Commit Graph

18 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tim Allen 9c25f128f9 Update to v104r07 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - md/vdp: added VIP bit to status register; fixes Cliffhanger
  - processor/m68k/disassembler: added modes 7 and 8 to LEA address
    disassembly
  - processor/m68k/disassembler: enhanced ILLEGAL to display LINEA/LINEF
    $xxx variants
  - processor/m68k: ILLEGAL/LINEA/LINEF do not modify the stack
    register; fixes Caeser no Yabou II
  - icarus/sfc: request sgb1.boot.rom and sgb2.boot.rom separately; as
    they are different
  - icarus/sfc: removed support for external firmware when loading ROM
    images

The hack to run Mega Drive Ballz 3D isn't in place, as I don't know if
it's correct, and the graphics were corrupted anyway.

The SGB boot ROM change is going to require updating the icarus database
as well. I will add that in when I start dumping more cartridges here
soon.

Finally ... I explained this already, but I'll do so here as well: I
removed icarus' support for loading SNES coprocessor firmware games with
external firmware files (eg dsp1.program.rom + dsp1.data.rom in the same
path as supermariokart.sfc, for example.)

I realize most are going to see this as an antagonizing/stubborn move
given the recent No-Intro discussion, and I won't deny that said thread
is why this came to the forefront of my mind. But on my word, I honestly
believe this was an ineffective solution for many reasons not related to
our disagreements:

 1. No-Intro distributes SNES coprocessor firmware as a merged file, eg
    "DSP1 (World).zip/DSP1 (World).bin" -- icarus can't possibly know
    about every ROM distribution set's naming conventions for firmware.
    (Right now, it appears GoodSNES and NSRT are mostly dead; but there
    may be more DATs in the future -- including my own.)
 2. Even if the user obtains the firmware and tries to rename it, it
    won't work: icarus parses manifests generated by the heuristics
    module and sees two ROM files: dsp1.program.rom and dsp1.data.rom.
    icarus cannot identify a file named dsp1.rom as containing both
    of these sub-files. Users are going to have to know how to split
    files, which there is no way to do on stock Windows. Merging files,
    however, can be done via `copy /b supermariokart.sfc+dsp1.rom
    supermariokartdsp.sfc`; - and dsp1.rom can be named whatever now.
    I am not saying this will be easy for the average user, but it's
    easier than splitting files.
 3. Separate firmware breaks icarus' database lookup. If you have
    pilotwings.sfc but without firmware, icarus will not find a match
    for it in the database lookup phase. It will then fall back on
    heuristics. The heuristics will pick DSP1B for compatibility with
    Ballz 3D which requires it. And so it will try to pull in the
    wrong firmware, and the game's intro will not work correctly.
    Furthermore, the database information will be unavailable, resulting
    in inaccurate mirroring.

So for these reasons, I have removed said support. You must now load
SNES coprocessor games into higan in one of two ways: 1) game paks with
split files; or 2) SFC images with merged firmware.

If and when No-Intro deploys a method I can actually use, I give you all
my word I will give it a fair shot and if it's reasonable, I'll support
it in icarus.
2017-08-28 22:46:14 +10:00
Tim Allen 6e8406291c Update to v102r24 release.
byuu says

Changelog:

  - FC: fixed three MOS6502 regressions [hex\_usr]
  - GBA: return fetched instruction instead of 0 for unmapped MMIO
    (passes all of endrift's I/O tests)
  - MD: fix VDP control port read Vblank bit to test screen height
    instead of hard-code 240 (fixes Phantasy Star IV)
  - MD: swap USP,SSP when executing an exception (allows Super Street
    Fighter II to run; but no sprites visible yet)
  - MD: grant 68K access to Z80 bus on reset (fixes vdpdoc demo ROM from
    freezing immediately)
  - SFC: reads from $00-3f,80-bf:4000-43ff no longer update MDR
    [p4plus2]
  - SFC: massive, eight-hour cleanup of WDC65816 CPU core ... still not
    complete

The big change this time around is the SFC CPU core. I've renamed
everything from R65816 to WDC65816, and then went through and tried to
clean up the code as much as possible. This core is so much larger than
the 6502 core that I chose cleaning up the code to rewriting it.

First off, I really don't care for the BitRange style functionality. It
was an interesting experiment, but its fatal flaw are that the types are
just bizarre, which makes them hard to pass around generically to other
functions as arguments. So I went back to the list of bools for flags,
and union/struct blocks for the registers.

Next, I renamed all of the functions to be more descriptive: eg
`op_read_idpx_w` becomes `instructionIndexedIndirectRead16`. `op_adc_b`
becomes `algorithmADC8`. And so forth.

I eliminated about ten instructions because they were functionally
identical sans the index, so I just added a uint index=0 parameter to
said functions. I added a few new ones (adjust→INC,DEC;
pflag→REP,SEP) where it seemed appropriate.

I cleaned up the disaster of the instruction switch table into something
a whole lot more elegant without all the weird argument decoding
nonsense (still need M vs X variants to avoid having to have 4-5
separate switch tables, but all the F/I flags are gone now); and made
some things saner, like the flag clear/set and branch conditions, now
that I have normal types for flags and registers once again.

I renamed all of the memory access functions to be more descriptive to
what they're doing: eg writeSP→push, readPC→fetch,
writeDP→writeDirect, etc. Eliminated some of the special read/write
modes that were only used in one single instruction.

I started to clean up some of the actual instructions themselves, but
haven't really accomplished much here. The big thing I want to do is get
rid of the global state (aa, rd, iaddr, etc) and instead use local
variables like I am doing with my other 65xx CPU cores now. But this
will take some time ... the algorithm functions depend on rd to be set
to work on them, rather than taking arguments. So I'll need to rework
that.

And then lastly, the disassembler is still a mess. I want to finish the
CPU cleanups, and then post a new WIP, and then rewrite the disassembler
after that. The reason being ... I want a WIP that can generate
identical trace logs to older versions, in case the CPU cleanup causes
any regressions. That way I can more easily spot the errors.

Oh ... and a bit of good news. v102 was running at ~140fps on the SNES
core. With the new support to suspend/resume WAI/STP, plus the internal
CPU registers not updating the MDR, the framerate dropped to ~132fps.
But with the CPU cleanups, performance went back to ~140fps. So, hooray.
Of course, without those two other improvements, we'd have ended up at
possibly ~146-148fps, but oh well.
2017-06-13 11:42:31 +10:00
Tim Allen 04072b278b Update to v102r16 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - Emulator::Stream now allows adding low-pass and high-pass filters
    dynamically
      - also accepts a pass# count; each pass is a second-order biquad
        butterworth IIR filter
  - Emulator::Stream no longer automatically filters out >20KHz
    frequencies for all streams
  - FC: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter
  - GB: removed simple 'magic constant' high-pass filter of unknown
    cutoff frequency (missed this one in the last WIP)
  - GB,SGB,GBC: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter
  - MS,GG,MD/PSG: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter
  - MD: added save state support (but it's completely broken for now;
    sorry)
  - MD/YM2612: fixed Voice#3 per-operator pitch support (fixes sound
    effects in Streets of Rage, etc)
  - PCE: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter
  - WS,WSC: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter

So, the point of the low-pass filters is to remove frequencies above
human hearing. If we don't do this, then resampling will introduce
aliasing that results in sounds that are audible to the human ear. Which
basically an annoying buzzing sound. You'll definitely hear the
improvement from these in games like Mega Man 2 on the NES. Of course,
these already existed before, so this WIP won't sound better than
previous WIPs.

The high-pass filters are a little more complicated. Their main role is
to remove DC bias and help to center the audio stream. I don't
understand how they do this at all, but ... that's what everyone who
knows what they're talking about says, thus ... so be it.

I have set all of the high-pass filters to 20Hz, which is below the
limit of human hearing. Now this is where it gets really interesting ...
technically, some of these systems actually cut off a lot of range. For
instance, the GBA should technically use an 800Hz high-pass filter when
output is done through the system's speakers. But of course, if you plug
in headphones, you can hear the lower frequencies.

Now 800Hz ... you definitely can hear. At that level, nearly all of the
bass is stripped out and the audio is very tinny. Just like the real
system. But for now, I don't want to emulate the audio being crushed
that badly.

I'm sticking with 20Hz everywhere since it won't negatively affect audio
quality. In fact, you should not be able to hear any difference between
this WIP and the previous WIP. But theoretically, DC bias should mostly
be removed as a result of these new filters. It may be that we need to
raise the values on some cores in the future, but I don't want to do
that until we know for certain that we have to.

What I can say is that compared to even older WIPs than r15 ... the
removal of the simple one-pole low-pass and high-pass filters with the
newer three-pass, second-order filters should result in much better
attenuation (less distortion of audible frequencies.) Probably not
enough to be noticeable in a blind test, though.
2017-03-09 07:20:40 +11:00
Tim Allen bdc100e123 Update to v102r02 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - I caved on the `samples[] = {0.0}` thing, but I'm very unhappy about it
      - if it's really invalid C++, then GCC needs to stop accepting it
        in strict `-std=c++14` mode
  - Emulator::Interface::Information::resettable is gone
  - Emulator::Interface::reset() is gone
  - FC, SFC, MD cores updated to remove soft reset behavior
  - split GameBoy::Interface into GameBoyInterface,
    GameBoyColorInterface
  - split WonderSwan::Interface into WonderSwanInterface,
    WonderSwanColorInterface
  - PCE: fixed off-by-one scanline error [hex_usr]
  - PCE: temporary hack to prevent crashing when VDS is set to < 2
  - hiro: Cocoa: removed (u)int(#) constants; converted (u)int(#)
    types to (u)int_(#)t types
  - icarus: replaced usage of unique with strip instead (so we don't
    mess up frameworks on macOS)
  - libco: added macOS-specific section marker [Ryphecha]

So ... the major news this time is the removal of the soft reset
behavior. This is a major!! change that results in a 100KiB diff file,
and it's very prone to accidental mistakes!! If anyone is up for
testing, or even better -- looking over the code changes between v102r01
and v102r02 and looking for any issues, please do so. Ideally we'll want
to test every NES mapper type and every SNES coprocessor type by loading
said games and power cycling to make sure the games are all cleanly
resetting. It's too big of a change for me to cover there not being any
issues on my own, but this is truly critical code, so yeah ... please
help if you can.

We technically lose a bit of hardware documentation here. The soft reset
events do all kinds of interesting things in all kinds of different
chips -- or at least they do on the SNES. This is obviously not ideal.
But in the process of removing these portions of code, I found a few
mistakes I had made previously. It simplifies resetting the system state
a lot when not trying to have all the power() functions call the reset()
functions to share partial functionality.

In the future, the goal will be to come up with a way to add back in the
soft reset behavior via keyboard binding as with the Master System core.
What's going to have to happen is that the key binding will have to send
a "reset pulse" to every emulated chip, and those chips are going to
have to act independently to power() instead of reusing functionality.
We'll get there eventually, but there's many things of vastly greater
importance to work on right now, so it'll be a while. The information
isn't lost ... we'll just have to pull it out of v102 when we are ready.

Note that I left the SNES reset vector simulation code in, even though
it's not possible to trigger, for the time being.

Also ... the Super Game Boy core is still disconnected. To be honest, it
totally slipped my mind when I released v102 that it wasn't connected
again yet. This one's going to be pretty tricky to be honest. I'm
thinking about making a third GameBoy::Interface class just for SGB, and
coming up with some way of bypassing platform-> calls when in this
mode.
2017-01-23 08:04:26 +11:00
Tim Allen 043f6a8b33 Update to v101r08 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - 68K: fixed read-modify-write instructions
  - 68K: fixed ADDX bug (using wrong target)
  - 68K: fixed major bug with SUB using wrong argument ordering
  - 68K: fixed sign extension when reading address registers from
    effective addressing
  - 68K: fixed sign extension on CMPA, SUBA instructions
  - VDP: improved OAM sprite attribute table caching behavior
  - VDP: improved DMA fill operation behavior
  - added Master System / Game Gear stubs (needed for developing the Z80
    core)
2016-08-17 22:31:22 +10:00
Tim Allen ffd150735b Update to v101r07 release.
byuu says:

Added VDP sprite rendering. Can't get any games far enough in to see if
it actually works. So in other words, it doesn't work at all and is 100%
completely broken.

Also added 68K exceptions and interrupts. So far only the VDP interrupt
is present. It definitely seems to be firing in commercial games, so
that's promising. But the implementation is almost certainly completely
wrong. There is fuck all of nothing for documentation on how interrupts
actually work. I had to find out the interrupt vector numbers from
reading the comments from the Sonic the Hedgehog disassembly. I have
literally no fucking clue what I0-I2 (3-bit integer priority value in
the status register) is supposed to do. I know that Vblank=6, Hblank=4,
Ext(gamepad)=2. I know that at reset, SR.I=7. I don't know if I'm
supposed to block interrupts when I is >, >=, <, <= to the interrupt
level. I don't know what level CPU exceptions are supposed to be.

Also implemented VDP regular DMA. No idea if it works correctly since
none of the commercial games run far enough to use it. So again, it's
horribly broken for usre.

Also improved VDP fill mode. But I don't understand how it takes
byte-lengths when the bus is 16-bit. The transfer times indicate it's
actually transferring at the same speed as the 68K->VDP copy, strongly
suggesting it's actually doing 16-bit transfers at a time. In which case,
what happens when you set an odd transfer length?

Also, both DMA modes can now target VRAM, VSRAM, CRAM. Supposedly there's
all kinds of weird shit going on when you target VSRAM, CRAM with VDP
fill/copy modes, but whatever. Get to that later.

Also implemented a very lazy preliminary wait mechanism to to stall out
a processor while another processor exerts control over the bus. This
one's going to be a major work in progress. For one, it totally breaks
the model I use to do save states with libco. For another, I don't
know if a 68K->VDP DMA instantly locks the CPU, or if it the CPU could
actually keep running if it was executing out of RAM when it started
the DMA transfer from ROM (eg it's a bus busy stall, not a hard chip
stall.) That'll greatly change how I handle the waiting.

Also, the OSS driver now supports Audio::Latency. Sound should be
even lower latency now. On FreeBSD when set to 0ms, it's absolutely
incredible. Cannot detect latency whatsoever. The Mario jump sound seems
to happen at the very instant I hear my cherry blue keyswitch activate.
2016-08-15 14:56:38 +10:00
Tim Allen 9b8c3ff8c0 Update to v101r03 release.
byuu says:

The 68K core now implements all 88 instructions. It ended up being 111
instructions in my core due to splitting up opcodes with the same name
but different addressing modes or directions (removes conditions at the
expense of more code.)

Technically, I don't have exceptions actually implemented yet, and
RESET/STOP don't do anything but set flags. So there's still more to
go. But ... close enough for statistics time!

The M68K core source code is 124,712 bytes in size. The next largest
core is the ARM7 core at 70,203 bytes in size.

The M68K object size is 942KiB; with the next largest being the V30MZ
core at 173KiB.

There are a total of 19,656 invalid opcodes in the 68000 revision (unless
of course I've made mistakes in my mappings, which is very probably.)

Now the fun part ... figuring out how to fix bugs in this core without
VDP emulation :/
2016-08-11 08:02:02 +10:00
Tim Allen f230d144b5 Update to v100r12 release.
byuu says:

All of the above fixes, plus I added all 24 variations on the shift
opcodes, plus SUBQ, plus fixes to the BCC instruction.

I can now run 851,767 instructions into Sonic the Hedgehog before hitting
an unimplemented instruction (SUB).

The 68K core is probably only ~35% complete, and yet it's already within
4KiB of being the largest CPU core, code size wise, in all of higan. Fuck
this chip.
2016-07-25 23:15:54 +10:00
Tim Allen 7ccfbe0206 Update to v100r11 release.
byuu says:

I split the Register class and read/write handlers into DataRegister and
AddressRegister, given that they have different behaviors on byte/word
accesses (data tends to preserve the upper bits; address tends to
sign-extend things.)

I expanded EA to EffectiveAddress. No sense in abbreviating things
to death.

I've now implemented 26 instructions. But the new ones are just all the
stupid from/to ccr/sr instructions.

Ryphecha confirmed that you can't set the undefined bits, so I don't
think the BitField concept is appropriate for the CCR/SR. Instead, I'm
just storing direct flags and have (read,write)(CCR,SR) instead. This
isn't like the 65816 where you have subroutines that push and pop the
flag register. It's much more common to access individual flags. Doesn't
match the consistency angle of the other CPU cores, but ... I think this
is the right thing to for the 68K specifically.
2016-07-23 12:32:35 +10:00
Tim Allen 4b897ba791 Update to v100r10 release.
byuu says:

Redesigned the handling of reading/writing registers to be about eight
times faster than the old system. More work may be needed ... it seems
data registers tend to preserve their upper bits upon assignment; whereas
address registers tend to sign-extend values into them. It may make
sense to have DataRegister and AddressRegister classes with separate
read/write handlers. I'd have to hold two Register objects inside the
EffectiveAddress (EA) class if we do that.

Implemented 19 opcodes now (out of somewhere between 60 and 90.) That gets
the first ~530,000 instructions in Sonic the Hedgehog running (though
probably wrong. But we can run a lot thanks to large initialization
loops.)

If I force the core to loop back to the reset vector on an invalid opcode,
I'm getting about 1500fps with a dumb 320x240 blit 60 times a second and
just the 68K running alone (no Z80, PSG, VDP, YM2612.) I don't know if
that's good or not. I guess we'll find out.

I had to stop tonight because the final opcode I execute is an RTS
(return from subroutine) that's branching back to address 0; which is
invalid ... meaning something went terribly wrong and the system crashed.
2016-07-22 22:03:25 +10:00
Tim Allen be3f6ac0d5 Update to v100r09 release.
byuu says:

Another six hours in ...

I have all of the opcodes, memory access functions, disassembler mnemonics
and table building converted over to the new template<uint Size> format.

Certainly, it would be quite easy for this nightmare chip to throw me
another curveball, but so far I can handle:

- MOVE (EA to, EA from) case
  - read(from) has to update register index for +/-(aN) mode
- MOVEM (EA from) case
  - when using +/-(aN), RA can't actually be updated until the transfer
    is completed
- LEA (EA from) case
  - doesn't actually perform the final read; just returns the address
    to be read from
- ANDI (EA from-and-to) case
  - same EA has to be read from and written to
  - for -(aN), the read has to come from aN-2, but can't update aN yet;
    so that the write also goes to aN-2
- no opcode can ever fetch the extension words more than once
- manually control the order of extension word fetching order for proper
  opcode decoding

To do all of that without a whole lot of duplicated code (or really
bloating out every single instruction with red tape), I had to bring
back the "bool valid / uint32 address" variables inside the EA struct =(

If weird exceptions creep in like timing constraints only on certain
opcodes, I can use template flags to the EA read/write functions to
handle that.
2016-07-19 19:12:05 +10:00
Tim Allen 92fe5b0813 Update to v100r08 release.
byuu says:

Six and a half hours this time ... one new opcode, and all old opcodes
now in a deprecated format. Hooray, progress!

For building the table, I've decided to move from:

    for(uint opcode : range(65536)) {
      if(match(...)) bind(opNAME, ...);
    }

To instead having separate for loops for each supported opcode. This
lets me specialize parts I want with templates.

And to this aim, I'm moving to replace all of the
(read,write)(size, ...) functions with (read,write)<Size>(...) functions.

This will amount to the ~70ish instructions being triplicated ot ~210ish
instructions; but I think this is really important.

When I was getting into flag calculations, a ton of conditionals
were needed to mask sizes to byte/word/long. There was also lots of
conditionals in all the memory access handlers.

The template code is ugly, but we eliminate a huge amount of branch
conditions this way.
2016-07-18 08:11:29 +10:00
Tim Allen 059347e575 Update to v100r07 release.
byuu says:

Four and a half hours of work and ... zero new opcodes implemented.

This was the best job I could do refining the effective address
computations. Should have all twelve 68000 modes implemented now. Still
have a billion questions about when and how I'm supposed to perform
certain edge case operations, though.
2016-07-17 13:24:28 +10:00
Tim Allen 0d6a09f9f8 Update to v100r06 release.
byuu says:

Up to ten 68K instructions out of somewhere between 61 and 88, depending
upon which PDF you look at. Of course, some of them aren't 100% completed
yet, either. Lots of craziness with MOVEM, and BCC has a BSR variant
that needs stack push/pop functions.

This WIP actually took over eight hours to make, going through every
possible permutation on how to design the core itself. The updated design
now builds both the instruction decoder+dispatcher and the disassembler
decoder into the same main loop during M68K's constructor.

The special cases are also really psychotic on this processor, and
I'm afraid of missing something via the fallthrough cases. So instead,
I'm ordering the instructions alphabetically, and including exclusion
cases to ignore binding invalid cases. If I end up remapping an existing
register, then it'll throw a run-time assertion at program startup.

I wanted very much to get rid of struct EA (EffectiveAddress), but
it's too difficult to keep track of the internal effective address
without it. So I split out the size to a separate parameter, since
every opcode only has one size parameter, and otherwise it was getting
duplicated in opcodes that take two EAs, and was also awkward with the
flag testing. It's a bit more typing, but I feel it's more clean this way.

Overall, I'm really worried this is going to be too slow. I don't want
to turn the EA stuff into templates, because that will massively bloat
out compilation times and object sizes, and will also need a special DSL
preprocessor since C++ doesn't have a static for loop. I can definitely
optimize a lot of EA's address/read/write functions away once the core
is completed, but it's never going to hold a candle to a templatized
68K core.

----

Forgot to include the SA-1 regression fix. I always remember immediately
after I upload and archive the WIP. Will try to get that in next time,
I guess.
2016-07-16 18:39:44 +10:00
Tim Allen b72f35a13e Update to v100r05 release.
byuu says:

Alright, I'm definitely going to need to find some people willing to
tolerate my questions on this chip, so I'm going to go ahead and announce
I'm working on this I guess.

This core is way too big for a surprise like the NES and WS cores
were. It'll probably even span multiple v10x releases before it's
even ready.
2016-07-13 08:47:04 +10:00
Tim Allen 1c0ef793fe Update to v100r04 release.
byuu says:

I now have enough of three instructions implemented to get through the
first four instructions in Sonic the Hedgehog.

But they're far from complete. The very first instruction uses EA
addressing, which is similar to x86's ModRM in terms of how disgustingly
complex it is. And it also accesses Z80 control registers, which obviously
isn't going to do anything yet.

The slow speed was me being stupid again. It's not 7.6MHz per frame,
it's 7.67MHz per second. So yeah, speed is so far acceptable again. But
we'll see how things go as I keep emulating more. The 68K decode is not
pretty at all.
2016-07-12 20:19:31 +10:00
Tim Allen 76a8ecd32a Update to v100r03 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:
- moved Thread, Scheduler, Cheat functionality into emulator/ for
  all cores
- start of actual Mega Drive emulation (two 68K instructions)

I'm going to be rather terse on MD emulation, as it's too early for any
meaningful dialogue here.
2016-07-10 15:28:26 +10:00
Tim Allen 3dd1aa9c1b Update to v100r02 release.
byuu says:

Sigh ... I'm really not a good person. I'm inherently selfish.

My responsibility and obligation right now is to work on loki, and
then on the Tengai Makyou Zero translation, and then on improving the
Famicom emulation.

And yet ... it's not what I really want to do. That shouldn't matter;
I should work on my responsibilities first.

Instead, I'm going to be a greedy, self-centered asshole, and work on
what I really want to instead.

I'm really sorry, guys. I'm sure this will make a few people happy,
and probably upset even more people.

I'm also making zero guarantees that this ever gets finished. As always,
I wish I could keep these things secret, so if I fail / give up, I could
just drop it with no shame. But I would have to cut everyone out of the
WIP process completely to make it happen. So, here goes ...

This WIP adds the initial skeleton for Sega Mega Drive / Genesis
emulation. God help us.

(minor note: apparently the new extension for Mega Drive games is .md,
neat. That's what I chose for the folders too. I thought it was .smd,
so that'll be fixed in icarus for the next WIP.)

(aside: this is why I wanted to get v100 out. I didn't want this code in
a skeleton state in v100's source. Nor did I want really broken emulation,
which the first release is sure to be, tarring said release.)

...

So, basically, I've been ruminating on the legacy I want to leave behind
with higan. 3D systems are just plain out. I'm never going to support
them. They're too complex for my abilities, and they would run too slowly
with my design style. I'm not willing to compromise my design ideals. And
I would never want to play a 3D game system at native 240p/480i resolution
... but 1080p+ upscaling is not accurate, so that's a conflict I want
to avoid entirely. It's also never going to emulate computer systems
(X68K, PC-98, FM-Towns, etc) because holy shit that would completely
destroy me. It's also never going emulate arcade machines.

So I think of higan as a collection of 2D emulators for consoles
and handhelds. I've gone over every major 2D gaming system there is,
looking for ones with games I actually care about and enjoy. And I
basically have five of those systems supported already. Looking at the
remaining list, I see only three systems left that I have any interest
in whatsoever: PC-Engine, Master System, Mega Drive. Again, I'm not in
any way committing to emulating any of these, but ... if I had all of
those in higan, I think I'd be content to really, truly, finally stop
writing more emulators for the rest of my life.

And so I decided to tackle the most difficult system first. If I'm
successful, the Z80 core should cover a lot of the work on the SMS. And
the HuC6280 should land somewhere between the NES and SNES in terms of
difficulty ... closer to the NES.

The systems that just don't appeal to me at all, which I will never touch,
include, but are not limited to:
* Atari 2600/5200/7800
* Lynx
* Jaguar
* Vectrex
* Colecovision
* Commodore 64
* Neo-Geo
* Neo-Geo Pocket / Color
* Virtual Boy
* Super A'can
* 32X
* CD-i
* etc, etc, etc.

And really, even if something were mildly interesting in there ... we
have to stop. I can't scale infinitely. I'm already way past my limit,
but I'm doing this anyway. Too many cores bloats everything and kills
quality on everything. I don't want higan to become MESS v2.

I don't know what I'll do about the Famicom Disk System, PC-Engine CD,
and Mega CD. I don't think I'll be able to achieve 60fps emulating the
Mega CD, even if I tried to.

I don't know what's going to happen here with even the Mega Drive. Maybe
I'll get driven crazy with the documentation and quit. Maybe it'll end
up being too complicated and I'll quit. Maybe the emulation will end up
way too slow and I'll give up. Maybe it'll take me seven years to get
any games playable at all. Maybe Steve Snake, AamirM and Mike Pavone
will pool money to hire a hitman to come after me. Who knows.

But this is what I want to do, so ... here goes nothing.
2016-07-09 14:21:37 +10:00