byuu says:
Don't let the point release fool you, there are many significant changes in this
release. I will be keeping bsnes releases using a point system until the new
higan release is ready.
Changelog:
- GUI: added high DPI support
- GUI: fixed the state manager image preview
- Windows: added a new waveOut driver with support for dynamic rate control
- Windows: corrected the XAudio 2.1 dynamic rate control support [BearOso]
- Windows: corrected the Direct3D 9.0 fullscreen exclusive window centering
- Windows: fixed XInput controller support on Windows 10
- SFC: added high-level emulation for the DSP1, DSP2, DSP4, ST010, and Cx4
coprocessors
- SFC: fixed a slight rendering glitch in the intro to Megalomania
If the coprocessor firmware is missing, bsnes will fallback on HLE where it is
supported, which is everything other than SD Gundam GX and the two Hayazashi
Nidan Morita Shougi games.
The Windows dynamic rate control works best with Direct3D in fullscreen
exclusive mode. I recommend the waveOut driver over the XAudio 2.1 driver, as it
is not possible to target a single XAudio2 version on all Windows OS releases.
The waveOut driver should work everywhere out of the box.
Note that with DRC, the synchronization source is your monitor, so you will
want to be running at 60hz (NTSC) or 50hz (PAL). If you have an adaptive sync
monitor, you should instead use the WASAPI (exclusive) or ASIO audio driver.
byuu says:
The biggest change was improving WonderSwan emulation. With help from
trap15, I tracked down a bug where I was checking the wrong bit for
reverse DMA transfers. Then I also emulated VTOTAL to support variable
refresh rate. Then I improved HyperVoice emulation which should be
unsigned samples in three of four modes. That got Fire Lancer running
great. I also rewrote the disassembler. The old one disassembled many
instructions completely wrong, and deviated too much from any known x86
syntax. I also emulated some of the quirks of the V30 (two-byte POP into
registers fails, SALC is just XLAT mirrored, etc) which probably don't
matter unless someone tries to run code to verify it's a NEC CPU and not
an Intel CPU, but hey, why not?
I also put more work into the MSX skeleton, but it's still just a
skeleton with no real emulation yet.
byuu says:
The Windows port can now run the emulation while navigating menus,
moving windows, and resizing windows. The main window also doesn't try
so hard to constantly clear itself. This may leave a bit of unwelcome
residue behind in some video drivers during resize, but under most
drivers, it lets you resize without a huge amount of flickering.
On all platforms, I now also run the emulation during MessageWindow
modal events, where I didn't before.
I'm thinking we should probably mute the audio during modal periods,
since it can generate a good deal of distortion.
The tooltip timeout was increased to ten seconds.
On Windows, the enter key can now activate buttons, so you can more
quickly dismiss MessageDialog windows. This part may not actually work
... I'm in the middle of trying to get messages out of the global
`Application_windowProc` hook and into the individual `Widget_windowProc`
hooks, so I need to do some testing.
I fixed a bug where changing the input driver wouldn't immediately
reload the input/hotkey settings lists properly.
I also went from disabling the driver "Change" button when the currently
active driver is selected in the list, to instead setting it to say
"Reload", and I also added a tool tip to the input driver reload button,
advising that if you're using DirectInput or SDL, you can hit "Reload"
to rescan for hotplugged gamepads without needing to restart the
emulator. XInput and udev have auto hotswap support. If we can ever get
that into DirectInput and SDL, then I'll remove the tooltip. But
regardless, the reload functionality is nice to have for all drivers.
I'm not sure what should happen when a user changes their driver
selection while a game is loaded, gets the warning dialog, chooses not
to change it, and then closes the emulator. Currently, it will make the
change happen the next time you start the emulator. This feels a bit
unexpected, but when you change the selection without a game loaded, it
takes immediate effect. So I'm not really sure what's best here.
byuu says:
I've added tool tips to hiro for Windows, GTK, and Qt. I'm unsure how to
add them for Cocoa. I wasted am embarrassing ~14 hours implementing tool
tips from scratch on Windows, because the `TOOLTIPS_CLASS` widget just
absolutely refused to show up, no matter what I tried. As such, they're
not quite 100% native, but I would really appreciate any patch
submissions to help improve my implementation.
I added tool tips to all of the confusing settings in bsnes. And of
course, for those of you who don't like them, there's a configuration
file setting to turn them off globally.
I also improved Mega Drive handling of the Game Genie a bit, and
restructured the way the Settings class works in bsnes.
Starting now, I'm feature-freezing bsnes and higan. From this point
forward:
- polishing up and fixing bugs caused by the ruby/hiro changes
- adding DRC to XAudio2, and maybe exclusive mode to WGL
- correcting FEoEZ (English) to load and work again out of the box
Once that's done, a final beta of bsnes will go out, I'll fix any
reported bugs that I'm able to, and then v107 should be ready. This time
with higan being functional, but marked as v107 beta. v108 will restore
higan to production status again, alongside bsnes.
byuu says:
Everything *should* be working again, but of course that won't
actually be the case. Here's where things stand:
- bsnes, higan, icarus, and genius compile and run fine on FreeBSD
with GTK
- ruby video and audio drivers are untested on Windows, macOS, and
Linux
- hiro is untested on macOS
- bsnes' status bar is not showing up properly with hiro/qt
- bsnes and higan's about screen is not showing up properly with
hiro/qt (1x1 window size)
- bsnes on Windows crashes often when saving states, and I'm not sure
why ... it happens inside Encode::RLE
- bsnes on Windows crashes with ruby.input.windows (unsure why)
- bsnes on Windows fails to show the verified emblem on the status bar
properly
- hiro on Windows flickers when changing tabs
To build the Windows bsnes and higan ports, use
ruby="video.gdi audio.directsound"
Compilation error logs for Linux will help me fix the inevitable list of
typos there. I can fix the typos on other platforms, I just haven't
gotten to it yet.
byuu says:
I failed to complete a WIP, have five of eight cores updated with some
major changes to Emulator::Interface. I'll just post a quick temporary
WIP in the off chance someone wants to look over the new interface and
comment on it.
Also implemented screen saver suppression into hiro/GTK.
I should also add ... a plan of mine is to develop target-bsnes into a
more generic user interface, with the general idea being that
target-higan is for multiple Emulator::Interface cores at the same time,
and target-bsnes is for just one Emulator::Interface core.
The idea being that if one were to compile target-bsnes with the GBA
core, it'd become bgba, for instance.
I don't plan on releasing single-core emulators like this, but ... I don't see any downsides to being more flexible.
byuu says:
This is probably the largest code-change diff I've done in years.
I spent four days working 10-16 hours a day reworking layouts in hiro
completely.
The result is we now have TableLayout, which will allow for better
horizontal+vertical combined alignment.
Windows, GTK2, and now GTK3 are fully supported.
Windows is getting the initial window geometry wrong by a bit.
GTK2 and GTK3 work perfectly. I basically abandoned trying to detect
resize signals, and instead keep a list of all hiro windows that are
allocated, and every time the main loop runs, it will query all of them
to see if they've been resized. I'm disgusted that I have to do this,
but after fighting with GTK for years, I'm about sick of it. GTK was
doing this crazy thing where it would trigger another size-allocate
inside of a previous size-allocate, and so my layouts would be halfway
through resizing all the widgets, and then the size-allocate would kick
off another one. That would end up leaving the rest of the first layout
loop with bad widget sizes. And if I detected a second re-entry and
blocked it, then the entire window would end up with the older geometry.
I started trying to build a message queue system to allow the second
layout resize to occur after the first one completed, but this was just
too much madness, so I went with the simpler solution.
Qt4 has some geometry problems, and doesn't show tab frame layouts
properly yet.
Qt5 causes an ICE error and tanks my entire Xorg display server, so ...
something is seriously wrong there, and it's not hiro's fault. Creating
a dummy Qt5 application without even using hiro, just int main() {
TestObject object; } with object performing a dynamic\_cast to a derived
type segfaults. Memory is getting corrupted where GCC allocates the
vtables for classes, just by linking in Qt. Could be somehow related to
the -fPIC requirement that only Qt5 has ... could just be that FreeBSD
10.1 has a buggy implementation of Qt5. I don't know. It's beyond my
ability to debug, so this one's going to stay broken.
The Cocoa port is busted. I'll fix it up to compile again, but that's
about all I'm going to do.
Many optimizations mean bsnes and higan open faster. GTK2 and GTK3 both
resize windows very quickly now.
higan crashes when you load a game, so that's not good. bsnes works
though.
bsnes also has the start of a localization engine now. Still a long way
to go.
The makefiles received a rather substantial restructuring. Including the
ruby and hiro makefiles will add the necessary compilation rules for
you, which also means that moc will run for the qt4 and qt5 targets, and
windres will run for the Windows targets.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- hiro: added Qt5 support
- hiro: added GTK3 support (currently runs very poorly)
- bsnes: number of recent games and quick state slots can be changed
programmatically now
- I may expose this as a configuration file setting, but probably
not within the GUI
- nall: use -Wno-everything when compiling with Clang
- sorry, Clang's meaningless warning messages are just endless ...
byuu says:
Changelog:
- higan: target-tomoko has been renamed to target-higan
- Super Famicom: event has been renamed to
processor(architecture=uPD78214)
- Super Famicom: SNES-EVENT supported once more; under board IDs
EVENT-CC92 and EVENT-PF94
- Super Famicom: SNES-EVENT preliminarily set up to use DIP switch
settings ala the Nintendo Super System (incomplete)
- Super Famicom: MCC PSRAM moved inside the MCU, as it is remappable
- Super Famicom: MCC emulation rewritten from scratch; it is now
vastly more accurate than before
- Super Famicom: added BSC-1A5B9P-01 board definition to database;
corrected BS-MCC-RAM board definition
- Super Famicom: moved SHVC-LN3B-01 RAM outside of
processor(identifier=SDD1)
- higan: when selecting a default game to load for a new system entry,
it will change the system option to match the media type
- higan: the load text box on the system entry window is now editable;
can be used to erase entries
- icarus: fixed bug in Famicom importing
- icarus: importing unappended SNES coprocessor firmware will now
rename the firmware properly
- hiro/GTK,Qt: WM_CLASS is now set correctly in `argv[0]`, so
applications should show “higan”, “icarus” instead of “hiro” now
Note: if you wish to run the BS-X town cartridge, the database currently
lists the download RAM as type “PSRAM”. This needs to be changed to
“RAM” in order to load properly. Otherwise, the emulator will bomb
out on the load window, because BSC-1A5B9P-01 expects PSRAM to always be
present, but it won't find it with the wrong memory type. I'll correct
this in the database in a later release. For now, you can copy the game
portion of the manifest to a new manifest.bml file and drop it into the
gamepak folder until I fix the database.
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.
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.
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:
Main reason for this WIP was because of all the added lines to hiro for
selective component disabling. May as well get all the diff-noise apart
from code changes.
It also merges something I've been talking to Cydrak about ... making
nall::string::(integer,decimal) do built-in binary,octal,hex decoding
instead of just failing on those. This will have fun little side effects
all over the place, like being able to view a topic on my forum via
"forum.byuu.org/topic/0b10010110", heh.
There are two small changes to higan itself, though. First up, I fixed
the resampler ratio when loading non-SNES games. Tested and I can play
Game Boy games fine now. Second, I hooked up menu option hiding for
reset and controller selection. Right now, this works like higan v094,
but I'm thinking I might want to show the "Device -> Controller" even if
that's all that's there. It kind of jives nicer with the input settings
window to see the labels there, I think. And if we ever do add more
stuff, it'll be nice that people already always expect that menu there.
Remaining issues:
* add slotted cart loader (SGB, BSX, ST)
* add DIP switch selection window (NSS)
* add timing configuration (video/audio sync)
byuu says:
This version polishes up the input dialogue (reset, erase, disable
button when item not focused, split device ID from mapping name), adds
color emulation toggle, and add dummy menu items for remaining features
(to be filled in later.)
Also, it now compiles cleanly on Windows with GTK.
I didn't test with TDM-GCC-32, because for god knows what reason, the
32-bit version ships with headers from Windows 95 OSR2 only. So I built
with TDM-GCC-64 with arch=x86.
And uh, apparently, moving or resizing a window causes a Visual C++
runtime exception in the GTK+ DLLs. This doesn't happen with trance or
renshuu built with TDM-GCC-32. So, yeah, like I said, don't use -m32.
byuu says:
I've hooked up the input subsystem, and the input manager to assign
hotkeys.
So far I only have digital buttons working (keyboard only), and I'm not
planning on supporting input groups again (mapping multiple physical
buttons to one emulated button), but it's progress. As with the rest of
tomoko, the code's a lot more compact. The nice thing about redoing code
so many times is that each time you get a little bit better at it.
The input configuration is saved to ~/.config/tomoko/settings.bml (just
realized that I'm an idiot and need to rename it to input.bml)
Also hooked up game saves and cartridge unloading. Active controller
changing isn't hooked up yet, and I'll probably do it differently.
Oh, and I declared the ruby lines for other platforms.
Still need to add Cydrak's Windows compilation fixes. I am nothing if
not lazy :P
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