byuu says:
Time for a new release. There are a few important emulation improvements
and a few new features; but for the most part, this release focuses on
major code refactoring, the details of which I will mostly spare you.
The major change is that, as of v099, the SNES balanced and performance
cores have been removed from higan. Basically, in addition to my five
other emulation cores, these were too much of a burden to maintain. And
they've come along as far as I was able to develop them. If you need to
use these cores, please use these two from the v098 release.
I'm very well aware that ~80% of the people using higan for SNES
emulation were using the two removed profiles. But they simply had
to go. Hopefully in the future, we can compensate for their loss by
increasing the performance of the accuracy core.
Changelog (since v098):
SFC: balanced profile removed
SFC: performance profile removed
SFC: expansion port devices can now be changed during gameplay (atlhough
you shouldn't)
SFC: fixed bug in SharpRTC leap year calculations
SFC: emulated new research findings for the S-DD1 coprocessor
SFC: fixed CPU emulation-mode wrapping bug with pei, [dp], [dp]+y
instructions [AWJ]
SFC: fixed Super Game Boy bug that caused the bottom tile-row to flicker
in games
GB: added MBC1M (multi-cart) mapper; icarus can't detect these so manual
manifests are needed for now
GB: corrected return value when HuC3 unmapped RAM is read; fixes Robopon
[endrift]
GB: improved STAT IRQ emulation; fixes Altered Space, etc [endrift,
gekkio]
GB: partial emulation of DMG STAT write IRQ bug; fixes Legend of Zerd,
Road Rash, etc
nall: execute() fix, for some Linux platforms that had trouble detecting
icarus
nall: new BitField class; which allows for simplifying flag/register
emulation in various cores
ruby: added Windows WASAPI audio driver (experimental)
ruby: remove attempts to call glSwapIntervalEXT (fixes crashing on some
Linux systems)
ui: timing settings panel removed
video: restored saturation, gamma, luminance settings
video: added new post-emulation sprite system; light gun cursors are
now higher-resolution
audio: new resampler (6th-order Butterworth biquad IIR); quite a bit
faster than the old one
audio: added optional basic reverb filter (for fun)
higan: refresh video outside cooperative threads (workaround for shoddy
code in AMD graphics drivers)
higan: individual emulation cores no longer have unique names
higan: really substantial code refactoring; 43% reduction in binary size
Off the bat, here are the known bugs:
hiro/Windows: focus stealing bug on startup. Needs to be fixed in hiro,
not with a cheap hack to tomoko.
higan/SFC: some of the coprocessors are saving some volatile memory to
disk. Completely harmless, but still needs to be fixed.
ruby/WASAPI: some sound cards have a lot of issues with the current driver
(eg FitzRoy's). We need to find a clean way to fix this before it
can be made the default driver. Which would be a huge win because
the latency improvements are substantial, and in exclusive mode,
WASAPI allows G-sync to work very well.
[From the v099 WIP thread, here's the changelog since v098r19:
- GB: don't force mode 1 during force-blank; fixes v098r16 regression
with many Game Boy games
- GB: only perform the STAT write IRQ bug during vblank, not hblank
(still not hardware accurate, though)
-Ed.]
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 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:
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:
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:
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:
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