byuu says:
Changelog:
- PCE: split VCE from VDC
- HuC6280: changed bus from (uint21 addr) to (uint8 bank, uint13 addr)
- added SuperGrafx emulation (adds secondary VDC, plus new VPC)
The VDC now has no concept of the actual display raster timing, and
instead is driven by Vpulse (start of frame) and Hpulse (start of
scanline) signals from the VCE. One still can't render the start of the
next scanline onto the current scanline through overly aggressive
timings, but it shouldn't be too much more difficult to allow that to
occur now. This process incurs quite a major speed hit, so low-end
systems with Atom CPUs can't run things at 60fps anymore.
The timing needs a lot of work. The pixels end up very jagged if the VCE
doesn't output batches of 2-4 pixels at a time. But this should not be a
requirement at all, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there.
Yo, Bro and the 512-width mode of TV Sports Basketball is now broken as
a result of these changes, and I'm not sure why.
To load SuperGrafx games, you're going to have to change the .pce
extensions to .sg or .sgx. Or you can manually move the games from the
PC Engine folder to the SuperGrafx folder and change the game folder
extensions. I have no way to tell the games apart. Mednafen uses CRC32
comparisons, and I may consider that since there's only five games, but
I'm not sure yet.
The only SuperGrafx game that's playable right now is Aldynes. And the
priorities are all screwed up. I don't understand how the windows or the
priorities work at all from sgxtech.txt, so ... yeah. It's pretty
broken, but it's a start.
I could really use some help with this, as I'm very lost right now with
rendering :/
-----
Note that the SuperGrafx is technically its own system, it's not an
add-on.
As such, I'm giving it a separate .sys folder, and a separate library.
There's debate over how to name this thing. "SuperGrafx" appears more
popular than "Super Grafx". And you might also call it the "PC Engine
SuperGrafx", but I decided to leave off the prefix so it appears more
distinct.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SMS: added cartridge ROM/RAM mirroring (fixes Alex Kidd)
- SMS: fixed 8x16 sprite mode (fixes Wonder Boy, Ys graphics)
- Z80: emulated "ex (sp),hl" instruction
- Z80: fixed INx NF (should be set instead of cleared)
- Z80: fixed loop condition check for CPxR, INxR, LDxR, OTxR (fixes
walking in Wonder Boy)
- SFC: removed Debugger and sfc/debugger.hpp
- icarus: connected MS, GG, MD importing to the scan dialog
- PCE: added emulation skeleton to higan and icarus
At this point, Master System games are fairly highly compatible, sans
audio. Game Gear games are running, but I need to crop the resolution
and support the higher color palette that they can utilize. It's really
something else the way they handled the resolution shrink on that thing.
The last change is obviously going to be the biggest news.
I'm very well aware it's not an ideal time to start on a new emulation
core, with the MS and MD cores only just now coming to life with no
audio support.
But, for whatever reason, my heart's really set on working on the PC
Engine. I wanted to write the final higan skeleton core, and get things
ready so that whenever I'm in the mood to work on the PCE, I can do so.
The skeleton is far and away the most tedious and obnoxious part of the
emulator development, because it's basically all just lots of
boilerplate templated code, lots of new files to create, etc.
I really don't know how things are going to proceed ... but I can say
with 99.9% certainty that this will be the final brand new core ever
added to higan -- at least one written by me, that is. This was
basically the last system from my childhood that I ever cared about.
It's the last 2D system with games that I really enjoy playing. No other
system is worth dividing my efforts and reducing the quality and amount
of time to work on the systems I have.
In the future, there will be potential for FDS, Mega CD and PCE-CD
support. But those will all be add-ons, and they'll all be really
difficult and challenge the entire design of higan's UI (it's entirely
cartridge-driven at this time.) None of them will be entirely new cores
like this one.
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:
- hiro: BrowserDialog can navigate up to drive selection on Windows
- nall: (file,path,dir,base,prefix,suffix)name =>
Location::(file,path,dir,base,prefix,suffix)
- higan/tomoko: rename audio filter label from "Sinc" to "IIR - Biquad"
- higan/tomoko: allow loading files via icarus on the command-line
once again
- higan/tomoko: (begrudging) quick hack to fix presentation window focus
on startup
- higan/audio: don't divide output audio volume by number of streams
- processor/r65816: fix a regression in (read,write)DB; fixes Taz-Mania
- fixed compilation regressions on Windows and Linux
I'm happy with where we are at with code cleanups and stability, so I'd
like to release v100. But even though I'm not assigning any special
significance to this version, we should probably test it more thoroughly
first.
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:
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:
This release adds a settings dialog that lets you control the library
path, optionally generate manifest.bml files, and optionally bypass the
internal games database (so far this is only the US SNES set.)
Also, the settings.bml file can exist in the same folder as the binary
now (portable mode). Plus it can share the same config file as
higan/tomoko itself does. This will allow you to change the library
location in either program and have it affect the other program as well.
It's a bit hackish, but it works >_>
Note: don't use this with higan v095.06 or earlier, or bad things will
happen.
byuu says:
- fixes checkboxes (-again- again [*again*])
- won't check folders with select all / unselect all
- won't crash anymore if the SNES ROM image is too small (Saturday Night
Slam Masters was crashing it before due to DB size error)
- corrected heuristics for Sufami Turbo base cart (mirrors the
absurdities of the real cart precisely, since it's one of a kind)
- corrected a few DB issues (BS-X name + PSRAM (again [*again*]), SNSM,
LAH) (_again_)
- these are temporary. Monkey patched in the generated .hpp source
rather than the actual DB
- not going to fix the SFT sizes because I want to verify what
happened there first
byuu says:
With any luck, this will be the final WIP before v095. If all looks
good, this will be identical to v095. But if we hit some major issues,
I'll try and fix those first.
The most notable part of this release is probably Jonas Quinn's fix for
the unmapped regions of the GBA memory map. This allows games like Mario
& Luigi and Zelda: Minish Cap to (hopefully) be fully playable now.
icarus now supports my game database, so all games I've dumped will be
emulated with bit-perfect memory maps and native-language game titles.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- return open bus instead of mirroring addresses on the bus (fixes
Mario&Luigi, Minish Cap, etc) [Jonas Quinn]
- add boolean flag to load requests for slotted game carts (fixes slot
load prompts)
- rename BS-X Town cart from psram to ram
- icarus: add support for game database
Note: I didn't rename "bsx" to "mcc" in the database for icarus before
uploading that. But I just fixed it locally, so it'll be in the next
WIP. For now, make it create the manifest for you and then rename it
yourself. I did fix the PSRAM size to 256kbit.
Tim Allen