byuu says:
Don't let the point release fool you, there are many significant changes in this
release. I will be keeping bsnes releases using a point system until the new
higan release is ready.
Changelog:
- GUI: added high DPI support
- GUI: fixed the state manager image preview
- Windows: added a new waveOut driver with support for dynamic rate control
- Windows: corrected the XAudio 2.1 dynamic rate control support [BearOso]
- Windows: corrected the Direct3D 9.0 fullscreen exclusive window centering
- Windows: fixed XInput controller support on Windows 10
- SFC: added high-level emulation for the DSP1, DSP2, DSP4, ST010, and Cx4
coprocessors
- SFC: fixed a slight rendering glitch in the intro to Megalomania
If the coprocessor firmware is missing, bsnes will fallback on HLE where it is
supported, which is everything other than SD Gundam GX and the two Hayazashi
Nidan Morita Shougi games.
The Windows dynamic rate control works best with Direct3D in fullscreen
exclusive mode. I recommend the waveOut driver over the XAudio 2.1 driver, as it
is not possible to target a single XAudio2 version on all Windows OS releases.
The waveOut driver should work everywhere out of the box.
Note that with DRC, the synchronization source is your monitor, so you will
want to be running at 60hz (NTSC) or 50hz (PAL). If you have an adaptive sync
monitor, you should instead use the WASAPI (exclusive) or ASIO audio driver.
byuu says:
The biggest change was improving WonderSwan emulation. With help from
trap15, I tracked down a bug where I was checking the wrong bit for
reverse DMA transfers. Then I also emulated VTOTAL to support variable
refresh rate. Then I improved HyperVoice emulation which should be
unsigned samples in three of four modes. That got Fire Lancer running
great. I also rewrote the disassembler. The old one disassembled many
instructions completely wrong, and deviated too much from any known x86
syntax. I also emulated some of the quirks of the V30 (two-byte POP into
registers fails, SALC is just XLAT mirrored, etc) which probably don't
matter unless someone tries to run code to verify it's a NEC CPU and not
an Intel CPU, but hey, why not?
I also put more work into the MSX skeleton, but it's still just a
skeleton with no real emulation yet.
byuu says:
Everything *should* be working again, but of course that won't
actually be the case. Here's where things stand:
- bsnes, higan, icarus, and genius compile and run fine on FreeBSD
with GTK
- ruby video and audio drivers are untested on Windows, macOS, and
Linux
- hiro is untested on macOS
- bsnes' status bar is not showing up properly with hiro/qt
- bsnes and higan's about screen is not showing up properly with
hiro/qt (1x1 window size)
- bsnes on Windows crashes often when saving states, and I'm not sure
why ... it happens inside Encode::RLE
- bsnes on Windows crashes with ruby.input.windows (unsure why)
- bsnes on Windows fails to show the verified emblem on the status bar
properly
- hiro on Windows flickers when changing tabs
To build the Windows bsnes and higan ports, use
ruby="video.gdi audio.directsound"
Compilation error logs for Linux will help me fix the inevitable list of
typos there. I can fix the typos on other platforms, I just haven't
gotten to it yet.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan, icarus, genius: new manifest syntax (work in progress)
Pretty much only LoROM and HiROM SNES games will load right now, and RAM
will only work right if the save.ram file already exists to pull its
file size from (a temporary cheap hack was used.)
Basically, I'm just getting this out there for evaluation.
One minor errata is that I switched icarus to using “memory/battery” to
indicate battery-backed RAM, whereas genius still uses “memory/volatile”
to indicate non-battery-backed RAM.
I intend to make it “memory/battery” in genius, and have the field
auto-enable when RAM or RTC is selected for type (obviously allowing it
to be unchecked for volatile memory.)
I need to update all 64 production boards, and 25 of 29 generic boards,
to use the new slot syntax; and I also need to update every single core
in higan to use the new manifest game syntax. I want to build out a
generic manifest game parser that all emulation cores will use.
Once I finish this, I'll also need to write a database converter to
update all of my licensed game dumps to the new database syntax.
I also need to write up something for doc.byuu.org explaining the new
manifest game syntax. The manifest board syntax will still be “internal”
and subject to revisions, but once v107 is out, the gamepak manifest
format will be set in stone sans extensions.
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.
byuu