byuu says:
higan has finally reached v100!
I feel it's important to stress right away that this is not "version
1.00", nor is it a major milestone release. Rather than arbitrary version
numbers, all of my software simply bumps version numbers by one for each
official release. As such, higan v100 is simply higan's 100th release.
That said, the primary focus of this release has been code
clean-ups. These are always somewhat dangerous in that regressions are
possible. We've tested through sixteen WIP revisions, one of which was
open to the public, to try and minimize any regressions. But all the same,
please report any regressions if you discover any.
Changelog (since v099):
FC: render during pixels 1-256 instead of 0-255 [hex_usr]
FC: rewrote controller emulation code
SFC: 8% speedup over the previous release thanks to PPU optimizations
SFC: fixed nasty DB address wrapping regression from v099
SFC: USART developer controller removed; superseded by 21fx
SFC: Super Multitap option removed from controller port 1; ports
renamed 2-5
SFC: hidden option to experiment with 128KB VRAM (strictly for novelty)
higan: audio volume no longer divided by number of audio streams
higan: updated controller polling code to fix possible future mapping
issues
higan: replaced nall/stream with nall/vfs for file-loading subsystem
tomoko: can now load multi-slotted games via command-line
tomoko: synchronize video removed from UI; still available in the
settings file
tomoko, icarus: can navigate to root drive selection on Windows
all: major code cleanups and refactoring (~1MB diff against v099)
Note 1: the audio volume change means that SGB and MSU1 games won't
lose half the volume on the SNES sounds anymore. However, if one goes
overboard and drives the sound all the way to max volume with the MSU1,
clamping may occur. The obvious solution is not to drive volume that high
(it will vastly overpower the SNES audio, which usually never exceeds
25% volume.) Another option is to lower the volume in the audio settings
panel to 50%. In general, neither is likely to ever be necessary.
Note 2: the synchronize video option was hidden from the UI because it
is no longer useful. With the advent of compositors, the loss of the
complicated timing settings panel, support for the WonderSwan and its
75hz display, the need to emulate variable refresh rate behaviors in the
Game Boy, the unfortunate latency spike and audio distortion caused by
long Vsync pauses, and the arrival of adaptive sync technology ... it
no longer makes sense to present this option. However, as stated, you
can edit settings.bml to enable this option anyway if you insist and
understand the aforementioned risks.
Changelog (since v099r16 open beta):
- fixed MSU1 audio sign extension
- fixed compilation with SGB support disabled
- icarus can now navigate to root directory
- fixed compilation issues with OS X port
- (hopefully) fixed label height issue with hiro that affected icarus
import dialog
- (mostly) fixed BS Memory, Sufami Turbo slot loading
Errata:
- forgot to remove the " - Slot A", " - Slot B" suffixes for Sufami
Turbo slot loading
- this means you have to navigate up one folder and then into Sufami
Turbo/ to load games for this system
- moving WonderSwan orientation controls to the device slot is causing
some nastiness
- can now select orientation from the main menu, but it doesn't rotate
the display
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall::lstring -> nall::string_vector
- added IntegerBitField<type, lo, hi> -- hopefully it works correctly...
- Multitap 1-4 -> Super Multitap 2-5
- fixed SFC PPU CGRAM read regression
- huge amounts of SFC PPU IO register cleanups -- .bits really is lovely
- re-added the read/write(VRAM,OAM,CGRAM) helpers for the SFC PPU
- but they're now optimized to the realities of the PPU (16-bit data
sizes / no address parameter / where appropriate)
- basically used to get the active-display overrides in a unified place;
but also reduces duplicate code in (read,write)IO
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:
- fixed icarus to save settings properly
- fixed higan's full screen toggle on OS X
- increased "Add Codes" button width to avoid text clipping
- implemented cocoa/canvas.cpp
- added 1s delay after mapping inputs before re-enabling the window
(wasn't actually necessary, but already added it)
- fixed setEnabled(false) on Cocoa's ListView and TextEdit widgets
- updated nall::programpath() to use GetModuleFileName on Windows
- GB: system uses open collector logic, so unmapped reads return 0xFF,
not 0x00 (passes blargg's cpu_instrs again) [gekkio]
byuu says:
New update. Most of the work today went into eliminating hiro::Image
from all objects in all ports, replacing with nall::image. That took an
eternity.
Changelog:
- fixed crashing bug when loading games [thanks endrift!!]
- toggling "show status bar" option adjusts window geometry (not
supposed to recenter the window, though)
- button sizes improved; icon-only button icons no longer being cut off
byuu says:
Warning: this is not for the faint of heart. This is a very early,
unpolished, buggy release. But help testing/fixing bugs would be greatly
appreciated for anyone willing.
Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.7+
- Xcode 7.2+
Installation Commands:
cd higan
gmake -j 4
gmake install
cd ../icarus
gmake -j 4
gmake install
(gmake install is absolutely required, sorry. You'll be missing key
files in key places if you don't run it, and nothing will work.)
(gmake uninstall also exists, or you can just delete the .app bundles
from your Applications folder, and the Dev folder on your desktop.)
If you want to use the GBA emulation, then you need to drop the GBA BIOS
into ~/Emulation/System/Game\ Boy\ Advance.sys\bios.rom
Usage:
You'll now find higan.app and icarus.app in your Applications folders.
First, run icarus.app, navigate to where you keep your game ROMs. Now
click the settings button at the bottom right, and check "Create
Manifests", and click OK. (You'll need to do this every time you run
icarus because there's some sort of bug on OSX saving the settings.) Now
click "Import", and let it bring in your games into ~/Emulation.
Note: "Create Manifests" is required. I don't yet have a pipe
implementation on OS X for higan to invoke icarus yet. If you don't
check this box, it won't create manifest.bml files, and your games won't
run at all.
Now you can run higan.app. The first thing you'll want to do is go to
higan->Preferences... and assign inputs for your gamepads. At the very
least, do it for the default controller for all the systems you want to
emulate.
Now this is very important ... close the application at this point so
that it writes your config file to disk. There's a serious crashing bug,
and if you trigger it, you'll lose your input bindings.
Now the really annoying part ... go to Library->{System} and pick the
game you want to play. Right now, there's a ~50% chance the application
will bomb. It seems the hiro::pListView object is getting destroyed, yet
somehow the internal Cocoa callbacks are being triggered anyway. I don't
know how this is possible, and my attempts to debug with lldb have been
a failure :(
If you're unlucky, the application will crash. Restart and try again. If
it crashes every single time, then you can try launching your game from
the command-line instead. Example:
open /Applications/higan.app \
--args ~/Emulation/Super\ Famicom/Zelda3.sfc/
Help wanted:
I could really, really, really use some help with that crashing on game
loading. There's a lot of rough edges, but they're all cosmetic. This
one thing is pretty much the only major show-stopping issue at the
moment, preventing a wider general audience pre-compiled binary preview.
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:
This will easily be the biggest diff in the history of higan. And not in
a good way.
* target-higan and target-loki have been blown away completely
* nall and ruby massively updated
* phoenix replaced with hiro (pretty near a total rewrite)
* target-higan restarted using hiro (just a window for now)
* all emulation cores updated to compile again
* installation changed to not require root privileges (installs locally)
For the foreseeable future (maybe even permanently?), the new higan UI
will only build under Linux/BSD with GTK+ 2.20+. Probably the most
likely route for Windows/OS X will be to try and figure out how to build
hiro/GTK on those platforms, as awful as that would be. The other
alternative would be to produce new UIs for those platforms ... which
would actually be a good opportunity to make something much more user
friendly.
Being that I just started on this a few hours ago, that means that for
at least a few weeks, don't expect to be able to actually play any
games. Right now, you can pretty much just compile the binary and that's
it. It's quite possible that some nall changes didn't produce
compilation errors, but will produce runtime errors. So until the UI can
actually load games, we won't know if anything is broken. But we should
mostly be okay. It was mostly just trim<1> -> trim changes, moving to
Hash::SHA256 (much cleaner), and patching some reckless memory copy
functions enough to compile.
Progress isn't going to be like it was before: I'm now dividing my time
much thinner between studying and other hobbies.
My aim this time is not to produce a binary for everyone to play games
on. Rather, it's to keep the emulator alive. I want to be able to apply
critical patches again. And I would also like the base of the emulator
to live on, for use in other emulator frontends that utilize higan.
Tim Allen