byuu says:
Changelog:
- Super Famicom: added remaining generic board types
- icarus: improved Super Famicom heuristics
- icarus: reworked BS Memory heuristics
- icarus: reworked Sufami Turbo heuristics
Notes: this is really complicated, and is going to take a long time to
work 100% smoothly again.
Starting off, I am trying to get rid of the weird edge case zero-byte
SRAM mapping for the Cx4. It has the RAM region present, but returns
logic low (0x00) instead of open bus, when SRAM isn't present. I started
by making it `map=ram` instead of `ram/map`, which is gross, and then it ended
up detecing the map tag ending in RAM and pulling the Cx4 data RAM into that
slot. Ugh. The preservation board mapping is still as it was before and will
need to be updated once I get the syntax down.
The BS Memory and Sufami Turbo moving to the new `game/memory`
ending means I can't use the SuperFamicom::Cartridge::loadMemory
function that looks at the old-style rom/ram tags. Because I didn't
write more code, the result is those sub-carts won't load now.
The old heuristics were short-circuiting on SA1 before bothering with
BS-X slots, so that's why SD Gundam G-Next wasn't asking for a data
pack. The problem is, I don't know where the BS-X pack maps to on this
cartridge. It's at c0-ef on the other BS-X slotted cartridges, but
that's mapped to the SA1 on regular SA1 cartridges, so ... for now, it's
not actually mapped in.
I'm still struggling with naming conventions on all these boards. I'll
make a public post about that, though.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall: `Markup::Node::operator[]` now uses `find()` instead of `lookup()`
behind the scenes
- Super Famicom: RAM memory ordering is now independent of ROM memory
ordering
- Super Famicom: added 19 new generic board definitions
- icarus: improved Super Famicom heuristics generation
Not putting it in the changelog, but the SPC7110 RAM now has write
protection disabled again.
99% of games should now be playable with heuristics. The exceptions
should be:
- 4MB LoROM games with SRAM (Ys 3, FE: Thracia 776)
- 2MB DSP LoROM games
- BS-X Town
- BS-X slotted games
- SA1 BSX slotted games
- SPC7110 games without the RTC (Momotarou Dentetsu Happy, Super Power
League 4)
- SPC7110 7MB fan translation (wasn't supported earlier either)
- ExLoROM games (wasn't supported earlier either)
- Sufami Turbo
- Campus Challenge '92 and Powerfest '94
- ST010 is going to run at 15MHz instead of 11MHz
- MSU1 (needs to be supported in higan, not icarus)
I'll add support for most of these before the release of v107.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Super Famicom: update to newer board markup syntax
- Super Famicom: update all mapped ROMs to be write-protected
- errata: SPC7110 set ram.writeProtect(true), I'll fix it in the
next WIP
- icarus: rewrote the Super Famicom heuristics module from scratch
Instead of icarus heuristics generating higan-specific mappings, it now
generates generic board IDs that can be used by any emulator. I had
originally planned to print out real PCB ID codes here, but these board
mappings are meant to be more generic, and I don't want them to look
real. The pseudo-codes are easy to parse, for example: `DSP-LOROM-NVRAM`
for Super Mario Kart, `SUPERFX-RAM` for Doom.
I'm going to make a `Boards (Generic).bml` file that will contain mapping
definitions for every board. Until this is done, any games not in the SNES
preservation database will fail to play because the mapping information is
now missing.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Super Famicom: added support for loading manifests without embedded
mapping information¹
- genius: initial commit
- various Makefile cleanups
¹: so the idea here is to try and aim for a stable manifest format,
and to allow direct transposition of icarus/genius database entries into
manifest files. The exact mechanics of how this is going to work is
currently in flux, but we'll get there.
For right now, `Super Famicom.sys` gains `boards.bml`, which is the raw
database from my board-editor tool, and higan itself tries to load
`boards.bml`, match an entry to game/board from the game's `manifest.bml`
file, and then transform it into the format currently used by higan. It
does this only when the game's `manifest.bml` file lacks a board node.
When such a board node exists, it works as previous versions of higan
did.
The only incompatible change right now is information/title is now
located at game/label. I may transition window title display to just use
the filenames instead.
Longer term, some thought is going to need to go into the format of the
`boards.bml` database itself, and at which point in the process I should
be transforming things.
Give it time, we'll refine this into something nicer.
byuu says (in the WIP forum):
Changelog:
- higan: cheat codes accept = and ? separators now
- the new preferred code format is: address=value or
address=if-match?value
- the old code format of address/value and address/if-match/value
will continue to work
- higan: cheats.bml is no longer included with the base distribution
- mightymo stopped updating it in 2015, and it's not source code;
it can still be pulled in from older releases
- fc: improved PAL mode timing; use PAL APU timing tables; fix PAL
noise period table [hex\_usr]
- md: support aborting a Z80 bus wait in order to capture save states
without freezing
- note that this will violate accuracy; but in practice a slight
desync is better than an emulator deadlock
- sfc: revert DSP ENDX randomization for now (want to research it more
before deploying in an official release)
- sfc: fix Super Famicom.sys/manifest.bml APU RAM size [hex\_usr]
- tomoko: cleaned up make install rules
- hiro/cocoa: use ABGR for pixel data [Sintendo]
Note: I forgot to change the command-line and drag-and-drop separator
from : to | in this WIP. However, it is corrected in the v103 official
binary and source published on download.byuu.org. Sorry about that, I
know it makes the Git repository history more difficult. I'm not
concerned whether the : → | change is part of v103 or v103r01 in the
repository, and will leave this to your discretion, Screwtape.
I also still need to set the VDP bit to indicate PAL mode in the Mega
Drive core. This is what happens when I have 47 things I have to do,
given how lousy my memory is. I miss things.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan: `Emulator::<Platform::load>()` now returns a struct containing
both a path ID and a string option
- higan: `Emulator::<Platform::load>()` now takes an optional final
argument of string options
- fc: added PAL emulation (finally, only took six years)
- md: added PAL emulation
- md: fixed address parameter to `VDP::Sprite::write()`; fixes missing
sprites in Super Street Fighter II
- md: emulated HIRQ counter; fixes many games
- Super Street Fighter II - status bar
- Altered Beast - status bar
- Sonic the Hedgehog - Labyrinth Zone - water effect
- etc.
- ms: added PAL emulation
- sfc: added the ability to override the default region auto-detection
- sfc: removed "system.region" override setting from `Super Famicom.sys`
- tomoko: added options list to game folder load dialog window
- tomoko: added the ability to specify game folder load options on the
command-line
So, basically ... Sega forced a change with the way region detection
works. You end up with games that can run on multiple regions, and the
content changes accordingly. Bare Knuckle in NTSC-J mode will become
Streets of Rage in NTSC-U mode. Some games can even run in both NTSC and
PAL mode.
In my view, there should be a separate ROM for each region a game was
released in, even if the ROM content were identical. But unfortunately
that's not how things were done by anyone else.
So to support this, the higan load dialog now has a drop-down at the
bottom-right, where you can choose the region to load games from. On the
SNES, it defaults to "Auto", which will pull the region setting from the
manifest, or fall back on NTSC. On the Mega Drive ... unfortunately, I
can't auto-detect the region from the ROM header. $1f0 is supposed to
contain a string like "JUE", but instead you get games like Maui Mallard
that put an "A" there, and other such nonsense. Sega was far more lax
than Nintendo with the ROM header validity. So for now at least, you
have to manually select your region every time you play a Mega Drive
game, thus you have "NTSC-J", "NTSC-U", and "PAL". The same goes for the
Master System for the same reason, but there's only "NTSC" and "PAL"
here. I'm not sure if games have a way to detect domestic vs
international consoles.
And for now ... the Famicom is the same as well, with no auto-detection.
I'd sincerely hope iNES has a header bit for the region, but I didn't
bother with updating icarus to support that yet.
The way to pass these parameters on the command-line is to prefix the
game path with "option:", so for example:
higan "PAL:/path/to/Sonic the Hedgehog (USA, Europe).md"
If you don't provide a prefix, it uses the default (NTSC-J, NTSC, or
Auto.) Obviously, it's not possible to pass parameters with
drag-and-drop, so you will always get the default option in said case.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan/profile/ => higan/systems/ [temporary; unless we can't think of
a better base folder name]
- god-damn-better-have fixed the input polling bug
- re-added command-line and drag-and-drop loading
- command-line loading can now load multiple folders at once (SGB+GB
game; Sufami Turbo+Slot A+Slot B; etc)
- if you load just the base cart, it'll present you with a dialog to
optionally load slotted cart(s)
- MSU1 now goes through nall/vfs instead of directly accessing the
filesystem
- Famicom Cartridge, PPU cores updated to newer programming style
- there's countless opportunity for BitField and .bits() in the PPU
... but I'm worried about breaking things
If anyone has a working MSU1 game and can test the changes out, that'd
be appreciated. I still don't have a test ROM on my dev box.
I wouldn't worry too much about extensively testing the Famicom PPU
changes just yet ... I'm still struggling with what to name the structs
inside the classes between all of my emulators, and the BitField/.bits()
changes will be much more important to test at a later date.
The only use case left for Emulator::Interface::path(uint id) is for
21fx emulation. This peripheral loads a DLL/SO via LoadLibrary/dlopen,
which do not have any official ways to open a file in RAM. I'm
very hesitant to use the portable trick of writing the memory to a
temporary file, loading it, and deleting the temporary file once done
... it's a real waste of disk activity. I might make something like
vfs::file::isVirtual->bool,path()->string to get around this. But even
once I do, the underlying LoadLibrary/dlopen call is still going to be
direct disk access.
Tim Allen