byuu says:
Changelog:
- finished cleaning up the SFC core to my new coding conventions
- removed sfc/controller/usart (superseded by 21fx)
- hid Synchronize Video option from the menu (still in the configuration
file)
Pretty much the only minor detail left is some variable names in the
SA-1 core that really won't look good at all if I move to camelCase,
so I'll have to rethink how I handle those. It's probably a good area
to attempt using BitFields, to see how it impacts performance. But I'll
do that in a test branch first.
But for the most part, this should be the end of the gigantic diffs (this
one was 174KiB), at least for the SFC/WS cores. Still have the FC/GB/GBA
cores to clean up more fully. Assuming we don't spot any new regressions,
we should be ~95% out of the woods on code cleanups breaking things.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- massive cleanups and optimizations on the PPU core
- ~9% speedup over v099 official
This is pretty much it for the low-hanging fruit of speeding up higan. Any
more gains from this point will be extremely hard-fought, unfortunately.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed Super Game Boy regression from v096r04 with bottom tile row
flickering
- fixed GB STAT IRQ regression from previous WIP
- Altered Space is now playable
- GBVideoPlayer isn't; but nobody seems to know exactly what weird
hardware quirk that one relies on to work
- ~3-4% speed improvement in SuperFX games by eliminating function<>
callback on register assignments
- most noticeable in Doom in-game; least noticeable on Yoshi's Island
title screen (darn)
- finished GSU core and SuperFX coprocessor code cleanups
- did some more work cleaning up the LR35902 core and GB CPU code
Just a fair warning: don't get your hopes up on these GB
fixes. Cliffhanger now hangs completely (har har), and none of the
other bugs are fixed. We pretty much did all this work just for Altered
Space. So, I hope you like playing Altered Space.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- GNUmakefile: reverted $(call unique,) to $(strip)
- processor/r6502: removed templates; reduces object size from 146.5kb
to 107.6kb
- processor/lr35902: removed templates; reduces object size from 386.2kb
to 197.4kb
- processor/spc700: merged op macros for switch table declarations
- sfc/coprocessor/sa1: partial cleanups; flattened directory structure
- sfc/coprocessor/superfx: partial cleanups; flattened directory structure
- sfc/coprocessor/icd2: flattened directory structure
- gb/ppu: changed behavior of STAT IRQs
Major caveat! The GB/GBC STAT IRQ changes has a major bug in it somewhere
that's seriously breaking most games. I'm pushing the WIP anyway, because
I believe the changes to be mostly correct. I'd like to get more people
looking at these changes, and also try more heavy-handed hacking and
diff comparison logging between the previous WIP and this one.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- removed template usage from processor/spc700; cleaned up many function
names and the switch table
- object size: 176.8kb => 127.3kb
- source code size: 43.5kb => 37.0kb
- fixed processor/r65816 BRK/COP vector regression [hex_usr]
- corrected HuC3 unmapped RAM read value; fixes Robopon [endrift]
- cosmetic: simplified the butterworth constant calculation
[Wolfram|Alpha]
The SPC700 core changes took forever, about three hours of work.
Only the LR35902 and R6502 still need their template functions
removed. The point of this is that it doesn't cause any speed penalty
to do so, and it results in smaller binary sizes and faster compilation
times.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- improved attenuation of biquad filter by computing butterworth Q
coefficients correctly (instead of using the same constant)
- adding 1e-25 to each input sample into the biquad filters to try and
prevent denormalization
- updated normalization from [0.0 to 1.0] to [-1.0 to +1.0]; volume/reverb
happen in floating-point mode now
- good amount of work to make the base Emulator::Audio support any number
of output channels
- so that we don't have to do separate work on left/right channels;
and can instead share the code for each channel
- Emulator::Interface::audioSample(int16 left, int16 right); changed to:
- Emulator::Interface::audioSample(double* samples, uint channels);
- samples are normalized [-1.0 to +1.0]
- for now at least, channels will be the value given to
Emulator::Audio::reset()
- fixed GUI crash on startup when audio driver is set to None
I'm probably going to be updating ruby to accept normalized doubles as
well; but I'm not sure if I will try and support anything other 2-channel
audio output. It'll depend on how easy it is to do so; perhaps it'll be
a per-driver setting.
The denormalization thing is fierce. If that happens, it drops the
emulator framerate from 220fps to about 20fps for Game Boy emulation. And
that happens basically whenever audio output is silent. I'm probably
also going to make a nall/denormal.hpp file at some point with
platform-specific functionality to set the CPU state to "denormals as
zero" where applicable. I'll still add the 1e-25 offset (inaudible)
as another fallback.
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:
- higan/video: added support for Emulator::Sprite
- higan/resource: a new system for accessing embedded binary files
inside the emulation cores; holds the sprites
- higan/sfc/superscope,justifier: re-enabled display of crosshairs
- higan/sfc/superscope: fixed turbo toggle (also shows different
crosshair color when in turbo mode)
- higan/sfc/ppu: always outputs at 512x480 resolution now
- causes a slight speed-hit from ~127fps to ~125fps;
- but allows high-resolution 32x32 cursors that look way better;
- also avoids the need to implement sprite scaling logic
Right now, the PPU code to always output at 480-height is a really gross
hack. Don't worry, I'll make that nicer before release.
Also, superscope.cpp and justifier.cpp are built around a 256x240
screen. But since we now have 512x480, we can make the cursor's movement
much smoother by doubling the resolution on both axes. The actual games
won't see any accuracy improvements when firing the light guns, but the
cursors will animate nicer so I think it's still worth it. I'll work on
that before the next release as well.
The current 32x32 cursors are nicer, but we can do better now with full
24-bit color. So feel free to submit alternatives. I'll probably reject
them, but you can always try :D
The sprites don't support alpha blending, just color keying (0x00000000
= transparent; anything else is 0xff......). We can revisit that later
if necessary.
The way I have it designed, the only files that do anything with
Emulator::Sprite at all are the superscope and justifier folders.
I didn't have to add any hooks anywhere else. Rendering the sprite is
a lot cleaner than the old code, too.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed nall/path.hpp compilation issue
- fixed ruby/audio/xaudio header declaration compilation issue (again)
- cleaned up xaudio2.hpp file to match my coding syntax (12.5% of the
file was whitespace overkill)
- added null terminator entry to nall/windows/utf8.hpp argc[] array
- nall/windows/guid.hpp uses the Windows API for generating the GUID
- this should stop all the bug reports where two nall users were
generating GUIDs at the exact same second
- fixed hiro/cocoa compilation issue with uint# types
- fixed major higan/sfc Super Game Boy audio latency issue
- fixed higan/sfc CPU core bug with pei, [dp], [dp]+y instructions
- major cleanups to higan/processor/r65816 core
- merged emulation/native-mode opcodes
- use camel-case naming on memory.hpp functions
- simplify address masking code for memory.hpp functions
- simplify a few opcodes themselves (avoid redundant copies, etc)
- rename regs.* to r.* to match modern convention of other CPU cores
- removed device.order<> concept from Emulator::Interface
- cores will now do the translation to make the job of the UI easier
- fixed plurality naming of arrays in Emulator::Interface
- example: emulator.ports[p].devices[d].inputs[i]
- example: vector<Medium> media
- probably more surprises
Major show-stoppers to the next official release:
- we need to work on GB core improvements: LY=153/0 case, multiple STAT
IRQs case, GBC audio output regs, etc.
- we need to re-add software cursors for light guns (Super Scope,
Justifier)
- after the above, we need to fix the turbo button for the Super Scope
I really have no idea how I want to implement the light guns. Ideally,
we'd want it in higan/video, so we can support the NES Zapper with the
same code. But this isn't going to be easy, because only the SNES knows
when its output is interlaced, and its resolutions can vary as
{256,512}x{224,240,448,480} which requires pixel doubling that was
hard-coded to the SNES-specific behavior, but isn't appropriate to be
exposed in higan/video.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed major nall/vector/prepend bug
- renamed hiro/ListView to hiro/TableView
- added new hiro/ListView control which is a simplified abstraction of
hiro/TableView
- updated higan's cheat database window and icarus' scan dialog to use
the new ListView control
- compilation works once again on all platforms (Windows, Cocoa, GTK,
Qt)
- the loki skeleton compiles once again (removed nall/DSP references;
updated port/device ID names)
Small catch: need to capture layout resize events internally in Windows
to call resizeColumns. For now, just resize the icarus window to get it
to use the full window width for list view items.
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:
Changelog:
- GB: support modeSelect and RAM for MBC1M (Momotarou Collection)
- audio: implemented native resampling support into Emulator::Stream
- audio: removed nall::DSP completely
Unfortunately, the new resampler didn't turn out quite as fast as I had
hoped. The final hermite resampling added some overhead; and I had to
bump up the kernel count to 500 from 400 to get the buzzing to go away
on my main PC. I think that's due to it running at 48000hz output
instead of 44100hz output, maybe?
Compared to Ryphecha's:
(NES) Mega Man 2: 167fps -> 166fps
(GB) Mega Man II: 224fps -> 200fps
(WSC) Riviera: 143fps -> 151fps
Odd that the WS/WSC ends up faster while the DMG/CGB ends up slower.
But this knocks 922 lines down to 146 lines. The only files left in all
of higan not written (or rewritten) by me are ruby/xaudio2.h and
libco/ppc.c
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: 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:
It took several hours, but I've rebuilt much of the SNES' bus memory
mapping architecture.
The new design unifies the cartridge string-based mapping
("00-3f,80-bf:8000-ffff") and internal bus.map calls. The map() function
now has an accompanying unmap() function, and instead of a fixed 256
callbacks, it'll scan to find the first available slot. unmap() will
free slots up when zero addresses reference a given slot.
The controllers and expansion port are now both entirely dynamic.
Instead of load/unload/power/reset, they only have the constructor
(power/reset/load) and destructor (unload). What this means is you can
now dynamically change even expansion port devices after the system is
loaded.
Note that this is incredibly dangerous and stupid, but ... oh well. The
whole point of this was for 21fx. There's no way to change the expansion
port device prior to loading a game, but if the 21fx isn't active, then
the reset vector hijack won't work. Now you can load a 21fx game, change
the expansion port device, and simply reset the system to active the
device.
The unification of design between controller port devices and expansion
port devices is nice, and overall this results in a reduction of code
(all of the Mapping stuff in Cartridge is gone, replaced with direct bus
mapping.) And there's always the potential to expand this system more in
the future now.
The big missing feature right now is the ability to push/pop mappings.
So if you look at how the 21fx does the reset vector, you might vomit
a little bit. But ... it works.
Also changed exit(0) to _exit(0) in the POSIX version of nall::execute.
[The _exit(0) thing is an attempt to make higan not crash when it tries
to launch icarus and it's not on $PATH. The theory is that higan forks,
then the child tries to exec icarus and fails, so it exits, all the
unique_ptrs clean up their resources and tell the X server to free
things the parent process is still using. Calling _exit() prevents
destructors from running, and seems to prevent the problem. -Ed.]
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SFC: fixed a regression on auto joypad polling due to missing
parentheses
- SFC: exported new PPU::vdisp() const -> uint; function [1]
- SFC: merged PPU MMIO functions into the read/write handles (as
I previously did for the CPU)
- higan: removed individual emulator core names (bnes, bsnes, bgb, bgba,
bws) [2] Forgot:
- to remove /tomoko from the about dialog
[1] note that technically I was relying on the cached, per-frame
overscan setting when the CPU and light guns were polling the number of
active display scanlines per frame. This was technically incorrect as
you can change this value mid-frame and it'll kick in. I've never seen
any game toggle overscan every frame, we only know about this because
anomie tested this a long time ago. So, nothing should break, but ...
you know how the SNES is. You can't even look at the code without
something breaking, so I figured I'd mention it >_>
[2] I'll probably keep referring to the SNES core as bsnes anyway.
I don't mind if you guys use the b<system> names as shorthand. The
simplification is mostly to make the branding easier.
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:
Changelog:
- bsnes-accuracy emulates reset vector properly[1]
- bsnes-balanced compiles once more
- bsnes-performance compiles once more
The balanced and performance profiles are fixed for the last time. They
will be removed for v098r01.
Please test this WIP as much as you can. I intend to release v098 soon.
I know save states are a little unstable for the WS/WSC, but they work
well enough for a release. If I can't figure it out soon, I'm going to
post v098 anyway.
[1] this one's been a really long time coming, but ... one of the bugs
I found when I translated Tekkaman Blade was that my translation patch
would crash every now and again when you hit the reset button on a real
SNES, but it always worked upon power on.
Turns out that while power-on initializes the stack register to $01ff,
reset does things a little bit differently. Reset actually triggers the
reset interrupt vector after putting the CPU into emulation mode, but it
doesn't initialize the stack pointer. The net effect is that the stack
high byte is set to $01, and the low byte is left as it was. And then
the reset vector runs, which pushes the low 16-bits of the program
counter, plus the processor flags, onto the stack frame. So you can
actually tell where the game was at when the system was reset ... sort
of.
It's a really weird behavior to be sure. But here's the catch: say
you're hacking a game, and so you hook the reset vector with jsl
showMyTranslationCreditsSplashScreen, and inside this new subroutine,
you then perform whatever bytes you hijacked, and then initialize the
stack frame to go about your business drawing the screen, and when
you're done, you return via rtl.
Generally, this works fine. But if S={0100, 0101, or 0102}, then the
stack will wrap due to being in emulation mode at reset. So it will
write to {0100, 01ff, 01fe}. But now in your subroutine, you enable
native mode. So when you return from your subroutine hijack, it reads
the return address from {01ff, 0200, 0201} instead of the expected
{01ff, 0100, 0101}. Thus, you get an invalid address back, and you
"return" to the wrong location, and your program dies.
The odds of this happening depend on how the game handles S, but
generally speaking, it's a ~1:85 chance.
By emulating this behavior, I'll likely expose this bug in many ROM
hacks that do splash screen hooks like this, including my own Tekkaman
Blade translation. And it's also very possible that there are commercial
games that screw this up as well.
But, it's what the real system does. So if any crashes start happening
as of this WIP upon resetting the game, well ... it'd happen on real
hardware, too.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS: fixed sprite window clipping (again)
- WS: don't set IRQ status bits of IRQ enable bits are clear
- SFC: signed/unsigned -> int/uint for DSP core
- SFC: removed eBoot
- SFC: added 21fx (not the same as the old precursor to MSU1; just
reusing the name)
Note: XI Little doesn't seem to be fixed after all ... but the other
three are. So I guess we're at 13 bugs :( And holy shit that music when
you choose a menu option is one of the worst sounds I've ever heard in
my life >_<
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed DAS instruction (Judgment Silversword score)
- fixed [VH]TMR_FREQ writes (Judgement Silversword audio after area 20)
- fixed initialization of SP (fixes seven games that were hanging on
startup)
- added SER_STATUS and SER_DATA stubs (fixes four games that were
hanging on startup)
- initialized IEEP data (fixes Super Robot Taisen Compact 2 series)
- note: you'll need to delete your internal.com in WonderSwan
(Color).sys folders
- fixed CMPS and SCAS termination condition (fixes serious bugs in four
games)
- set read/writeCompleted flags for EEPROM status (fixes Tetsujin 28
Gou)
- major code cleanups to SFC/R65816 and SFC/CPU
- mostly refactored disassembler to output strings instead of using
char* buffer
- unrolled all the subfolders on sfc/cpu to a single directory
- corrected casing for all of sfc/cpu and a large portion of
processor/r65816
I kind of went overboard on the code cleanup with this WIP. Hopefully
nothing broke. Any testing one can do with the SFC accuracy core would
be greatly appreciated.
There's still an absolutely huge amount of work left to go, but I do
want to eventually refresh the entire codebase to my current coding
style, which is extremely different from stuff that's been in higan
mostly untouched since ~2006 or so. It's dangerous and fickle work, but
if I don't do it, then the code will be a jumbled mess of several
different styles.
byuu says:
Changelog: (all WSC unless otherwise noted)
- fixed LINECMP=0 interrupt case (fixes FF4 world map during airship
sequence)
- improved CPU timing (fixes Magical Drop flickering and FF1 battle
music)
- added per-frame OAM caching (fixes sprite glitchiness in Magical Drop,
Riviera, etc.)
- added RTC emulation (fixes Dicing Knight and Judgement Silversword)
- added save state support
- added cheat code support (untested because I don't know of any cheat
codes that exist for this system)
- icarus: can now detect games with RTC chips
- SFC: bugfix to SharpRTC emulation (Dai Kaijuu Monogatari II)
- ( I was adding the extra leap year day to all 12 months instead of
just February ... >_< )
Note that the RTC emulation is very incomplete. It's not really
documented at all, and the two games I've tried that use it never even
ask you to set the date/time (so they're probably just using it to count
seconds.) I'm not even sure if I've implement the level-sensitive
behavior correctly (actually, now that I think about it, I need to mask
the clear bit in INT_ACK for the level-sensitive interrupts ...)
A bit worried about the RTC alarm, because it seems like it'll fire
continuously for a full minute. Or even if you turn it off after it
fires, then that doesn't seem to be lowering the line until the next
second ticks on the RTC, so that likely needs to happen when changing
the alarm flag.
Also not sure on this RTC's weekday byte. On the SharpRTC, it actually
computes this for you. Because it's not at all an easy thing to
calculate yourself in 65816 or V30MZ assembler. About 40 lines of code
to do it in C. For now, I'm requiring the program to calculate the value
itself.
Also note that there's some gibberish tiles in Judgement Silversword,
sadly. Not sure what's up there, but the game's still fully playable at
least.
Finally, no surprise: Beat-Mania doesn't run :P
byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulated SuperDisc $21e1 basic interface (NEC 4-bit MCU); all hardware
tests pass now (but they don't test much)
- WS/V30MZ: fixed inc/dec reg flag calculation
- WS/V30MZ: fixed lds/les instructions
WS/C compatibility should be way up now. SuperDisc BIOS passes all tests
now (but they only test for the presence of the interface, nothing
more.)
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 $21e4 clear, so I'm happy that's fixed now.
Riviera starts now, and displays the first intro screen before crashing.
Huge, huge amounts of corrupted graphics, though. This game's really
making me work for it :(
No color games seem fully playable yet, but a lot of monochrome and
color games are now at least showing more intro screen graphics before
dying.
This build defaults to horizontal orientation, but I left the inputs
bound to vertical orientation. Whoops. I still need to implement
a screen flip key binding.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- icarus: WS/C detects RAM type/size heuristically now
- icarus: WS/C uses ram type=$type instead of $type
- WS: use back color instead of white for backdrop
- WS: fixed sprite count limit; removes all the garbled sprites from
GunPey
- WS: hopefully fixed sprite priority with screen 2
- WS: implemented keypad polling; GunPey is now fully playable
- SNES: added Super Disc expansion port device (doesn't do anything,
just for testing)
Note: WS is hard-coded to vertical orientation right now. But there's
basic code in there for all the horizontal stuff.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed nall/windows/guard.hpp
- fixed hiro/(windows,gtk)/header.hpp
- fixed Famicom PPU OAM reads (mask the correct bits when writing)
[hex_usr]
- removed the need for (system := system) lines from higan/GNUmakefile
- added "All" option to filetype dropdown for ROM loading
- allows loading GBC games in SGB mode (and technically non-GB(C)
games, which will obviously fail to do anything)
- loki can load and play game folders now (command-line only) (extremely
unimpressive; don't waste your time :P)
- the input is extremely hacked in as a quick placeholder; not sure
how I'm going to do mapping yet for it
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed SNES sprite priority regression from r17
- added nall/windows/guard.hpp to guard against global namespace
pollution (similar to nall/xorg/guard.hpp)
- almost fixed Windows compilation (still accuracy profile only, sorry)
- finished porting all of gba/ppu's registers over to the new .bit,.bits
format ... all GBA registers.cpp files gone now
- the "processors :=" line in the target-$(ui)/GNUmakefile is no longer
required
- processors += added to each emulator core
- duplicates are removed using the new nall/GNUmakefile's $(unique)
function
- SFC core can be compiled without the GB core now
- "-DSFC_SUPERGAMEBOY" is required to build in SGB support now (it's
set in target-tomoko/GNUmakefile)
- started once again on loki (higan/target-loki/) [as before, loki is
Linux/BSD only on account of needing hiro::Console]
loki shouldn't be too horrendous ... I hope. I just have the base
skeleton ready for now. But the code from v094r08 should be mostly
copyable over to it. It's just that it's about 50KiB of incredibly
tricky code that has to be just perfect, so it's not going to be quick.
But at least with the skeleton, it'll be a lot easier to pick away at it
as I want.
Windows compilation fix: move hiro/windows/header.hpp line 18 (header
guard) to line 16 instead.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- sfc/ppu/sprite updated to use new .bit(s) functions; masked sizes
better; added valid flags instead of using magic numbers
- ws/ppu updates to use new .bit(s) functions
- ws/ppu: added line compare interrupt support
- added ws/eeprom; emulation of WS/WSC internal EEPROM and cartridge
EEPROM (1kbit - 16kbit supported)
- added basic read/write handlers for remaining WS/WSC PPU registers
WS EEPROM emulation is basically a direct copy of trap15's code. Still
some unknown areas in there, but hopefully it's enough to get further
into games that depend on EEPROM support. Note that you'll have to
manually add the eeprom line to the manifest for now, as icarus doesn't
know how to detect EEPROM/sizes yet.
I figured the changes to the SNES PPU sprites would slow it down a tad,
but it actually sped it up. Most of the impact from the integer classes
are gone now.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan now uses Natural<Size>/Integer<Size> for its internal types
- Super Famicom emulation now uses uint24 instead of uint for bus
addresses (it's a 24-bit bus)
- cleaned up gb/apu MMIO writes
- cleaned up sfc/coprocessor/msu1 MMIO writes
- ~3% speed penalty
I've wanted to do that 24-bit bus thing for so long, but have always
been afraid of the speed impact. It's probably going to hurt
balanced/performance once they compile again, but it wasn't significant
enough to harm the accuracy core's frame rate, thankfully. Only lost one
frame per second.
The GBA core handlers are clearly going to take a lot more work. The
bit-ranges will make it substantially easier to handle, though. Lots of
32-bit registers where certain values span multiple bytes, but we have
to be able to read/write at byte-granularity.
byuu says:
Got it. Wow, that didn't hurt nearly as much as I thought it was going
to.
Dropped from 127.5fps to 123.5fps to use Natural/Integer for
(u)int(8,16,32,64).
That's totally worth the cost.
byuu says:
This is a few days old, but oh well.
This WIP changes nall,hiro,ruby,icarus back to (u)int(8,16,32,64)_t.
I'm slowly pushing for (u)int(8,16,32,64) to use my custom
Integer<Size>/Natural<Size> classes instead. But it's going to be one
hell of a struggle to get that into higan.
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:
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:
More V30MZ implemented, a lot more to go.
icarus now supports importing WS and WSC games. It expects them to have
the correct file extension, same for GB and GBC.
> Ugh, apparently HiDPI icarus doesn't let you press the check boxes.
I set the flag value in the plist to false for now. Forgot to do it for
higan, but hopefully I won't forget before release.
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:
A minor WIP to get us started.
Changelog:
- System::Video merged to PPU::Video
- System::Audio merged to DSP::Audio
- System::Configuration merged to Interface::Settings
- created emulator/emulator.cpp and accompanying object file for shared
code between all cores
Currently, emulator.cpp just holds a videoColor() function that takes
R16G16B16, performs gamma/saturation/luma adjust, and outputs
(currently) A8R8G8B8. It's basically an internal function call for cores
to use when generating palette entries. This code used to exist inside
ui-tomoko/program/interface.cpp, but we have to move it internal for
software display emulation. But in the future, we could add other useful
cross-core functionality here.
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:
This WIP finally achieves the vision I've had for icarus.
I also fixed a mapping issue with Cx4 that, oddly enough, only caused
the "2" from the Mega Man X2 title screen to disappear.
[Editor's note - "the vision for icarus" was described in a separate,
public forum post: http://board.byuu.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?p=20584
Quoting for posterity:
icarus is now a full-fledged part of higan, and will be bundled with
each higan WIP as well. This will ensure that in the future, the
exact version of icarus you need to run higan will be included right
along with it. As of this WIP, physical manifest files are now truly
and entirely optional.
From now on, you can associate your ROM image files with higan's
main binary, or drop them directly on top of it, to load and play
your games.
Furthermore, there are two new menu options that appear under the
library menu when icarus is present:
- "Load ROM File ..." => gives you a single-file selection dialog to
import (and if possible) run the game
- "Import ROM Files ..." => gives you a multi-file import dialog
with checkboxes to pull in multiple games at once
Finally, as before, icarus can generate manifest.bml files for
folders that lack them.
For people who like the game folder and library system, nothing's
changed. Keep using higan as you have been.
For people who hate it, you can now use higan like your classic
emulators. Treat the "Library->{System Name}" entries as your
"favorites" list: the games you actually play. Treat the
"Library->Load ROM" as your standard open file dialog in other
emulators. And finally, treat "Advanced->Game Library" as your save
data path for cheat codes, save states, save RAM, etc.
]
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed S-DD1 RAM writes (Star Ocean audio fixed)
- applied all of the DMG test ROM fixes discussed earlier; passes many
more test ROMs now
- at least until the GBVideoPlayer is working: for debugging purposes,
CPU/PPU single-step now instead of sync just-in-time (~30% slower)
- fixed OS X crash on NSTextView (hopefully, would be very odd if not)
Unfortunately passing these test ROMs caused my favorite GB/GBC game to
break all of its graphics =(
Shin Megami Tensei - Devichil - Kuro no Sho (Japan) is all garbled now.
I'm really quite bummed by this ... but I guess I'll go through and
revert r04's fixes one at a time until I find what's causing it.
On the plus side, Astro Rabby is playable now. Still acts weird when
pressing B/A on the first screen, but the start button will start the
game.
EDIT: got it. Shin Megami Tensei - Devichil requires FF4F (VBK) to be
readable. Before, it was always returning 0x00. With my return 0xFF
patch, that broke. But it should be returning the VBK value, which also
fixes it. Also need to handle FF68/FF6A reads. Was really hoping that'd
help GBVideoPlayer too, but nope. It doesn't read any of those three
registers.
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:
Changelog:
- added Cocoa target: higan can now be compiled for OS X Lion
[Cydrak, byuu]
- SNES/accuracy profile hires color blending improvements - fixes
Marvelous text [AWJ]
- fixed a slight bug in SNES/SA-1 VBR support caused by a typo
- added support for multi-pass shaders that can load external textures
(requires OpenGL 3.2+)
- added game library path (used by ananke->Import Game) to
Settings->Advanced
- system profiles, shaders and cheats database can be stored in "all
users" shared folders now (eg /usr/share on Linux)
- all configuration files are in BML format now, instead of XML (much
easier to read and edit this way)
- main window supports drag-and-drop of game folders (but not game files
/ ZIP archives)
- audio buffer clears when entering a modal loop on Windows (prevents
audio repetition with DirectSound driver)
- a substantial amount of code clean-up (probably the biggest
refactoring to date)
One highly desired target for this release was to default to the optimal
drivers instead of the safest drivers, but because AMD drivers don't
seem to like my OpenGL 3.2 driver, I've decided to postpone that. AMD
has too big a market share. Hopefully with v093 officially released, we
can get some public input on what AMD doesn't like.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- you can now drop game folders (not game files, sorry) onto higan's
main window to load them
- audio buffer will clear on Windows when entering modal loop (entering
menu, moving or resizing window)
- this prevents DirectSound driver's audio repetition
- ruby defaults to the optimal driver for each platform, rather than the
safest driver, now
- added Cydrak's gl_Position.zw change to ruby
- added fixes for all the changes to nall, ruby, phoenix over the past
three months
byuu says:
This will be another massive diff from the previous version.
All of higan was updated to use the new foo& bar syntax, and I also
updated switch statements to be consistent as well (but not in the
disassemblers, was starting to get an RSI just from what I already did.)
phoenix/{windows, cocoa, qt} need to be updated to use "string foo"
instead of "const string& foo", and after that, the major diffs should
be finished.
This archive is the first time I'm posting my copy-on-write,
size+capacity nall::string class, so any feedback on that is welcome as
well.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed cartridge load window focus on Windows
- lots of updates to nall, ruby and phoenix
- ethos and Emulator::Interface updated from "foo &bar" to "foo& bar"
syntax (work-in-progress)
Before I had mixed the two ways to declare variables/arguments all over
the place, so the goal is to unify them all for consistency. So the
changelog for this release will be massive (750KB >.>) due to the syntax
change. Yeah, that's what I spent the last three days working on ...
byuu says:
This release should be polished enough for a general release.
This release should be polished enough for a general release.
Anyone with a real, clean Mac up for posting compiled binaries?
Preferably compile with "make profile=balanced" In fact, I'd like it if
someone were willing to host a "higan for Mac" page, with binaries of
each of the latest releases. Only really needed for major official
releases, but it'd be preferable to have the builds updated as soon as
possible after I post new builds.
Changelog:
- no more keyboard chimes when pressing keys
- status bar added, fully functional
- Label::minimumSize() takes frame into account (but note a few places
hard-code raw Font::size(), so a few text labels are still clipped)
- resizing the main window looks smooth regardless of whether a game is
running or not
- currently, resizing the window pauses the emulation. Allowing it to
run the main loop was lagging out the window resize process too much
to be worth it
Additional OS X integration enhancements:
- closing the main window unloads the current game, but does not quit
the application (quit via the main menu or the dock menu)
- clicking the icon in the dock will (re)display the main menu
byuu says:
This release adds the phoenix/Cocoa port, and rewrites a lot of the
higan user interface to work with all of the new changes (like blocking
in the main run loop and in modal windows.)
It doesn't yet modify the compilation flags to actually build on OS
X yet, and even then, we don't really have ruby drivers, so there'd be
no video, audio or input.
Two months between a single WIP point release ... for the first six
years, I never went more than a month without a full official release.
I guess I should be happy that it's become so refined, but I sure do
miss those halcyon days of exciting progress.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- merged AWJ's hires color blending improvements (most notably: fixes
Marvelous' text)
- created sfc/base/ to store base unit (expansion port device) emulation
- synchronized the markup of Satellaview and Sufami Turbo cartridge
slots in the board markup
- fixed "Initializing ..." typo in timing settings
If at all possible, I'd really like to have heavy testing of games that
use hires graphics to check for any regressions.
I trust AWJ's code, and all of the test ROMs I have thrown at it all
appear to work great. But better safe than sorry. Same deal for any core
changes, it's a lot better to catch it now than after v093 is released.
byuu says:
higan changelog:
- compiler is set to g++-4.7, subst(cc,++) rule is gone, C files compile
with $(compiler) -x c
- make throws an error when you specify an invalid profile or compile on
an unsupported platform (instead of hanging forever)
- added unverified.png to resources (causes too big of a speed hit to
actually check for folder/unverified file ... so disabled for now)
- fixed default browser paths for Game Boy, Sufami Turbo and BS-X
Satellaview (have to delete paths.cfg to see this)
- browser home button seeks to configpath()/higan/library.cfg
- settings->driver is now settings->advanced, and it adds game library
path setting and profile information
- emulation cores now load manifest files internally, manifest.bml is
not required for a game folder to be recognized by higan as such
- BS-X Satellaview and Sufami Turbo slot cartridge handling moved out of
sfc/chip and into sfc/slot
- Video::StartFullScreen only sets fullscreen when a game is specified
on the command-line
purify and ananke changelog:
- library output path shown in purify window
- added button to change library path
- squelch firmware warning windows to prevent multi-threading crash, but
only via purify (they show up in higan still)
byuu says:
For higan:
- I fixed the data ROM/RAM initialization for the Cx4, which would
periodically cause a crash.
- I also moved the Satellaview MaskROM vs FlashROM detection into the
Satellaview manifests, so Same Game - Character Data works now.
- I also re-added the driver filter to the video shaders, so the D3D
driver won't show OGL shaders and vice versa.
For ananke:
- You can now generate the other SGB images by putting sgb.rom in the
same folder as the BIOS images.
- I fixed the markup in the database and via heuristics for 5MB+ games
(DKJM2, ToP)
- Sufami Turbo and BS-X Satellaview generate BML now instead of XML when
using heuristics.
In the release thread, byuu says:
The first official release of higan has been posted. higan is the
new name for bsnes, and it continues with the latter's version
numbering.
Note that as of now, bsnes still exists. It's a module distributed
inside of higan. bsnes is now specific to my SNES emulator.
Due to last minute changes to the emulator interface, and missing
support in ananke, I wasn't able to include Cydrak's Nintendo DS
emulator dasShiny in this build, but I hope to do so in the next
release.
http://code.google.com/p/higan/downloads/list
For both new and experienced users, please read the higan user guide
first:
http://byuu.org/higan/user-guide
In the v091 WIP thread, byuu says:
r15->r16:
- BS-X MaskROM handling (partial ... need to split bsx/flash away
from sfc/chip, restructure code - it requires tagging the base
cart markup for now, but it needs to parse the slotted cart
markup)
- phoenixflags / phoenixlink += -m32
- nall/sort stability
- if(input.poll(scancode[activeScancode]) == false) return;
- MSU1 / USART need to use interface->path(1)
- MSU1 needs to use Markup::Document, not XML::Document
- case-insensitive folder listings
- remove nall/emulation/system.hpp files (move to ananke)
- remove rom/ram id= checks with indexing
X have cores ask for manifest.bml (skipped for v092's release, too
big a change)
- rename compatibility profile to balanced (so people don't assume
it has better compatibility than accuracy)
byuu says:
Changelog:
- all media types always show base name in the title now (eg Super Game
Boy + Mega Man II)
- Game Boy loading via ananke has been fixed
- phoenix is dynamically linked on Windows now (needed for ananke)
- Linux port shows the higan program icon (once you install the program
to get the bitmap into /usr/local/share/pixmaps)
- paths.cfg defaults to "userpath()/Emulation/System Name/" when it is
created from scratch
[Later, after the v092 release, byuu posted this additional changelog:
- new compilation rules for win32
- OS::setName
- default to ~/Emulation/media.name for paths.cfg
]
byuu says:
higan changelog:
- generates title displayed in emulator window by asking the core
- core builds title solely from "information/title" ... if it's not
there, you don't get a title at all
- sub-system load menu is gone ... since there are multiple revisions of
the SGB, this never really worked well anyway
- to load an SGB, BS-X or ST cartridge, load the base cartridge first
- "File->Load Game" moved to "Load->Import Game" ... may cause a bit of
confusion to new users, but I don't like having a single-item menu,
we'll just have to explain it to new users
- browser window redone to look like ananke
- home button here goes to ~/Emulation rather than just ~ like ananke,
since this is the home of game folders
- game folder icon is now the executable icon for the Tango theme
(orange diamond), meant to represent a complete game rather than
a game file or archive
ananke changelog:
- outputs GBC games to "Game Boy Color/" instead of "Game Boy/"
- adds the file basename to "information/title"
Known issues:
- using ananke to load a GB game trips the Super Famicom SGB mode and
fails (need to make the full-path auto-detection ignore non-bootable
systems)
- need to dump and test some BS-X media before releasing
- ananke lacks BS-X Satellaview cartridge support
- v092 isn't going to let you retarget the ananke/higan game folder path
of ~/Emulation, you will have to wait for a future version if that
bothers you so greatly
[Later, after the v092 release, byuu posted this additional changelog:
- kill laevateinn
- add title()
- add bootable, remove load
- combine file, library
- combine [][][] paths
- fix SFC subtype handling XML->BML
- update file browser to use buttons
- update file browser keyboard handling
- update system XML->BML
- fix sufami turbo hashing
- remove Cartridge::manifest
]
byuu says (about higan):
- dropped release/ root node for individual games (still there in
ananke's database.)
- Memory export uses smarter names (vram.rwm -> video.ram, etc.)
- cheat database moved from XML to BML (3.1MB to 1.9MB file size.)
- cheat codes moved from XML to BML
- resource manifest moved from XML to BML
What can I say, I like consistency. But I'll leave the shaders alone
until I get around to shader folders.
byuu says (about ananke):
Works with higan v091r13. Only does SNES stuff so far.
byuu says:
This release refines HSU1 support as a bidirectional protocol, nests SFC
manifests as "release/cartridge" and "release/information" (but release/
is not guaranteed to be finalized just yet), removes the database
integration, and adds support for ananke.
ananke represents inevitability. It's a library that, when installed,
higan can use to load files from the command-line, and also from a new
File -> Load Game menu option.
I need to change the build rules a bit for it to work on Windows (need
to make phoenix a DLL, basically), but it works now on Linux.
Right now, it only takes *.sfc file names, looks them up in the included
database, converts them to game folders, and returns the game folder
path for higan to load.
The idea is to continue expanding it to support everything we can that
I don't want in the higan core:
- load *.sfc, *.smc, *.swc, *.fig files
- remove SNES copier headers
- split apart merged firmware files
- pull in external firmware files (eg dsp1b.rom - these are staying
merged, just as SPC7110 prg+dat are merged)
- load *.zip and *.7z archives
- prompt for selection on multi-file archives
- generate manifest files based on heuristics
- apply BPS patches
The "Load" menu option has been renamed to "Library", to represent games
in your library. I'm going to add some sort of suffix to indicate
unverified games, and use a different folder icon for those (eg
manifests built on heuristics rather than from the database.)
So basically, to future end users:
File -> Load Game will be how they play games.
Library -> (specific system) can be thought of as an infinitely-sized
recent games list.
purify will likely become a simple stub that invokes ananke's functions.
No reason to duplicate all that code.
[r07 and r08 were not posted to the WIP thread. -Ed.]
byuu says:
I'd appreciate it if you guys wouldn't mind testing out the database
functionality.
Save this file as database.bml (remove the date) inside
~/.config/higan/Super Famicom.sfc/ or %APPDATA%/higan/Super Famicom.sfc/
http://byuu.org/snes/database/database_2012-10-21.bml
Now load any of the 20 games in the database from the file dialog. They
need to be named *.sfc, have no copier header, and have firmware
appended (for Mario Kart only so far.)
If anyone actually does test it, please let me know how it goes for you
and what you think. Note that future versions of higan will have the
database.bml file included with the release.
byuu says:
This release adds initial database support.
The way it works is you can now load game folders as you always have, or
you can load a game file. If you load a game file, it tries to create
a game folder for you by looking up the file's sha256 in a database. If
it can't find it, sorry, the game won't play. I'm not hooking up the
oldschool "make up a manifest" code here. The easiest way to handle this
is to get me every game so I can dump it and add it to the database :D
The database entries are complete entries that can be copied directly.
So it describes the board, the information, file layout, etc. That'll be
what comes with higan releases in the future.
Internally, I'm separating the information and board descriptions, and
will use a tool to merge the two together.
Here's a current database copy, with one game in it. Still hammering out
some details, but it's mostly how it's going to look.
cartridge region=NTSC
board type=1CB5B-20
superfx revision=2
rom name=program.rom size=0x200000
ram name=save.rwm size=0x8000
map id=io address=00-3f,80-bf:3000-32ff
map id=rom address=00-3f:8000-ffff mask=0x8000
map id=rom address=40-5f:0000-ffff
map id=ram address=00-3f,80-bf:6000-7fff size=0x2000
map id=ram address=70-71:0000-ffff
information
name: Super Mario World 2 - Yoshi's Island (SNS) (1.1)
title: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island
sha256: bd763c1a56365c244be92e6cffefd318780a2a19eda7d5baf1c6d5bd6c1b3e06
board: SHVC-1CB5B-20
rom: 0x200000
ram: 0x8000
layout
file name=program.rom size=0x200000
[No prior releases were posted to the WIP thread. -Ed.]
byuu says:
Super Famicom mapping system has been reworked as discussed with the
mask= changes. offset becomes base, mode is gone. Also added support for
comma-separated fields in the address fields, to reduce the number of
map lines needed.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<cartridge region="NTSC">
<superfx revision="2">
<rom name="program.rom" size="0x200000"/>
<ram name="save.rwm" size="0x8000"/>
<map id="io" address="00-3f,80-bf:3000-32ff"/>
<map id="rom" address="00-3f:8000-ffff" mask="0x8000"/>
<map id="rom" address="40-5f:0000-ffff"/>
<map id="ram" address="00-3f,80-bf:6000-7fff" size="0x2000"/>
<map id="ram" address="70-71:0000-ffff"/>
</superfx>
</cartridge>
Or in BML:
cartridge region=NTSC
superfx revision=2
rom name=program.rom size=0x200000
ram name=save.rwm size=0x8000
map id=io address=00-3f,80-bf:3000-32ff
map id=rom address=00-3f:8000-ffff mask=0x8000
map id=rom address=40-5f:0000-ffff
map id=ram address=00-3f,80-bf:6000-7fff size=0x2000
map id=ram address=70-71:0000-ffff
As a result of the changes, old mappings will no longer work. The above
XML example will run Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. Otherwise,
you'll have to write your own.
All that's left now is to work some sort of database mapping system in,
so I can start dumping carts en masse.
The NES changes that FitzRoy asked for are mostly in as well.
Also, part of the reason I haven't released a WIP ... but fuck it, I'm
not going to wait forever to post a new WIP.
I've added a skeleton driver to emulate Campus Challenge '92 and
Powerfest '94. There's no actual emulation, except for the stuff I can
glean from looking at the pictures of the board. It has a DSP-1 (so
SR/DR registers), four ROMs that map in and out, RAM, etc.
I've also added preliminary mapping to upload high scores to a website,
but obviously I need the ROMs first.
byuu says:
Basically just a project rename, with s/bsnes/higan and the new icon
from lowkee added in.
It won't compile on Windows because I forgot to update the resource.rc
file, and a path transform command isn't working on Windows.
It was really just meant as a starting point, so that v091 WIPs can flow
starting from .00 with the new name (it overshadows bsnes v091, so
publicly speaking this "shouldn't exist" and will probably be deleted
from Google Code when v092 is ready.)
Tim Allen