byuu says:
Changelog:
- gb/mbc6: mapper is now functional, but Net de Get has some text
corruption¹
- gb/mbc7: mapper is now functional²
- gb/cpu: HDMA syncs other components after each byte transfer now
- gb/ppu: LY,LX forced to zero when LCDC.d7 is lowered (eg disabled),
not when it's raised (eg enabled)
- gb/ppu: the LCD does not run at all when LCDC.d7 is clear³
- fixes graphical corruption between scene transitions in Legend
of Zelda - Oracle of Ages
- thanks to Cydrak, Shonumi, gekkio for their input on the cause
of this issue
- md/controller: renamed "Gamepad" to "Control Pad" per official
terminology
- md/controller: added "Fighting Pad" (6-button controller) emulation
[hex\_usr]
- processor/m68k: fixed TAS to set data.d7 when
EA.mode==DataRegisterDirect; fixes Asterix
- hiro/windows: removed carriage returns from mouse.cpp and
desktop.cpp
- ruby/audio/alsa: added device driver selection [SuperMikeMan]
- ruby/audio/ao: set format.matrix=nullptr to prevent a crash on some
systems [SuperMikeMan]
- ruby/video/cgl: rename term() to terminate() to fix a crash on macOS
[Sintendo]
¹: The observation that this mapper split $4000-7fff into two banks
came from MAME's implementation. But their implementation was quite
broken and incomplete, so I didn't actually use any of it. The
observation that this mapper split $a000-bfff into two banks came from
Tauwasser, and I did directly use that information, plus the knowledge
that $0400/$0800 are the RAM bank select registers.
The text corruption is due to a race condition with timing. The game is
transferring font letters via HDMA, but the game code ends up setting
the bank# with the font a bit too late after the HDMA has already
occurred. I'm not sure how to fix this ... as a whole, I assumed my Game
Boy timing was pretty good, but apparently it's not that good.
²: The entire design of this mapper comes from endrift's notes.
endrift gets full credit for higan being able to emulate this mapper.
Note that the accelerometer implementation is still not tested, and
probably won't work right until I tweak the sensitivity a lot.
³: So the fun part of this is ... it breaks the strict 60fps rate of
the Game Boy. This was always inevitable: certain timing conditions can
stretch frames, too. But this is pretty much an absolute deal breaker
for something like Vsync timing. This pretty much requires adaptive sync
to run well without audio stuttering during the transition.
There's currently one very important detail missing: when the LCD is
turned off, presumably the image on the screen fades to white. I do not
know how long this process takes, or how to really go about emulating
it. Right now as an incomplete patch, I'm simply leaving the last
displayed image on the screen until the LCD is turned on again. But I
will have to output white, as well as add code to break out of the
emulation loop periodically when the LCD is left off eg indefinitely, or
bad things would happen. I'll work something out and then implement.
Another detail is I'm not sure how long it takes for the LCD to start
rendering again once enabled. Right now, it's immediate. I've heard it's
as long as 1/60th of a second, but that really seems incredibly
excessive? I'd like to know at least a reasonably well-supported
estimate before I implement that.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulator/audio: added the ability to change the output frequency at
run-time without emulator reset
- tomoko: display video synchronize option again¹
- tomoko: Settings→Configuration expanded to Settings→{Video,
Audio, Input, Hotkey, Advanced} Settings²
- tomoko: fix default population of audio settings tab
- ruby: Audio::frequency is a double now (to match both
Emulator::Audio and ASIO)³
- tomoko: changing the audio device will repopulate the frequency and
latency lists
- tomoko: changing the audio frequency can now be done in real-time
- ruby/audio/asio: added missing device() information, so devices can
be changed now
- ruby/audio/openal: ported to new API; added device selection support
- ruby/audio/wasapi: ported to new API, but did not test yet (it's
assuredly still broken)⁴
¹: I'm uneasy about this ... but, I guess if people want to disable
audio and just have smooth scrolling video ... so be it. With
Screwtape's documentation, hopefully that'll help people understand that
video synchronization always breaks audio synchronization. I may change
this to a child menu that lets you pick between {no synchronization,
video synchronization, audio synchronization} as a radio selection.
²: given how much more useful the video and audio tabs are now, I
felt that four extra menu items were worth saving a click and going
right to the tab you want. This also matches the behavior of the Tools
menu displaying all tool options and taking you directly to each tab.
This is kind of a hard change to get used to ... but I think it's for
the better.
³: kind of stupid because I've never seen a hardware sound card where
floor(frequency) != frequency, but whatever. Yay consistency.
⁴: I'm going to move it to be event-driven, and try to support 24-bit
sample formats if possible. Who knows which cards that'll fix and which
cards that'll break. I may end up making multiple WASAPI drivers so
people can find one that actually works for them. We'll see.
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:
Changelog:
- ruby/video: cleaned up Direct3D9 driver and fixed catastrophic
memory leak
- ruby/video: added fullscreen exclusive mode support to the Direct3D9
driver¹
- ruby/video: minor cosmetic code cleanups to various drivers
- tomoko: added support to always allow input when in fullscreen
exclusive mode
- tomoko: fixed window to not remove resizability flag when exiting
fullscreen mode
¹: I am assuming that exclusive mode will try to capture the primary
monitor. I don't know what will happen in multi-monitor setups, however,
as I don't use such a setup here.
Also, I am using `D3DPRESENT_DISCARD` instead of `D3DPRESENT_FLIP`. I'm
not sure if this will prove better or worse, but I've heard it will
waste less memory, and having a BackBufferCount of 1 should still result
in page flipping anyway. The difference is supposedly just that you
can't rely on the back buffer being a valid copy of the previous frame
like you can with FLIP.
Lastly, if you want Vsync, you can edit the configuration file to enable
that, and then turn off audio sync.
Errata: "pause emulation when focus is lost" is not working with
exclusive mode. I need to add a check to never auto-pause when in
exclusive mode. Thanks to bun for catching that one.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall::lstring -> nall::string_vector
- added IntegerBitField<type, lo, hi> -- hopefully it works correctly...
- Multitap 1-4 -> Super Multitap 2-5
- fixed SFC PPU CGRAM read regression
- huge amounts of SFC PPU IO register cleanups -- .bits really is lovely
- re-added the read/write(VRAM,OAM,CGRAM) helpers for the SFC PPU
- but they're now optimized to the realities of the PPU (16-bit data
sizes / no address parameter / where appropriate)
- basically used to get the active-display overrides in a unified place;
but also reduces duplicate code in (read,write)IO
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS/WSC: re-added support for screen rotation (code is inside WS core)
- ruby: changed sample(uint16_t left, uint16_t right) to sample(int16_t
left, int16_t right);
- requires casting to uint prior to shifting in each driver, but
I felt it was misleading to use uint16_t just to avoid that
- ruby: WASAPI is now built in by default; has wareya's improvements,
and now supports latency adjust
- tomoko: audio settings panel has new "Exclusive Mode" checkbox for
WASAPI driver only
- note: although the setting *does* take effect in real-time, I'd
suggest restarting the emulator after changing it
- tomoko: audio latency can now be set to 0ms (which in reality means
"the minimum supported by the driver")
- all: increased cothread size from 512KiB to 2MiB to see if it fixes
bullshit AMD driver crashes
- this appears to cause a slight speed penalty due to cache locality
going down between threads, though
byuu says:
New update. Most of the work today went into eliminating hiro::Image
from all objects in all ports, replacing with nall::image. That took an
eternity.
Changelog:
- fixed crashing bug when loading games [thanks endrift!!]
- toggling "show status bar" option adjusts window geometry (not
supposed to recenter the window, though)
- button sizes improved; icon-only button icons no longer being cut off
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added preliminary WASAPI driver (it's really terrible, though. Patches
most welcome.)
- all of processor/ updated to auto fn() -> ret syntax
- all of gb/ updated to auto fn() -> ret syntax
If you want to test the WASAPI driver, then edit ui-tomoko/GNUmakefile,
and replace audio.xaudio2 with audio.wasapi Note that the two drivers
are incompatible and cannot co-exist (yet. We can probably make it work
in the future.)
All that's left for the auto fn() -> ret syntax is the NES core and the
balanced/performance SNES components. This is kind of a big deal because
this syntax change causes diffs between WIPs to go crazy. So the sooner
we get this done and out of the way, the better. It's also nice from
a consistency standpoint, of course.
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:
I fixed the hiro layout enable bug, so when you go to assign joypad
input, the window disables itself so your input doesn't mess with the
controls.
I added "reset" to the hotkeys, in case you feel like clearing all of
them at once.
I added device selection support and the ability to disable audio
synchronization (run > 60fps) to the ruby/OSS driver. This is exposed in
tomoko's configuration file.
I added checks to stringify so that assigning null char* strings to
nall::string won't cause crashes anymore (technically the crash was in
strlen(), which doesn't check for null strings, but whatever ... I'll do
the check myself.)
I hooked up BrowserDialog::folderSelect() to loading slotted media for
now. Tested it by loading a Game Boy game successfully through the Super
Game Boy. Definitely want to write a custom window for this though, that
looks more like the library dialog.
Remaining issues:
- finish slotted cart loader (SGB, BSX, ST)
- add DIP switch selection window (NSS) [I may end up punting this one
to v096]
- add more configuration panels (video, audio, timing)
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:
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.
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.
Tim Allen