byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan: `Emulator::<Platform::load>()` now returns a struct containing
both a path ID and a string option
- higan: `Emulator::<Platform::load>()` now takes an optional final
argument of string options
- fc: added PAL emulation (finally, only took six years)
- md: added PAL emulation
- md: fixed address parameter to `VDP::Sprite::write()`; fixes missing
sprites in Super Street Fighter II
- md: emulated HIRQ counter; fixes many games
- Super Street Fighter II - status bar
- Altered Beast - status bar
- Sonic the Hedgehog - Labyrinth Zone - water effect
- etc.
- ms: added PAL emulation
- sfc: added the ability to override the default region auto-detection
- sfc: removed "system.region" override setting from `Super Famicom.sys`
- tomoko: added options list to game folder load dialog window
- tomoko: added the ability to specify game folder load options on the
command-line
So, basically ... Sega forced a change with the way region detection
works. You end up with games that can run on multiple regions, and the
content changes accordingly. Bare Knuckle in NTSC-J mode will become
Streets of Rage in NTSC-U mode. Some games can even run in both NTSC and
PAL mode.
In my view, there should be a separate ROM for each region a game was
released in, even if the ROM content were identical. But unfortunately
that's not how things were done by anyone else.
So to support this, the higan load dialog now has a drop-down at the
bottom-right, where you can choose the region to load games from. On the
SNES, it defaults to "Auto", which will pull the region setting from the
manifest, or fall back on NTSC. On the Mega Drive ... unfortunately, I
can't auto-detect the region from the ROM header. $1f0 is supposed to
contain a string like "JUE", but instead you get games like Maui Mallard
that put an "A" there, and other such nonsense. Sega was far more lax
than Nintendo with the ROM header validity. So for now at least, you
have to manually select your region every time you play a Mega Drive
game, thus you have "NTSC-J", "NTSC-U", and "PAL". The same goes for the
Master System for the same reason, but there's only "NTSC" and "PAL"
here. I'm not sure if games have a way to detect domestic vs
international consoles.
And for now ... the Famicom is the same as well, with no auto-detection.
I'd sincerely hope iNES has a header bit for the region, but I didn't
bother with updating icarus to support that yet.
The way to pass these parameters on the command-line is to prefix the
game path with "option:", so for example:
higan "PAL:/path/to/Sonic the Hedgehog (USA, Europe).md"
If you don't provide a prefix, it uses the default (NTSC-J, NTSC, or
Auto.) Obviously, it's not possible to pass parameters with
drag-and-drop, so you will always get the default option in said case.
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:
- 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:
- 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: 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:
- 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:
- 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.
Tim Allen