might work. Maybe
I should let it be a signed integer so people can set it to -16 and think
it's actually faster :P (I'm only joking. I took out the 96000hz audio
placebo effect as well. Not really into psychological tricks anymore.)
But yeah seriously, I didn't do this to start this discussion again for
the billionth time. Please don't go there. And please don't tell me this
WIP has higher/lower latency than before. I don't want to hear it.
The only reason I bring it up is for the fun part that is worth
discussing: put up or shut up time on how sensitive you are to
latency! You can set the value above 5 to see how games feel.
I personally can't really tell a difference until about 50. And I can't
be 100% confident it's worse until about 75. But ... when I set it to
150, games become "extra difficult" ... the higher it goes, the worse
it gets :D
For this WIP, I've left no upper limit cap. I'll probably set a cap of
something like 500ms or 1000ms for the official release. Need to balance
user error/trolling with enjoyability. I'll think about it.
[...]
Now, what I worry about is stupid people seeing it and thinking it's an
"added latency" setting, as if anyone would intentionally make things
worse by default. This is a limiter. So if 5ms have passed since the
game last polled, and that will be the case 99.9% of the time in games,
the next poll will happen just in time, immediately when the game polls
the inputs. Thus, a value below 1/<framerate>ms is not only pointless,
if you go too low it will ruin your fast forward max speeds.
I did say I didn't want to resort to placebo tricks, but I also don't
want to spark up public discussion on this again either. So it might
be best to default Input/Latency to 0ms, and internally have a max(5,
latency) wrapper around the value.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/vector rewritten from scratch
- higan/audio uses nall/vector instead of raw pointers
- higan/sfc/coprocessor/sdd1 updated with new research information
- ruby/video/glx and ruby/video/glx2: fuck salt glXSwapIntervalEXT!
The big change here is definitely nall/vector. The Windows, OS X and Qt
ports won't compile until you change some first/last strings to
left/right, but GTK will compile.
I'd be really grateful if anyone could stress-test nall/vector. Pretty
much everything I do relies on this class. If we introduce a bug, the
worst case scenario is my entire SFC game dump database gets corrupted,
or the byuu.org server gets compromised. So it's really critical that we
test the hell out of this right now.
The S-DD1 changes mean you need to update your installation of icarus
again. Also, even though the Lunar FMV never really worked on the
accuracy core anyway (it didn't initialize the PPU properly), it really
won't work now that we emulate the hard-limit of 16MiB for S-DD1 games.
byuu says:
Nothing WS-related this time.
First, I fixed expansion port device mapping. On first load, it was
mapping the expansion port device too late, so it ended up not taking
effect. I had to spin out the logic for that into
Program::connectDevices(). This was proving to be quite annoying while
testing eBoot (SNES-Hook simulation.)
Second, I fixed the audio->set(Frequency, Latency) functions to take
(uint) parameters from the configuration file, so the weird behavior
around changing settings in the audio panel should hopefully be gone
now.
Third, I rewrote the interface->load,unload functions to call into the
(Emulator)::System::load,unload functions. And I have those call out to
Cartridge::load,unload. Before, this was inverted, and Cartridge::load()
was invoking System::load(), which I felt was kind of backward.
The Super Game Boy really didn't like this change, however. And it took
me a few hours to power through it. Before, I had the Game Boy core
dummying out all the interface->(load,save)Request calls, and having the
SNES core make them for it. This is because the folder paths and IDs
will be different between the two cores.
I've redesigned things so that ICD2's Emulator::Interface overloads
loadRequest and saveRequest, and translates the requests into new
requests for the SuperFamicom core. This allows the Game Boy code to do
its own loading for everything without a bunch of Super Game Boy special
casing, and without any awkwardness around powering on with no cartridge
inserted.
This also lets the SNES side of things simply call into higher-level
GameBoy::interface->load,save(id, stream) functions instead of stabbing
at the raw underlying state inside of various Game Boy core emulation
classes. So things are a lot better abstracted now.
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.
byuu says (in the WIP forum):
Changelog:
- satellaviewcartridge/SatellaviewCartridge is now bsmemory/BSMemory
- Emulation/BS-X Satellaview/ is now Emulation/BS Memory/
- masking is in for MCC's mcu (awful hack in the code, but that's
temporary)
- BS Memory types are now "flash" or "mrom"
- fixed loading Same Game - Tengai Hen
- icarus fixed up a lot; can load database entries for any supported
media type now (only the SFC DB exists currently)
mMenu::remove() fix will be in the next WIP.
byuu says (in the public beta thread):
Changelog:
- GBA emulation accuracy improved quite a bit
- video shaders are supported once again
- icarus shares settings.bml with higan; changing library path in
one now affects the other
- icarus manifest generation now uses my SNES game dumping database
for perfect mapping of US games
- major overhaul to manifest file format. As long as you have
v095-style folders without manifest.bml, you will be fine
- if not, go to higan->settings->configuration->advanced and check
"Ignore Manifests" before loading your first game
- new "Manifest Viewer" tool (not really meant for regular users;
more of a developer tool)
- experimental (but disabled in the binary) WASAPI driver. Help
stabilizing it would be *greatly* appreciated!
- lots of other stuff
Tim Allen