On X11, hiro uses the xdg-screensaver helper tool to disable the screensaver,
which detects the screensaver that is running and uses the appropriate
mechanism to communicate with it. The tool's API expects an X11 window ID,
but at least some screensavers ignore it, so it can be set up however. The
GNOME backend *does* care about the window ID, but its expectations are not
documented anywhere, so byuu spent a frustrating few days trying things
at random to get it working, and failing.
It turns out, GNOME does *not* require the window to be mapped, but it *does*
require the window to have a name. Using XStoreName() to name the window fixes
screensaver suspension for me under GNOME 3.38.
Note: while XStoreName is technically deprecated, it's not going to go away
while X11 is still around, and the reason it's deprecated is because it doesn't
include character encoding data. We don't care — no user should ever see the
window name, and it's plain ASCII so it should be fine.
Fixes#102.
* improved appended firmware detection [devinacker]
* added dynamic rate control support to ALSA and PulseAudio drivers [RedDwarf]
* added option to use native file dialogs
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:
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:
- updated to newest hiro API
- SFC performance profile builds once again
- hiro: Qt port completed
Errata 1: the hiro/Qt target won't run tomoko just yet. Starts by
crashing inside InputSettings because hiro/Qt isn't forcefully selecting
the first item added to a ComboButton just yet. Even with a monkey patch
to get around that, the UI is incredibly unstable. Lots of geometry
calculation bugs, and a crash when you try and access certain folders in
the browser dialog. Lots of work left to be done there, sadly.
Errata 2: the hiro/Windows port has black backgrounds on all ListView
items. It's because I need to test for unassigned colors and grab the
default Windows brush colors in those cases.
Note: alternating row colors on multi-column ListView widgets is gone
now. Not a bug. May add it back later, but I'm not sure. It doesn't
interact nicely with per-cell background colors.
Things left to do:
First, I have to fix the Windows and Qt target bugs.
Next, I need to go through and revise the hiro API even more (nothing
too major.)
Next, I need to update icarus to use the new hiro API, and add support
for the SFC games database.
Next, I have to rewrite my TSV->BML cheat code tool.
Next, I need to post a final WIP of higan+icarus publicly and wait a few
days.
Next, I need to fix any bugs reported from the final WIP that I can.
Finally, I should be able to release v095.
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