byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan, icarus, genius: new manifest syntax (work in progress)
Pretty much only LoROM and HiROM SNES games will load right now, and RAM
will only work right if the save.ram file already exists to pull its
file size from (a temporary cheap hack was used.)
Basically, I'm just getting this out there for evaluation.
One minor errata is that I switched icarus to using “memory/battery” to
indicate battery-backed RAM, whereas genius still uses “memory/volatile”
to indicate non-battery-backed RAM.
I intend to make it “memory/battery” in genius, and have the field
auto-enable when RAM or RTC is selected for type (obviously allowing it
to be unchecked for volatile memory.)
I need to update all 64 production boards, and 25 of 29 generic boards,
to use the new slot syntax; and I also need to update every single core
in higan to use the new manifest game syntax. I want to build out a
generic manifest game parser that all emulation cores will use.
Once I finish this, I'll also need to write a database converter to
update all of my licensed game dumps to the new database syntax.
I also need to write up something for doc.byuu.org explaining the new
manifest game syntax. The manifest board syntax will still be “internal”
and subject to revisions, but once v107 is out, the gamepak manifest
format will be set in stone sans extensions.
byuu says:
This will easily be the biggest diff in the history of higan. And not in
a good way.
* target-higan and target-loki have been blown away completely
* nall and ruby massively updated
* phoenix replaced with hiro (pretty near a total rewrite)
* target-higan restarted using hiro (just a window for now)
* all emulation cores updated to compile again
* installation changed to not require root privileges (installs locally)
For the foreseeable future (maybe even permanently?), the new higan UI
will only build under Linux/BSD with GTK+ 2.20+. Probably the most
likely route for Windows/OS X will be to try and figure out how to build
hiro/GTK on those platforms, as awful as that would be. The other
alternative would be to produce new UIs for those platforms ... which
would actually be a good opportunity to make something much more user
friendly.
Being that I just started on this a few hours ago, that means that for
at least a few weeks, don't expect to be able to actually play any
games. Right now, you can pretty much just compile the binary and that's
it. It's quite possible that some nall changes didn't produce
compilation errors, but will produce runtime errors. So until the UI can
actually load games, we won't know if anything is broken. But we should
mostly be okay. It was mostly just trim<1> -> trim changes, moving to
Hash::SHA256 (much cleaner), and patching some reckless memory copy
functions enough to compile.
Progress isn't going to be like it was before: I'm now dividing my time
much thinner between studying and other hobbies.
My aim this time is not to produce a binary for everyone to play games
on. Rather, it's to keep the emulator alive. I want to be able to apply
critical patches again. And I would also like the base of the emulator
to live on, for use in other emulator frontends that utilize higan.
Tim Allen