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:
- 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:
- 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:
- 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:
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:
- 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:
- ruby: if DirectSoundCreate fails (no sound device present), return
false from init instead of crashing
- nall: improved edge case return values for
(basename,pathname,dirname,...)
- nall: renamed file_system_object class to inode
- nall: varuint_t replaced with VariadicNatural; which contains
.bit,.bits,.byte ala Natural/Integer
- nall: fixed boolean compilation error on Windows
- WS: popa should not restore SP
- GBA: rewrote the CPU/APU cores to use the .bit,.bits functions;
removed registers.cpp from each
Note that the GBA changes are extremely major. This is about five hours
worth of extremely delicate work. Any slight errors could break
emulation in extremely bad ways. Let's hold off on extensive testing
until the next WIP, after I do the same to the PPU.
So far ... endrift's SOUNDCNT_X I/O test is failing, although that code
didn't change, so clearly I messed up SOUNDCNT_H somehow ...
To compile on Windows:
1. change nall/string/platform.hpp line 47 to
return slice(result, 0, 3);
2. change ruby/video.wgl.cpp line 72 to
auto lock(uint32_t*& data, uint& pitch, uint width, uint height) -> bool {
3. add this line to the very top of hiro/windows/header.cpp:
#define boolean FuckYouMicrosoft
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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)
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:
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
]
[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.
[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