Commit Graph

5 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tim Allen f5e5bf1772 Update to v100r16 release.
byuu says:

(Windows users may need to include <sys/time.h> at the top of
nall/chrono.hpp, not sure.)

Unchangelog:
- forgot to add the Scheduler clock=0 fix because I have the memory of
  a goldfish

Changelog:
- new icarus database with nine additional games
- hiro(GTK,Qt) won't constantly write its settings.bml file to disk
  anymore
- added latency simulator for fun (settings.bml => Input/Latency in
  milliseconds)

So the last one ... I wanted to test out nall::chrono, and I was also
thinking that by polling every emulated frame, it's pretty wasteful when
you are using Fast Forward and hitting 200+fps. As I've said before,
calls to ruby::input::poll are not cheap.

So to get around this, I added a limiter so that if you called the
hardware poll function within N milliseconds, it'll return without
doing any actual work. And indeed, that increases my framerate of Zelda
3 uncapped from 133fps to 142fps. Yay. But it's not a "real" speedup,
as it only helps you when you exceed 100% speed (theoretically, you'd
need to crack 300% speed since the game itself will poll at 16ms at 100%
speed, but yet it sped up Zelda 3, so who am I to complain?)

I threw the latency value into the settings file. It should be 16,
but I set it to 5 since that was the lowest before it started negatively
impacting uncapped speeds. You're wasting your time and CPU cycles setting
it lower than 5, but if people like placebo effects it might work. Maybe
I should let it be a signed integer so people can set it to -16 and think
it's actually faster :P (I'm only joking. I took out the 96000hz audio
placebo effect as well. Not really into psychological tricks anymore.)

But yeah seriously, I didn't do this to start this discussion again for
the billionth time. Please don't go there. And please don't tell me this
WIP has higher/lower latency than before. I don't want to hear it.

The only reason I bring it up is for the fun part that is worth
discussing: put up or shut up time on how sensitive you are to
latency! You can set the value above 5 to see how games feel.

I personally can't really tell a difference until about 50. And I can't
be 100% confident it's worse until about 75. But ... when I set it to
150, games become "extra difficult" ... the higher it goes, the worse
it gets :D

For this WIP, I've left no upper limit cap. I'll probably set a cap of
something like 500ms or 1000ms for the official release. Need to balance
user error/trolling with enjoyability. I'll think about it.

[...]

Now, what I worry about is stupid people seeing it and thinking it's an
"added latency" setting, as if anyone would intentionally make things
worse by default. This is a limiter. So if 5ms have passed since the
game last polled, and that will be the case 99.9% of the time in games,
the next poll will happen just in time, immediately when the game polls
the inputs. Thus, a value below 1/<framerate>ms is not only pointless,
if you go too low it will ruin your fast forward max speeds.

I did say I didn't want to resort to placebo tricks, but I also don't
want to spark up public discussion on this again either. So it might
be best to default Input/Latency to 0ms, and internally have a max(5,
latency) wrapper around the value.
2016-08-03 22:32:40 +10:00
Tim Allen 13ad9644a2 Update to v099r16 release (public beta).
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.
2016-07-04 21:53:24 +10:00
Tim Allen 82293c95ae Update to v099r14 release.
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.
2016-07-01 21:50:32 +10:00
Tim Allen f48b332c83 Update to v099r08 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:
- nall/vfs work 100% completed; even SGB games load now
- emulation cores now call load() for the base cartridges as well
- updated port/device handling; portmask is gone; device ID bug should
  be resolved now
- SNES controller port 1 multitap option was removed
- added support for 128KiB SNES PPU VRAM (for now, edit sfc/ppu/ppu.hpp
  VRAM::size=0x10000; to enable)

Overall, nall/vfs was a huge success!! We've substantially reduced
the amount of boilerplate code everywhere, while still allowing (even
easier than before) support for RAM-based game loading/saving. All of
nall/stream is dead and buried.

I am considering removing Emulator::Interface::Medium::id and/or
bootable flag. Or at least, doing something different with it. The
values for the non-bootable GB/BS/ST entries duplicate the ID that is
supposed to be unique. They are for GB/GBC and WS/WSC. Maybe I'll use
this as the hardware revision selection ID, and then gut non-bootable
options. There's really no reason for that to be there. I think at one
point I was using it to generate library tabs for non-bootable systems,
but we don't do that anymore anyway.

Emulator::Interface::load() may not need the required flag anymore ... it
doesn't really do anything right now anyway.

I have a few reasons for having the cores load the base cartridge. Most
importantly, it is going to enable a special mode for the WonderSwan /
WonderSwan Color in the future. If we ever get the IPLROMs dumped ... it's
possible to boot these systems with no games inserted to set user profile
information and such. There are also other systems that may accept being
booted without a cartridge. To reach this state, you would load a game and
then cancel the load dialog. Right now, this results in games not loading.

The second reason is this prevents nasty crashes when loading fails. So
if you're missing a required manifest, the emulator won't die a violent
death anymore. It's able to back out at any point.

The third reason is consistency: loading the base cartridge works the
same as the slot cartridges.

The fourth reason is Emulator::Interface::open(uint pathID)
values. Before, the GB, SB, GBC modes were IDs 1,2,3 respectively. This
complicated things because you had to pass the correct ID. But now
instead, Emulator::Interface::load() returns maybe<uint> that is nothing
when no game is selected, and a pathID for a valid game. And now open()
can take this ID to access this game's folder contents.

The downside, which is temporary, is that command-line loading is
currently broken. But I do intend on restoring it. In fact, I want to do
better than before and allow multi-cart booting from the command-line by
specifying the base cartridge and then slot cartridges. The idea should
be pretty simple: keep a queue of pending filenames that we fill from
the command-line and/or drag-and-drop operations on the main window,
and then empty out the queue or prompt for load dialogs from the UI
when booting a system. This also might be a bit more unorthodox compared
to the traditional emulator design of "loadGame(filename)", but ... oh
well. It's easy enough still.

The port/device changes are fun. We simplified things quite a bit. The
portmask stuff is gone entirely. While ports and devices keep IDs,
this is really just sugar-coating so UIs can use for(auto& port :
emulator->ports) and access port.id; rather than having to use for(auto
n : range(emulator->ports)) { auto& port = emulator->ports[n]; ... };
but they should otherwise generally be identical to the order they appear
in their respective ranges. Still, don't rely on that.

Input::id is gone. There was no point since we also got rid of the nasty
Input::order vector. Since I was in here, I went ahead and caved on the
pedantics and renamed Input::guid to Input::userData.

I removed the SNES controller port 1 multitap option. Basically, the only
game that uses this is N-warp Daisakusen and, no offense to d4s, it's
not really a good game anyway. It's just a quick demo to show 8-players
on the SNES. But in the UI, all it does is confuse people into wasting
time mapping a controller they're never going to use, and they're going
to wonder which port to use. If more compelling use cases for 8-players
comes about, we can reconsider this. I left all the code to support this
in place, so all you have to do is uncomment one line to enable it again.

We now have dsnes emulation! :D
If you change PPU::VRAM::size to 0x10000 (words), then you should now
have 128KiB of VRAM. Even better, it serializes the used-VRAM size,
so your save states shouldn't crash on you if you swap between the two
(though if you try this, you're nuts.)

Note that this option does break commercial software. Yoshi's Island in
particular. This game is setting A15 on some PPU register writes, but
not on others. The end result of this is things break horribly in-game.

Also, this option is causing a very tiny speed hit for obvious reasons
with the variable masking value (I'm even using size-1 for now.) Given
how niche this is, I may just leave it a compile-time constant to avoid
the overhead cost. Otherwise, if we keep the option, then it'll go into
Super Famicom.sys/manifest.bml ... I'll flesh that out in the near-future.

----

Finally, some fun for my OCD ... my monitor suddenly cut out on me
in the middle of working on this WIP, about six hours in of non-stop
work. Had to hit a bunch of ctrl+alt+fN commands (among other things)
and trying to log in headless on another TTY to do issue commands,
trying to recover the display. Finally power cycled the monitor and it
came back up. So all my typing ended up going to who knows where.

Usually this sort of thing terrifies me enough that I scrap a WIP and
start over to ensure I didn't screw anything up during the crashed screen
when hitting keys randomly.

Obviously, everything compiles and appears to work fine. And I know
it's extremely paranoid, but OCD isn't logical, so ... I'm going
to go over every line of the 100KiB r07->r08 diff looking for any
corruption/errors/whatever.

----

Review finished.

r08 diff review notes:
- fc/controller/gamepad/gamepad.cpp:
  use uint device = ID::Device::Gamepad; not id = ...;
- gb/cartridge/cartridge.hpp:
  remove redundant uint _pathID; (in Information::pathID already)
- gb/cartridge/cartridge.hpp:
  pull sha256 inside Information
- sfc/cartridge/load/cpp:
  add " - Slot (A,B)" to interface->load("Sufami Turbo"); to be more
  descriptive
- sfc/controller/gamepad/gamepad.cpp:
  use uint device = ID::Device::Gamepad; not id = ...;
- sfc/interface/interface.cpp:
  remove n variable from the Multitap device input generation loop
  (now unused)
- sfc/interface/interface.hpp:
  put struct Port above struct Device like the other classes
- ui-tomoko:
  cheats.bml is reading from/writing to mediumPaths(0) [system folder
  instead of game folder]
- ui-tomoko:
  instead of mediumPaths(1) - call emulator->metadataPathID() or something
  like that
2016-06-24 22:16:53 +10:00
Tim Allen 47d4bd4d81 Update to v096r01 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

- restructured the project and removed a whole bunch of old/dead
  directives from higan/GNUmakefile
- huge amounts of work on hiro/cocoa (compiles but ~70% of the
  functionality is commented out)
- fixed a masking error in my ARM CPU disassembler [Lioncash]
- SFC: decided to change board cic=(411,413) back to board
  region=(ntsc,pal) ... the former was too obtuse

If you rename Boolean (it's a problem with an include from ruby, not
from hiro) and disable all the ruby drivers, you can compile an
OS X binary, but obviously it's not going to do anything.

It's a boring WIP, I just wanted to push out the project structure
change now at the start of this WIP cycle.
2015-12-30 17:54:59 +11:00