byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulator/random: new array function with more realistic RAM
initializations
- emulator/random: both low and high entropy register initializations
now use PCG
- gba/player: rumble will time out and disable after being left on for
500ms; fixes Pokemon Pinball issue
- ruby/input/udev: fixed rumble effects [ma\_rysia]
- sfc/system: default to low-entropy randomization of memory
The low-entropy memory randomization is modeled after one of my SHVC
2/1/3 systems. It generates striped patterns in memory, using random
inputs (biased to 0x00/0xff), and has a random chance of corrupting 1-2
bits of random values in the pool of memory (to prevent easy emulator
detection and to match observed results on hardware.)
The reasoning for using PCG on register initializations, is that I don't
believe they're going to have repeating patterns like RAM does anyway.
And register initializations are way more vital.
I want to have the new low-entropy RAM mode tested, so at least for the
next few WIPs, I've set the SNES randomization over to low-entropy.
We'll have to have a long discussion and decide whether we want official
releases to use high-entropy or low-entropy.
Also, I figured out the cause of the Prince of Persia distortion ... I
had the volume under the audio settings tab set to 200%. I didn't
realize there were SNES games that clipped so easily, given how
incredibly weak SNES audio is compared to every other sound source on my
PC. So with no entropy or low-entropy, indeed the game now sounds just
fine.
I can't actually test the udev fixes, so I guess we'll see how that goes
for Screwtape and ma\_rysia.
I made a change to ruby/input/joypad/udev.cpp while diagnosing a problem
with higan's rumble behaviour on Linux, and accidentally committed it
in 15b3dc8b0b as part of a documentation
change.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- gb: added accelerometer X-axis, Y-Axis inputs¹
- gb: added rumble input¹
- gb/mbc5: added rumble support²
- gb/mbc6: added skeleton driver, but it doesn't boot Net de Get
- gb/mbc7: added mostly complete driver (only missing EEPROM), but it
doesn't boot Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble
- gb/tama: added leap year assignment
- tomoko: fixed macOS compilation [MerryMage]
- hiro/cocoa: fix table cell redrawing on updates and automatic column
resizing [ncbncb]
- hiro/cocoa: fix some weird issue with clicking table view checkboxes
on Retina displays [ncbncb]
- icarus: enhance Game Boy heuristics³
- nall: fix three missing return statements [Jonas Quinn]
- ruby: hopefully fixed all compilation errors reported by Screwtape
et al⁴
¹: because there's no concept of a controller for cartridge inputs,
I'm attaching to the base platform for now. An idea I had was to make
separate ports for each cartridge type ... but this would duplicate the
rumble input between MBC5 and MBC7. And would also be less discoverable.
But it would be more clean in that users wouldn't think the Game Boy
hardware had this functionality. I'll think about it.
²: it probably won't work yet. Rumble isn't documented anywhere, but
I dug through an emulator named GEST and discovered that it seems to use
bit 3 of the RAM bank select to be rumble. I don't know if it sets the
bit for rumbling, then clears when finished, or if it sets it and then
after a few milliseconds it stops rumbling. I couldn't test on my
FreeBSD box because SDL 1.2 doesn't support rumble, udev doesn't exist
on FreeBSD, and nobody has ever posted any working code for how to use
evdev (or whatever it's called) on FreeBSD.
³: I'm still thinking about specifying the MBC7 RAM as EEPROM, since
it's not really static RAM.
⁴: if possible, please test all drivers if you can. I want to ensure
they're all working. Especially let me know if the following work:
macOS: input.carbon Linux: audio.pulseaudiosimple, audio.ao (libao)
If I can confirm these are working, I'm going to then remove them from
being included with stock higan builds.
I'm also considering dropping SDL video on Linux/BSD. XShm is much
faster and supports blurring. I may also drop SDL input on Linux, since
udev works better. That will free a dependency on SDL 1.2 for building
higan. FreeBSD is still going to need it for joypad support, however.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- ruby: ported all remaining drivers to new API¹
- ruby/wasapi: fix for dropping one sample per period [SuperMikeMan]
- gb: emulated most of the TAMA RTC; but RTC state is still volatile²
¹: the new ports are:
- audio/{directsound, alsa, pulseaudio, pulseaudiosimple, ao}
- input/{udev, quartz, carbon}
It's pretty much guaranteed many of them will have compilation errors.
Please paste the error logs and I'll try to fix them up. It may take a
WIP or two to get there.
It's also possible things broke from the updates. If so, I could use
help comparing the old file to the new file, looking for mistakes, since
I can't test on these platforms apart from audio/directsound.
Please report working drivers in this list, so we can mark them off the
list. I'll need both macOS and Linux testers.
audio/directsound.cpp:112:
if(DirectSoundCreate(0, &_interface, 0) != DS_OK) return terminate(), false;
²: once I get this working, I'll add load/save support for the RTC
values. For now, the RTC data will be lost when you close the emulator.
Right now, you can set the date/time in real-time mode, and when you
start the game, the time will be correct, and the time will tick
forward. Note that it runs off emulated time instead of actual real
time, so if you fast-forward to 300%, one minute will be 20 seconds.
The really big limitation right now is that when you exit the game, and
restart it, and resume a new game, the hour spot gets corrupted, and
this seems to instantly kill your pet. Fun. This is crazy because the
commands the game sends to the TAMA interface are identical between
starting a new game and getting in-game versus loading a game.
It's likely going to require disassembling the game's code and seeing
what in the hell it's doing, but I am extremely bad at LR35092 assembly.
Hopefully endrift can help here :|
byuu says:
Changelog:
- ruby: rewrote the API interfaces for Video, Audio, Input
- ruby/audio: can now select the number of output channels (not useful
to higan, sorry)
- ruby/asio: various improvements
- tomoko: audio settings panel can now select separate audio devices
(for ASIO, OSS so far)
- tomoko: audio settings panel frequency and latency lists are
dynamically populated now
Note: due to the ruby API rewrite, most drivers will not compile. Right
now, the following work:
- video: Direct3D, XShm
- audio: ASIO, OSS
- input: Windows, SDL, Xlib
It takes a really long time to rewrite these (six hours to do the
above), so it's going to be a while before we're back at 100%
functionality again.
Errata:
- ASIO needs device(), setDevice()
- need to call setDevice() at program startup to populate
frequency/latency settings properly
- changing the device and/or frequency needs to update the emulator
resampler rates
The really hard part is going to be the last one: the only way to change
the emulator frequency is to flush all the audio streams and then
recompute all the coefficients for the resamplers. If this is called
during emulation, all audio streams will be erased and thus no sound
will be output. I'll most likely be forced to simply ignore
device/frequency changes until the user loads another game. It is at
least possible to toggle the latency dynamically.
byuu says:
This WIP fixes all the critical pending issues I had open. I'm sure
there's many more that simply didn't make their way into said list. So
by all means, please report important issues you're aware of so they can
get fixed.
Changelog:
- ruby: add variable texture support to GDI video driver [bug
reported by Cydrak]
- ruby: minor cleanups to XShm video driver
- ruby: fix handling of up+down, left+right hat cases for XInput
driver [bug reported by Cydrak]
- nall: fixed vector class so that compilation with GCC 7.1 should
succeed [SuperMikeMan]
- sfc: initialize most DSP registers to random values to fix Magical
Drop [Jonas Quinn]
- sfc: lower PPU brightness when luma=0 from 50% scale to 25% scale;
helps scenes like Final Fantasy III's intro
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Z80: implemented 113 new instructions (all the easy
LD/ADC/ADD/AND/OR/SBC/SUB/XOR ones)
- Z80: used alternative to castable<To, With> type (manual cast inside
instruction() register macros)
- Z80: debugger: used register macros to reduce typing and increase
readability
- Z80: debugger: smarter way of handling multiple DD/FD prefixes
(using gotos, yay!)
- ruby: fixed crash with Windows input driver on exit (from SuperMikeMan)
I have no idea how the P/V flag is supposed to work on AND/OR/XOR, so
that's probably wrong for now. HALT is also mostly a dummy function for
now. But I typically implement those inside instruction(), so it
probably won't need to be changed? We'll see.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- hiro: BrowserDialog can navigate up to drive selection on Windows
- nall: (file,path,dir,base,prefix,suffix)name =>
Location::(file,path,dir,base,prefix,suffix)
- higan/tomoko: rename audio filter label from "Sinc" to "IIR - Biquad"
- higan/tomoko: allow loading files via icarus on the command-line
once again
- higan/tomoko: (begrudging) quick hack to fix presentation window focus
on startup
- higan/audio: don't divide output audio volume by number of streams
- processor/r65816: fix a regression in (read,write)DB; fixes Taz-Mania
- fixed compilation regressions on Windows and Linux
I'm happy with where we are at with code cleanups and stability, so I'd
like to release v100. But even though I'm not assigning any special
significance to this version, we should probably test it more thoroughly
first.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- (u)int(max,ptr) abbreviations removed; use _t suffix now [didn't feel
like they were contributing enough to be worth it]
- cleaned up nall::integer,natural,real functionality
- toInteger, toNatural, toReal for parsing strings to numbers
- fromInteger, fromNatural, fromReal for creating strings from numbers
- (string,Markup::Node,SQL-based-classes)::(integer,natural,real)
left unchanged
- template<typename T> numeral(T value, long padding, char padchar)
-> string for print() formatting
- deduces integer,natural,real based on T ... cast the value if you
want to override
- there still exists binary,octal,hex,pointer for explicit print()
formatting
- lstring -> string_vector [but using lstring = string_vector; is
declared]
- would be nice to remove the using lstring eventually ... but that'd
probably require 10,000 lines of changes >_>
- format -> string_format [no using here; format was too ambiguous]
- using integer = Integer<sizeof(int)*8>; and using natural =
Natural<sizeof(uint)*8>; declared
- for consistency with boolean. These three are meant for creating
zero-initialized values implicitly (various uses)
- R65816::io() -> idle() and SPC700::io() -> idle() [more clear; frees
up struct IO {} io; naming]
- SFC CPU, PPU, SMP use struct IO {} io; over struct (Status,Registers) {}
(status,registers); now
- still some CPU::Status status values ... they didn't really fit into
IO functionality ... will have to think about this more
- SFC CPU, PPU, SMP now use step() exclusively instead of addClocks()
calling into step()
- SFC CPU joypad1_bits, joypad2_bits were unused; killed them
- SFC PPU CGRAM moved into PPU::Screen; since nothing else uses it
- SFC PPU OAM moved into PPU::Object; since nothing else uses it
- the raw uint8[544] array is gone. OAM::read() constructs values from
the OAM::Object[512] table now
- this avoids having to determine how we want to sub-divide the two
OAM memory sections
- this also eliminates the OAM::synchronize() functionality
- probably more I'm forgetting
The FPS fluctuations are driving me insane. This WIP went from 128fps to
137fps. Settled on 133.5fps for the final build. But nothing I changed
should have affected performance at all. This level of fluctuation makes
it damn near impossible to know whether I'm speeding things up or slowing
things down with changes.
byuu says:
This is a few days old, but oh well.
This WIP changes nall,hiro,ruby,icarus back to (u)int(8,16,32,64)_t.
I'm slowly pushing for (u)int(8,16,32,64) to use my custom
Integer<Size>/Natural<Size> classes instead. But it's going to be one
hell of a struggle to get that into higan.
byuu says:
Warning: this is not for the faint of heart. This is a very early,
unpolished, buggy release. But help testing/fixing bugs would be greatly
appreciated for anyone willing.
Requirements:
- Mac OS X 10.7+
- Xcode 7.2+
Installation Commands:
cd higan
gmake -j 4
gmake install
cd ../icarus
gmake -j 4
gmake install
(gmake install is absolutely required, sorry. You'll be missing key
files in key places if you don't run it, and nothing will work.)
(gmake uninstall also exists, or you can just delete the .app bundles
from your Applications folder, and the Dev folder on your desktop.)
If you want to use the GBA emulation, then you need to drop the GBA BIOS
into ~/Emulation/System/Game\ Boy\ Advance.sys\bios.rom
Usage:
You'll now find higan.app and icarus.app in your Applications folders.
First, run icarus.app, navigate to where you keep your game ROMs. Now
click the settings button at the bottom right, and check "Create
Manifests", and click OK. (You'll need to do this every time you run
icarus because there's some sort of bug on OSX saving the settings.) Now
click "Import", and let it bring in your games into ~/Emulation.
Note: "Create Manifests" is required. I don't yet have a pipe
implementation on OS X for higan to invoke icarus yet. If you don't
check this box, it won't create manifest.bml files, and your games won't
run at all.
Now you can run higan.app. The first thing you'll want to do is go to
higan->Preferences... and assign inputs for your gamepads. At the very
least, do it for the default controller for all the systems you want to
emulate.
Now this is very important ... close the application at this point so
that it writes your config file to disk. There's a serious crashing bug,
and if you trigger it, you'll lose your input bindings.
Now the really annoying part ... go to Library->{System} and pick the
game you want to play. Right now, there's a ~50% chance the application
will bomb. It seems the hiro::pListView object is getting destroyed, yet
somehow the internal Cocoa callbacks are being triggered anyway. I don't
know how this is possible, and my attempts to debug with lldb have been
a failure :(
If you're unlucky, the application will crash. Restart and try again. If
it crashes every single time, then you can try launching your game from
the command-line instead. Example:
open /Applications/higan.app \
--args ~/Emulation/Super\ Famicom/Zelda3.sfc/
Help wanted:
I could really, really, really use some help with that crashing on game
loading. There's a lot of rough edges, but they're all cosmetic. This
one thing is pretty much the only major show-stopping issue at the
moment, preventing a wider general audience pre-compiled binary preview.
r13 and r14 weren't posted as individual releases, but their changelogs
were posted.
byuu says about r13:
I'm not going to be posting WIPs for r13 and above for a while.
The reason is that I'm working on the major manifest overhaul I've
discussed previously on the icarus subforum.
I'm recreating my boards database from scratch using the map files
and the new map analyzer. The only games that will load are ones
I've created board definitions for, and updated
sfc/cartridge/markup.cpp to parse. Once I've finished all the
boards, then I'll update the heuristics.
Then finally, I'll sync the syntax changes over to the fc, gb, gba
cores.
Once that's done, I'll start posting WIPs again, along with a new
build of icarus.
But I'll still post changelogs as I work through things.
Changelog (r13):
- preservation: created new database-builder tool (merges
region-specific databases with boards)
- icarus: support new, external database format
(~/.config/icarus/Database/(Super Famicom.bml, ...)
- added 1A3B-(10,11,12); 1A3B-20
byuu says about r14:
r14 work:
I successfully created mappings for every board used in the US set.
I also updated icarus' heuristics to use the new mappings, and
created ones there for the boards that are only in the JP set.
Then I patched icarus to support pulling games out of the database
when it's used on a game folder to generate a manifest file.
Then I updated a lot of code in higan/sfc to support the new mapping
syntax. sfc/cartridge/markup.cpp is about half the size it used to
be with the new mappings, and I was able to kill off both map/id and
map/select entirely.
Then I updated all four emulated systems (and both subsystems) to
use "board" as the root node, and harmonized their syntax (made them
all more consistent with each other.)
Then I added a manifest viewer to the tools window+menu. It's kind
of an advanced user feature, but oh well. No reason to coddle people
when the feature is very useful for developers. The viewer will show
all manifests in order when you load multi-cart games as well.
Still not going to call any syntax 100% done right now, but
thankfully with the new manifest-free folders, nobody will have to
do anything to use the new format. Just download the new version and
go.
The Super Famicom Event stuff is currently broken (CC92/PF94
boards). That's gonna be fun to support.
byuu says about r15:
EDIT: small bug in icarus with heuristics. Edit
core/super-famicom.cpp line 27:
if(/*auto*/ markup = cartridge.markup) {
Gotta remove that "auto" so that it returns valid markup.
Resolved the final concerns I had with the new manifest format.
Right now there are two things that are definitely broken: MCC (BS-X
Town cart) and Event (CC '92 and PF'94).
And there are a few things that are untested: SPC7110, EpsonRTC,
SharpRTC, SDD1+RAM, SufamiTurbo, BS-X slotted carts.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed I/O register reads; perfect score on endrift's I/O tests now
- fixed mouse capture clipping on Windows [Cydrak]
- several hours of code maintenance work done on the SFC core
All higan/sfc files should now use the auto fn() -> ret; syntax. Haven't
converted all unsigned->uint yet. Also, probably won't do sfc/alt as
that's mostly just speed hack stuff.
Errata:
- forgot auto& instead of just auto on SuperFamicom::Video::draw_cursor,
which makes Super Scope / Justifier crash. Will be fixed in the next
WIP.
byuu says:
I'll post more detailed changes later, but basically:
- fixed Baldur's Gate bug
- guess if no flash ROM ID present (fixes Magical Vacation, many many
others)
- nall cleanups
- sfc/cartridge major cleanups
- bsxcartridge/"bsx" renamed to mcc/"mcc" after the logic chip it uses
(consistency with SGB/ICD2)
- ... and more!
byuu says:
Note: for Windows users, please go to nall/intrinsics.hpp line 60 and
correct the typo from "DISPLAY_WINDOW" to "DISPLAY_WINDOWS" before
compiling, otherwise things won't work at all.
This will be a really major WIP for the core SNES emulation, so please
test as thoroughly as possible.
I rewrote the 65816 CPU core's dispatcher from a jump table to a switch
table. This was so that I could pass class variables as parameters to
opcodes without crazy theatrics.
With that, I killed the regs.r[N] stuff, the flag_t operator|=, &=, ^=
stuff, and all of the template versions of opcodes.
I also removed some stupid pointless flag tests in xcn and pflag that
would always be true.
I sure hope that AWJ is happy with this; because this change was so that
my flag assignments and branch tests won't need to build regs.P into
a full 8-bit variable anymore.
It does of course incur a slight performance hit when you pass in
variables by-value to functions, but it should help with binary size
(and thus cache) by reducing a lot of extra functions. (I know I could
have used template parameters for some things even with a switch table,
but chose not to for the aforementioned reasons.)
Overall, it's about a ~1% speedup from the previous build. The CPU core
instructions were never a bottleneck, but I did want to fix the P flag
building stuff because that really was a dumb mistake v_v'
byuu says:
This WIP substantially restructures the ruby API for the first time
since that project started.
It is my hope that with this restructuring, destruction of the ruby
objects should now be deterministic, which should fix the crashing on
closing the emulator on Linux. We'll see I guess ... either way, it
removed two layers of wrappers from ruby, so it's a pretty nice code
cleanup.
It won't compile on Windows due to a few issues I didn't see until
uploading the WIP, too lazy to upload another. But I fixed all the
compilation issues locally, so it'll work on Windows again with the next
WIP (unless I break something else.)
(Kind of annoying that Linux defines glActiveTexture but Windows
doesn't.)
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:
The library window is gone, and replaced with
hiro::BrowserWindow::openFolder(). This gives navigation capabilities to
game loading, and it also completes our slotted cart selection code. As
an added bonus, it's less code this way, too.
I also set the window size to consistent sizes between all emulated
systems, so that switching between SFC and GB don't cause the window
size to keep changing, and so that the scaling size is consistent (eg at
normal scale, GB @ 3x is closer to SNES @ 2x.) This means black borders
in GB/GBA mode, but it doesn't look that bad, and it's not like many
people ever use these modes anyway.
Finally, added the placeholder tabs for video, audio and timing. I don't
intend to add the timing calculator code to v095 (it might be better as
a separate tool), but I'll add the ability to set video/audio rates, at
least.
Glitch 1: despite selecting the first item in the BrowserDialog list, if
you press enter when the window appears, it doesn't activate the item
until you press an arrow key first.
Glitch 2: in Game Boy mode, if you set the 4x window size, it's not
honoring the full requested height because the viewport is smaller than
the window. 8+ years of trying to get GTK+ and Qt to simply set the god
damned window size I ask for, and I still can't get them to do it
reliably.
Remaining issues:
- finish configuration panels (video, audio, timing)
- fix ruby driver compilation on Windows
- add DIP switch selection window (NSS) [I may end up punting this one
to v096]
byuu says:
This updates ruby to return shared_pointer<HID::Device> objects instead
of HID::Device* objects. It also fixes an ID bug where joypads were
starting at ID# 2+, but mice were also set to ID# 2. I also revised
nall/hid a lot, with getters and setters instead of stabbing at internal
state. I didn't yet patch nall::string to safely consume nullptr const
char* values, though.
byuu says:
Changelog:
* added driver selection
* added video scale + aspect correction settings
* added A/V sync + audio mute settings
* added configuration file
* fixed compilation bugs under Windows and Linux
* fixed window sizing
* removed HSU1
* the system menu stays as "System", because "Game Boy Advance" was too
long a string for the smallest scale size
* some more stuff
You guys probably won't be ecstatic about the video sizing options, but
it's basically your choice of 1x, 2x or 4x scale with optional aspect
correction. 3x was intentionally skipped because it looks horrible on
hires SNES games. The window is resized and recentered upon loading
games. The window doesn't resize otherwise. I never really liked the way
v094 always left you with black screen areas and left you with
off-centered window positions.
I might go ahead and add the pseudo-fullscreen toggle that will jump
into 4x mode (respecting your aspect setting.)
Short-term:
* add input port changing support
* add other input types (mouse-based, etc)
* add save states
* add cheat codes
* add timing configuration (video/audio sync)
* add hotkeys (single state)
We can probably do a new release once the short-term items are
completed.
Long-term:
* add slotted cart loader (SGB, BSX, ST)
* add DIP switch selection window (NSS)
* add cheat code database
* add state manager
* add overscan masking
Not planned:
* video color adjustments (will allow emulated color vs raw color; but
no more sliders)
* pixel shaders
* ananke integration (will need to make a command-line version to get my
games in)
* fancy audio adjustment controls (resampler, latency, volume)
* input focus settings
* relocating game library (not hard, just don't feel like it)
* localization support (not enough users)
* window geometry memory
* anything else not in higan v094
byuu says:
Changelog:
- port: various compilation fixes for OS X [kode54]
- nall: added programpath() function to return path to process binary
[todo: need to have ethos use this function]
- ruby: XAudio2 will select default game sound device instead of first
sound device
- ruby: DirectInput device IDs are no longer ambiguous when VID+PID are
identical
- ruby: OpenGL won't try and terminate if it hasn't been initialized
- gb: D-pad up+down/left+right not masked in SGB mode
- sfc: rewrote ICD2 video rendering to output in real-time, work with
cycle-based Game Boy renderer
- sfc: rewrote Bus::reduce(), reduces game loading time by about 500ms
- ethos: store save states in {game}/higan/* instead of {game}/bsnes/*
- loki: added target-loki/ (blank stub for now)
- Makefile: purge out/* on make clean
byuu says:
Not an official WIP (a WIP WIP? A meta-WIP?), just throwing in the new
fullscreen code, and I noticed that OpenGL colors in 30-bit mode are all
fucked up now for some strange reason. So I'm just using this snapshot
to debug the issue.
byuu says:
I've completely redone the ethos InputManager and ruby to work on
HID::Device objects instead of one giant scancode pool.
Currently only the udev driver supports the changes to ruby, so only
Linux users will be able to compile and run this WIP build.
The nice thing about the new system is that it's now possible to
uniquely identify controllers, so if you swap out gamepads, you won't
end up with it working but with all the mappings all screwed up. Since
higan lets you map multiple physical inputs to one emulated input, you
can now configure your keyboard and multiple gamepads to the same
emulated input, and then just use whatever controller you want.
Because USB gamepad makers failed to provide unique serial#s with each
controller, we have to limit the mapping to specific USB ports.
Otherwise, we couldn't distinguish two otherwise identical gamepads. So
basically your computer USB ports act like real game console input port
numbers. Which is kind of neat, I guess.
And the really nice thing about the new system is that we now have the
capability to support hotplugging input devices. I haven't yet added
this to any drivers, but I'm definitely going to add it to udev for v094
official.
Finally, with the device ID (vendor ID + product ID) exposed, we gain
one last really cool feature that we may be able to develop more in the
future. Say we created a joypad.bml file to include with higan. In it,
we'd store the Xbox 360 controller, and pre-defined button mappings for
each emulated system. So if higan detects you have an Xbox 360
controller, you can just plug it in and use it. Even better, we can
clearly specify the difference between triggers and analog axes, and
name each individual input. So you'd see "Xbox 360 Gamepad #1: Left
Trigger" instead of higan v093's "JP0::Axis2.Hi"
Note: for right now, ethos' input manager isn't filtering the device IDs
to look pretty. So you're going to see a 64-bit hex value for a device
ID right now instead of something like Joypad#N for now.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- GBA: SOUND_CTL_H is readable, fixes sound effects in Mario&Luigi
Superstar Saga [Cydrak] (note: game is still unplayable due to other
bugs)
- phoenix/Windows: workaround for Win32 API ListView bug, fixes slot
loading behavior
- ruby: added udev driver for Linux with rumble support, and added
rumble support to existing RawInput driver for XInput and DirectInput
- ethos: added new "Rumble" mapping to GBA input assignment, use it to
tell higan which controller to rumble (clear it to disable rumble)
- GBA: Game Boy Player rumble is now fully emulated
- core: added new normalized raw-color palette mode for Display
Emulation shaders
The way rumble was added to ethos was somewhat hackish. The support
doesn't really exist in nall.
I need to redesign the entire input system, but that's not a change
I want to make so close to a release.
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 describes the changes since v067:
This release officially introduces the accuracy and performance cores,
alongside the previously-existing compatibility core. The accuracy core
allows the most accurate SNES emulation ever seen, with every last
processor running at the lowest possible clock synchronization level.
The performance core allows slower computers the chance to finally use
bsnes. It is capable of attaining 60fps in standard games even on an
entry-level Intel Atom processor, commonly found in netbooks.
The accuracy core is absolutely not meant for casual gaming at all. It
is meant solely for getting as close to 100% perfection as possible, no
matter the cost to speed. It should only be used for testing,
development or debugging.
The compatibility core is identical to bsnes v067 and earlier, but is
now roughly 10% faster. This is the default and recommended core for
casual gaming.
The performance core contains an entirely new S-CPU core, with
range-tested IRQs; and uses blargg's heavily-optimized S-DSP core
directly. Although there are very minor accuracy tradeoffs to increase
speed, I am confident that the performance core is still more accurate
and compatible than any other SNES emulator. The S-CPU, S-SMP, S-DSP,
SuperFX and SA-1 processors are all clock-based, just as in the accuracy
and compatibility cores; and as always, there are zero game-specific
hacks. Its compatibility is still well above 99%, running even the most
challenging games flawlessly.
If you have held off from using bsnes in the past due to its system
requirements, please give the performance core a try. I think you will
be impressed. I'm also not finished: I believe performance can be
increased even further.
I would also strongly suggest Windows Vista and Windows 7 users to take
advantage of the new XAudio2 driver by OV2. Not only does it give you
a performance boost, it also lowers latency and provides better sound by
way of skipping an API emulation layer.
Changelog:
- Split core into three profiles: accuracy, compatibility and
performance
- Accuracy core now takes advantage of variable-bitlength integers (eg
uint24_t)
- Performance core uses a new S-CPU core, written from scratch for speed
- Performance core uses blargg's snes_dsp library for S-DSP emulation
- Binaries are now compiled using GCC 4.5
- Added a workaround in the SA-1 core for a bug in GCC 4.5+
- The clock-based S-PPU renderer has greatly improved OAM emulation;
fixing Winter Gold and Megalomania rendering issues
- Corrected pseudo-hires color math in the clock-based S-PPU renderer;
fixing Super Buster Bros backgrounds
- Fixed a clamping bug in the Cx4 16-bit triangle operation [Jonas
Quinn]; fixing Mega Man X2 "gained weapon" star background effect
- Updated video renderer to properly handle mixed-resolution screens
with interlace enabled; fixing Air Strike Patrol level briefing screen
- Added mightymo's 2010-08-19 cheat code pack
- Windows port: added XAudio2 output support [OV2]
- Source: major code restructuring; virtual base classes for processor
- cores removed, build system heavily modified, etc.
byuu says:
Added OV2's XAudio2 driver (it's better and faster than the DirectSound
one)
Fixed DirectInput keypad number codes
Added launcher to make the profiles work
Profiles now called: Accuracy, Compatibility, Performance (not debating
names anymore)
The launcher isn't going to work on OS X because of the .app folder
bullshit (yes, yes, .sfc folders.)
It also crashes on Windows XP for god only knows what reason. Works fine
on Windows 7 and Linux. So XP users, rename the .dll files to .exe to
test this release. I'll fix it on Monday.
The color highlighting fucks up the radio boxes on the Windows classic
theme, because Nokia can't afford a god damn QA team.
Lastly, I forgot to add launcher to the make archive-all command, so the
source for it will be in the next WIP.
Tim Allen