byuu says:
Changelog:
- 68K: fixed bug that affected BSR return address
- VDP: added very preliminary emulation of planes A, B, W (W is
entirely broken though)
- VDP: added command/address stuff so you can write to VRAM, CRAM,
VSRAM
- VDP: added VRAM fill DMA
I would be really surprised if any commercial games showed anything at
all, so I'd probably recommend against wasting your time trying, unless
you're really bored :P
Also, I wanted to add: I am accepting patches\! So if anyone wants to
look over the 68K core for bugs, that would save me untold amounts of
time in the near future :D
byuu says (in the public announcement):
Not a large changelog this time, sorry. This release is mostly to fix
the SA-1 issue, and to get some real-world testing of the new scheduler
model. Most of the work in the past month has gone into writing a 68000
CPU core; yet it's still only about half-way finished.
Changelog (since the previous release):
- fixed SNES SA-1 IRQ regression (fixes Super Mario RPG level-up
screen)
- new scheduler for all emulator cores (precision of 2^-127)
- icarus database adds nine new SNES games
- added Input/Frequency to settings file (allows simulation of
latency)
byuu says (in the WIP forum):
Changelog:
- in 32-bit mode, Thread uses uint64\_t with 2^-63 time units (10^-7
precision in the worst case)
- nearly ten times the precision of an attosecond
- in 64-bit mode, Thread uses uint128\_t with 2^-127 time units
(10^-26 precision in the worst case)
- far more accurate than yoctoseconds; almost closing in on planck
time
Note: a quartz crystal is accurate to 10^-4 or 10^-5. A cesium fountain
atomic clock is accurate to 10^-15. So ... yeah. 2^-63 was perfectly
fine; but there was no speed penalty whatsoever for using uint128\_t in
64-bit mode, so why not?
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: fixed the BrowserDialog column resizing when navigating to new
folders (prevents clipping of filenames)
- note: this is kind of a quick-fix; but I have a good idea how to do
the proper fix now
- nall: added BitField<T, Lo, Hi> class
- note: not yet working on the SFC CPU class; need to go at it with
a debugger to find out what's happening
- GB: emulated DMG/SGB STAT IRQ bug; fixes Zerd no Densetsu and Road Rash
(won't fix anything else; don't get hopes up)
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:
higan supports Event mapping again.
Further, icarus can now detect Event ROMs and MSU1 games.
Event ROMs must be named "program.rom", "slot-(1,2,3).rom" MSU1 games
must contain "msu1.rom"; and tracks must be named "track-#.pcm"
When importing the CC'92, PF'94 ROMs, the program.rom and
slot-(1,2,3).rom files must be concatenated. The DSP firmware can
optionally be separate, but I'd recommend you go ahead and merge it all
to one file. Especially since that common "higan DSP pack" floating
around on the web left out the DSP1 ROMs (only has DSP1B) for god knows
what reason.
There is no support for loading "game.sfc+game.msu+game-*.pcm", because
I'm not going to support trying to pull in all of those files through
importing. Games will have to be distributed as game folders to use
MSU1. The MSU1 icarus support is simply so your game folders won't
require an unstable manifest.bml file to be played. So once they're in
there, they are good for life.
Note: the Event sizes in icarus' SFC heuristics are wrong for appended
firmware. Change from 0xXX8000 to 0xXX2000 and it works fine. Will be
fixed in r18.
Added Sintendo's flickering fixes. The window one's a big help for
regular controls, but the ListView double buffering does nothing for me
on Windows 7 :( Fairly sure I know why, but too lazy to try and fix that
now.
Also fixes the mMenu thing.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added MSU1 resume support
- updated sfc/dsp, sfc/controller to match my coding style
- fixed hiro/Windows Button and ListView::CheckButton in Windows Classic
mode
byuu says:
Updated to compile with all of the new hiro changes. My next step is to
write up hiro API documentation, and move the API from alpha (constantly
changing) to beta (rarely changing), in preparation for the first stable
release (backward-compatible changes only.)
Added "--fullscreen" command-line option. I like this over
a configuration file option. Lets you use the emulator in both modes
without having to modify the config file each time.
Also enhanced the command-line game loading. You can now use any of
these methods:
higan /path/to/game-folder.sfc
higan /path/to/game-folder.sfc/
higan /path/to/game-folder.sfc/program.rom
The idea is to support launchers that insist on loading files only.
Technically, the file can be any name (manifest.bml also works); the
only criteria is that the file actually exists and is a file, and not
a directory. This is a requirement to support the first version (a
directory lacking the trailing / identifier), because I don't want my
nall::string class to query the file system to determine if the string
is an actual existing file or directory for its pathname() / dirname()
functions.
Anyway, every game folder I've made so far has program.rom, and that's
very unlikely to change, so this should be fine.
Now, of course, if you drop a regular "game.sfc" file on the emulator,
it won't even try to load it, unless it's in a folder that ends in .fc,
.sfc, etc. In which case, it'll bail out immediately by being unable to
produce a manifest for what is obviously not really a game folder.
byuu says:
I imagine you guys will like this WIP very much.
Changelog:
- ListView check boxes on Windows
- ListView removal of columns on reset (changing input dropdowns)
- DirectSound audio duplication on latency change
- DirectSound crash on 20ms latency
- Fullscreen window sizing in multi-monitor setups
- Allow joypad bindings of hotkeys
- Allow triggers to be mapped (Xbox 360 / XInput / Windows only)
- Support joypad rumble for Game Boy Player
- Video scale settings modified from {1x,2x,3x} to {2x,3x,4x}
- System menu now renames to active emulation core
- Added fast forward hotkey
Not changing for v095:
- not adding input focus settings yet
- not adding shaders yet
Not changing at all:
- not implementing maximize
byuu says:
Changelog (since the last open beta):
- icarus is now included. icarus is used to import game files/archives
into game paks (folders)
- SNES: mid-scanline BGMODE changes now emulated correctly (used only by
atx2.smc Anthrox Demo)
- GBA: fixed a CPU bug that was causing dozens of games to have
distorted audio
- GBA: fixed default FlashROM ID; should allow much higher compatibility
- GBA: now using Cydrak's new, much improved, GBA color emulation filter
(still a work-in-progress)
- re-added command-line loading support for game paks (not for game
files/archives, sorry!)
- Qt port now compiles and runs again (may be a little buggy;
Windows/GTK+ ports preferred)
- SNES performance profile now compiles and runs again
- much more
byuu says:
Changelog:
- updated to newest hiro API
- SFC performance profile builds once again
- hiro: Qt port completed
Errata 1: the hiro/Qt target won't run tomoko just yet. Starts by
crashing inside InputSettings because hiro/Qt isn't forcefully selecting
the first item added to a ComboButton just yet. Even with a monkey patch
to get around that, the UI is incredibly unstable. Lots of geometry
calculation bugs, and a crash when you try and access certain folders in
the browser dialog. Lots of work left to be done there, sadly.
Errata 2: the hiro/Windows port has black backgrounds on all ListView
items. It's because I need to test for unassigned colors and grab the
default Windows brush colors in those cases.
Note: alternating row colors on multi-column ListView widgets is gone
now. Not a bug. May add it back later, but I'm not sure. It doesn't
interact nicely with per-cell background colors.
Things left to do:
First, I have to fix the Windows and Qt target bugs.
Next, I need to go through and revise the hiro API even more (nothing
too major.)
Next, I need to update icarus to use the new hiro API, and add support
for the SFC games database.
Next, I have to rewrite my TSV->BML cheat code tool.
Next, I need to post a final WIP of higan+icarus publicly and wait a few
days.
Next, I need to fix any bugs reported from the final WIP that I can.
Finally, I should be able to release v095.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- SNES mid-scanline BGMODE fixes finally merged (can run
atx2.zip{mode7.smc}+mtest(2).sfc properly now)
- Makefile now discards all built-in rules and variables
- switch on bool warning disabled for GCC now as well (was already
disabled for Clang)
- when loading a game, if any required files are missing, display
a warning message box (manifest.bml, program.rom, bios.rom, etc)
- when loading a game (or a game slot), if manifest.bml is missing, it
will invoke icarus to try and generate it
- if that fails (icarus is missing or the folder is bad), you will get
a warning telling you that the manifest can't be loaded
The warning prompt on missing files work for both games and the .sys
folders and their files. For some reason, failing to load the DMG/CGB
BIOS is causing a crash before I can display the modal dialog. I have no
idea why, and the stack frame backtrace is junk.
I also can't seem to abort the failed loading process. If I call
Program::unloadMedia(), I get a nasty segfault. Again with a really
nasty stack trace. So for now, it'll just end up sitting there emulating
an empty ROM (solid black screen.) In time, I'd like to fix that too.
Lastly, I need a better method than popen for Windows. popen is kind of
ugly and flashes a console window for a brief second even if the
application launched is linked with -mwindows. Not sure if there even is
one (I need to read the stdout result, so CreateProcess may not work
unless I do something nasty like "> %tmp%/temp") I'm also using the
regular popen instead of _wpopen, so for this WIP, it won't work if your
game folder has non-English letters in the path.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- synchronizes lots of nall changes
- changes displayed program title from tomoko to higan(*)
- browser dialog sort is case-insensitive
- .sys folders look at user-selected library path; no longer hard-coded
Tried to get rid of the file modes from the Windows browser dialog, but
it was being a bitch so I left it on for now.
- The storage locations and binary still use tomoko. I'm not really sure
what to do here. The idea is there may be more than one "higan" UI in
the future, but I don't want people to go around calling the entire
program by the UI name. For official Windows releases, I can rename
the binaries to "higan-{profile}.exe", and by putting the config files
with the binary, they won't ever see the tomoko folder. Linux is of
course trickier.
Note: Windows users will need to edit hiro/components.hpp and comment
out these lines:
#define Hiro_Console
#define Hiro_IconView
#define Hiro_SourceView
#define Hiro_TreeView
I forgot to do that, and too lazy to upload another WIP.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- GBA emulation accuracy has been substantially improved [Cydrak]
- GBA ldm bug fixed [jchadwick]
- SNES SuperFX timing has been improved [AWJ, ARM9, qwertymodo]
- SNES accuracy profile is now ~8% faster than before
- you no longer need to copy the .sys profile folders to
~/Emulation/System
- you still need to put bios.rom (GBA BIOS) into Game Boy
Advance.sys to use GBA emulation!!
- you no longer need to pre-configure inputs before first use
- loading games / changing window size won't recenter window
- checkboxes in cheat editor update correctly
- can't type into state manager description textbox on an empty slot
- typing in state manager description box works correctly; and updates
list view correctly
- won't show files that match game extensions anymore (only game folders
show up)
- libco Win64 port fixes with FPU^H^H^H XMM registers
- libco ARM port now available; so you too can play at 15fps on an RPi2!
[jessedog3, Cydrak]
- controller selection will check the default item in the menu now on
game load
- as usual, a whole lot of other stuff I'm forgetting
Known issues:
- type-ahead find does not work in list views (eg game selection
dialog); I don't know how to fix this
- there's no game file importer yet
- there's no shader support yet
- there's no profiler available for the timing panel, you need to adjust
values manually for now
byuu says:
This WIP scores 448/920 tests passed.
Gave a shot at ROM prefetch that failed miserably (ranged from 409 to
494 tests passed. Nowhere near where it would be if it were implemented
correctly.)
Three remaining issues:
- ROM prefetch
- DMA timing
- timers (I suspect it's a 3-clock delay in starting, not a 3-clock into
the future affair)
Probably only going to be able to get the timers working without heroic
amounts of effort.
MUL timing is fixed to use idle cycles.
STMIA is fixed to set sequential at the right moments.
DMA priority support is added, so DMA 0 can interrupt DMA 1 mid-transfer.
In other news ...
I'm calling gtk_widget_destroy on the GtkWindow now, so hopefully those
Window_configure issues go away.
I realize I was leaking Display* handles in the X-video driver while
I was looking at it, so I fixed those.
I added DT_NOPREFIX so the Windows ListView will show & characters
correctly now.
byuu says:
Added AWJ's fixes for alt/cpu (Tetris Attack framelines issue) and
alt/dsp (Thread::clock reset)
Added fix so that the taskbar entry appears when the application first
starts on Windows.
Fixed checkbox toggling inside of list views on Windows.
Updated nall/image to properly protect variables that should not be
written externally.
New Object syntax for hiro is in.
Fixed the backwards-typing on Windows with the state manager.
NOTE: the list view isn't redrawing when you change the description
text. It does so on the cheat editor because of the resizeColumns call;
but that shouldn't be necessary. I'll try and fix this for the next WIP.
byuu says:
Windows port should run mostly well now, although exiting fullscreen
breaks the application in a really bizarre way. (clicking on the window
makes it sink to background rather than come to the foreground o_O)
I also need to add the doModalChange => audio.clear() thing for the
accursed menu stuttering with DirectSound.
I also finished porting all of the ruby drivers over to the newer API
changes from nall.
Since I can't compile the Linux or OS X drivers, I have no idea if there
are any typos that will result in compilation errors. If so, please let
me know where they're at and I'll try and fix them. If they're simple,
please try and fix them on your end to test further if you can.
I'm hopeful the udev crash will be gone now that nall::string checks for
null char* values passed to its stringify function. Of course, it's
a problem it's getting a null value in the first place, so it may not
work at all.
If you can compile on Linux (or by some miracle, OS X), please test each
video/audio/input driver if you don't mind, to make sure there's no
"compiles okay but still typos exist" bugs.
byuu says:
Finally!! Compilation works once again on Windows.
However, it's pretty buggy. Modality isn't really working right, you can
still poke at other windows, but when you select ListView items, they
redraw as empty boxes (need to process WM_DRAWITEM before checking
modality.)
The program crashes when you close it (probably a ruby driver's term()
function, that's what it usually is.)
The Layout::setEnabled(false) call isn't working right, so you get that
annoying chiming sound and cursor movement when mapping keyboard keys to
game inputs.
The column sizing seems off a bit on first display for the Hotkeys tab.
And probably lots more.
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