mirror of https://github.com/bsnes-emu/bsnes.git
15 Commits
Author | SHA1 | Message | Date |
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Tim Allen | 8af3e4a6e2 |
Update to v102r22 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - higan: Emulator::Interface::videoSize() renamed to videoResolution() - higan: Emulator::Interface::rtcsync() renamed to rtcSynchronize() - higan: added video display rotation support to Video - GBA: substantially improved audio mixing - fixed bug with FIFO 50%/100% volume setting - now properly using SOUNDBIAS amplitude to control output frequencies - reduced quantization noise - corrected relative volumes between PSG and FIFO channels - both PSG and FIFO values cached based on amplitude; resulting in cleaner PCM samples - treating PSG volume=3 as 200% volume instead of 0% volume now (unverified: to match mGBA) - GBA: properly initialize ALL CPU state; including the vital prefetch.wait=1 (fixes Classic NES series games) - GBA: added video rotation with automatic key translation support - PCE: reduced output resolution scalar from 285x242 to 285x240 - the extra two scanlines won't be visible on most TVs; and they make all other cores look worse - this is because all other cores output at 240p or less; so they were all receiving black bars in windowed mode - tomoko: added "Rotate Display" hotkey setting - tomoko: changed hotkey multi-key logic to OR instead of AND - left support for flipping it back inside the core; for those so inclined; by uncommenting one line in input.hpp - tomoko: when choosing Settings→Configuration, it will automatically select the currently loaded system - for instance, if you're playing a Game Gear game, it'll take you to the Game Gear input settings - if no games are loaded, it will take you to the hotkeys panel instead - WS(C): merged "Hardware-Vertical", "Hardware-Horizontal" controls into combined "Hardware" - WS(C): converted rotation support from being inside the core to using Emulator::Video - this lets WS(C) video content scale larger now that it's not bounded by a 224x224 square box - WS(C): added automatic key rotation support - WS(C): removed emulator "Rotate" key (use the general hotkey instead; I recommend F8 for this) - nall: added serializer support for nall::Boolean (boolean) types - although I will probably prefer the usage of uint1 in most cases |
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Tim Allen | 04072b278b |
Update to v102r16 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - Emulator::Stream now allows adding low-pass and high-pass filters dynamically - also accepts a pass# count; each pass is a second-order biquad butterworth IIR filter - Emulator::Stream no longer automatically filters out >20KHz frequencies for all streams - FC: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter - GB: removed simple 'magic constant' high-pass filter of unknown cutoff frequency (missed this one in the last WIP) - GB,SGB,GBC: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter - MS,GG,MD/PSG: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter - MD: added save state support (but it's completely broken for now; sorry) - MD/YM2612: fixed Voice#3 per-operator pitch support (fixes sound effects in Streets of Rage, etc) - PCE: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter - WS,WSC: added 20Hz high-pass filter; 20KHz low-pass filter So, the point of the low-pass filters is to remove frequencies above human hearing. If we don't do this, then resampling will introduce aliasing that results in sounds that are audible to the human ear. Which basically an annoying buzzing sound. You'll definitely hear the improvement from these in games like Mega Man 2 on the NES. Of course, these already existed before, so this WIP won't sound better than previous WIPs. The high-pass filters are a little more complicated. Their main role is to remove DC bias and help to center the audio stream. I don't understand how they do this at all, but ... that's what everyone who knows what they're talking about says, thus ... so be it. I have set all of the high-pass filters to 20Hz, which is below the limit of human hearing. Now this is where it gets really interesting ... technically, some of these systems actually cut off a lot of range. For instance, the GBA should technically use an 800Hz high-pass filter when output is done through the system's speakers. But of course, if you plug in headphones, you can hear the lower frequencies. Now 800Hz ... you definitely can hear. At that level, nearly all of the bass is stripped out and the audio is very tinny. Just like the real system. But for now, I don't want to emulate the audio being crushed that badly. I'm sticking with 20Hz everywhere since it won't negatively affect audio quality. In fact, you should not be able to hear any difference between this WIP and the previous WIP. But theoretically, DC bias should mostly be removed as a result of these new filters. It may be that we need to raise the values on some cores in the future, but I don't want to do that until we know for certain that we have to. What I can say is that compared to even older WIPs than r15 ... the removal of the simple one-pole low-pass and high-pass filters with the newer three-pass, second-order filters should result in much better attenuation (less distortion of audible frequencies.) Probably not enough to be noticeable in a blind test, though. |
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Tim Allen | 0bf2c9d4e1 |
Update to v102r13 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - removed Emulator::Interface::videoFrequency(), audioFrequency()¹ - (MS,GG,MD)/PSG: removed inversion on noise channel LFSR update [mic_] - MD/PSG: lowered volume to match YM2612 volume - MD/YM2612: added Cydrak's emulation of FM channels and LFO² ¹: These were no longer used by the UI. The video frequency is adaptive on many systems. And the audio frequency is meaningless due to Emulator::Audio always outputting a consistent frequency specified by the UI. Plus, take the Genesis where there's two sound chips running at different frequencies. So, these had to go. ²: Due to some lurking bugs, the audio is completely broken unfortunately. Will need to be debugged :( First pass looking for any typos didn't yield any obvious results. |
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Tim Allen | 68f04c3bb8 |
Update to v102r10 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - removed Emulator::Interface::Capabilities¹ - MS: improved the PSG emulation a bit - MS: added cheat code support - MS: added save state support² - MD: emulated the PSG³ ¹: there's really no point to it anymore. I intend to add cheat codes to the GBA core, as well as both cheat codes and save states to the Mega Drive core. I no longer intend to emulate any new systems, so these values will always be true. Further, the GUI doesn't respond to these values to disable those features anymore ever since the hiro rewrite, so they're double useless. ²: right now, the Z80 core is using a pointer for HL-\>(IX,IY) overrides. But I can't reliably serialize pointers, so I need to convert the Z80 core to use an integer here. The save states still appear to work fine, but there's the potential for an instruction to execute incorrectly if you're incredibly unlucky, so this needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Further, I still need a way to serialize array<T, Size> objects, and I should also add nall::Boolean serialization support. ³: I don't have a system in place to share identical sound chips. But this chip is so incredibly simple that it's not really much trouble to duplicate it. Further, I can strip out the stereo sound support code from the Game Gear portion, so it's even tinier. Note that the Mega Drive only just barely uses the PSG. Not at all in Altered Beast, and only for a tiny part of the BGM music on Sonic 1, plus his jump sound effect. |
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Tim Allen | fa6cbac251 |
Update to v102r06 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - added higan/emulator/platform.hpp (moved out Emulator::Platform from emulator/interface.hpp) - moved gmake build paramter to nall/GNUmakefile; both higan and icarus use it now - added build=profile mode - MD: added the region select I/O register - MD: started to add region selection support internally (still no external select or PAL support) - PCE: added cycle stealing when reading/writing to the VDC or VCE; and when using ST# instructions - PCE: cleaned up PSG to match the behavior of Mednafen (doesn't improve sound at all ;_;) - note: need to remove loadWaveSample, loadWavePeriod - HuC6280: ADC/SBC decimal mode consumes an extra cycle; does not set V flag - HuC6280: block transfer instructions were taking one cycle too many - icarus: added code to strip out PC Engine ROM headers - hiro: added options support to BrowserDialog The last one sure ended in failure. The plan was to put a region dropdown directly onto hiro::BrowserDialog, and I had all the code for it working. But I forgot one important detail: the system loads cartridges AFTER powering on, so even though I could technically change the system region post-boot, I'd rather not do so. So that means we have to know what region we want before we even select a game. Shit. |
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Tim Allen | ee7662a8be |
Update to v102r04 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - Super Game Boy support is functional once again - new GameBoy::SuperGameBoyInterface class - system.(dmg,cgb,sgb) is now Model::(Super)GameBoy(Color) ala the PC Engine - merged WonderSwanInterface, WonderSwanColorInterface shared functions to WonderSwan::Interface - merged GameBoyInterface, GameBoyColorInterface shared functions to GameBoy::Interface - Interface::unload() now calls Interface::save() for Master System, Game Gear, Mega Drive, PC Engine, SuperGrafx - PCE: emulated PCE-CD backup RAM; stored per-game as save.ram (2KiB file) - this means you can now save your progress in games like Neutopia - the PCE-CD I/O registers like BRAM write protect are not emulated yet - PCE: IRQ sources now hold the IRQ line state, instead of the CPU holding it - this fixes most SuperGrafx games, which were fighting over the VDC IRQ line previously - PCE: CPU I/O $14xx should return the pending IRQ bits even if IRQs are disabled - PCE: VCE and the VDCs now synchronize to each other; fixes pixel widths in all games - PCE: greatly increased the accuracy of the VPC priority selection code (windows may be buggy still) - HuC6280: PLA, PLX, PLY should set Z, N flags; fixes many game bugs [Jonas Quinn] The big thing I wanted to do was enslave the VDC(s) to the VCE. But unfortunately, I forgot about the asynchronous DMA channels that each VDC supports, so this isn't going to be possible I'm afraid. In the most demanding case, Daimakaimura in-game, we're looking at 85fps on my Xeon E3 1276v3. So ... not great, and we don't even have sound connected yet. We are going to have to profile and optimize this code once sound emulation and save states are in. Basically, think of it like this: the VCE, VDC0, and VDC1 all have the same overhead, scheduling wise (which is the bulk of the performance loss) as the dot-renderer for the SNES core. So it's like there's three bsnes-accuracy PPU threads running just for video. ----- Oh, just a fair warning ... the hooks for the SGB are a work in progress. If anyone is working on higan or a fork and want to do something similar to it, don't use it as a template, at least not yet. Right now, higan looks like this: - Emulator::Video handles the platform→videoRefresh calls - Emulator::Audio handles the platform→audioSample calls - each core hard-codes the platform→inputPoll, inputRumble calls - each core hard-codes calls to path, open, load to process files - dipSettings and notify are specialty hacks, neither are even hooked up right now to anything With the SGB, it's an emulation core inside an emulation core, so ideally you want to hook all of those functions. Emulator::Video and Emulator::Audio aren't really abstractions over that, as the GB core calls them and we have to special case not calling them in SGB mode. The path, open, load can be implemented without hooks, thanks to the UI only using one instance of Emulator::Platform for all cores. All we have to do is override the folder path ID for the "Game Boy.sys" folder, so that it picks "Super Game Boy.sfc/" and loads its boot ROM instead. That's just a simple argument to GameBoy::System::load() and we're done. dipSettings, notify and inputRumble don't matter. But we do also have to hook inputPoll as well. The nice idea would be for SuperFamicom::ICD2 to inherit from Emulator::Platform and provide the desired functions that we need to overload. After that, we'd just need the GB core to keep an abstraction over the global Emulator::platform\* handle, to select between the UI version and the SFC::ICD2 version. However ... that doesn't work because of Emulator::Video and Emulator::Audio. They would also have to gain an abstraction over Emulator::platform\*, and even worse ... you'd have to constantly swap between the two so that the SFC core uses the UI, and the GB core uses the ICD2. And so, for right now, I'm checking Model::SuperGameBoy() -> bool everywhere, and choosing between the UI and ICD2 targets that way. And as such, the ICD2 doesn't really need Emulator::Platform inheritance, although it certainly could do that and just use the functions it needs. But the SGB is even weirder, because we need additional new signals beyond just Emulator::Platform, like joypWrite(), etc. I'd also like to work on the Emulator::Stream for the SGB core. I don't see why we can't have the GB core create its own stream, and let the ICD2 just use that instead. We just have to be careful about the ICD2's CPU soft reset function, to make sure the GB core's Stream object remains valid. What I think that needs is a way to release an Emulator::Stream individually, rather than calling Emulator::Audio::reset() to do it. They are shared\_pointer objects, so I think if I added a destructor function to remove it from Emulator::Audio::streams, then that should work. |
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Tim Allen | bdc100e123 |
Update to v102r02 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - I caved on the `samples[] = {0.0}` thing, but I'm very unhappy about it - if it's really invalid C++, then GCC needs to stop accepting it in strict `-std=c++14` mode - Emulator::Interface::Information::resettable is gone - Emulator::Interface::reset() is gone - FC, SFC, MD cores updated to remove soft reset behavior - split GameBoy::Interface into GameBoyInterface, GameBoyColorInterface - split WonderSwan::Interface into WonderSwanInterface, WonderSwanColorInterface - PCE: fixed off-by-one scanline error [hex_usr] - PCE: temporary hack to prevent crashing when VDS is set to < 2 - hiro: Cocoa: removed (u)int(#) constants; converted (u)int(#) types to (u)int_(#)t types - icarus: replaced usage of unique with strip instead (so we don't mess up frameworks on macOS) - libco: added macOS-specific section marker [Ryphecha] So ... the major news this time is the removal of the soft reset behavior. This is a major!! change that results in a 100KiB diff file, and it's very prone to accidental mistakes!! If anyone is up for testing, or even better -- looking over the code changes between v102r01 and v102r02 and looking for any issues, please do so. Ideally we'll want to test every NES mapper type and every SNES coprocessor type by loading said games and power cycling to make sure the games are all cleanly resetting. It's too big of a change for me to cover there not being any issues on my own, but this is truly critical code, so yeah ... please help if you can. We technically lose a bit of hardware documentation here. The soft reset events do all kinds of interesting things in all kinds of different chips -- or at least they do on the SNES. This is obviously not ideal. But in the process of removing these portions of code, I found a few mistakes I had made previously. It simplifies resetting the system state a lot when not trying to have all the power() functions call the reset() functions to share partial functionality. In the future, the goal will be to come up with a way to add back in the soft reset behavior via keyboard binding as with the Master System core. What's going to have to happen is that the key binding will have to send a "reset pulse" to every emulated chip, and those chips are going to have to act independently to power() instead of reusing functionality. We'll get there eventually, but there's many things of vastly greater importance to work on right now, so it'll be a while. The information isn't lost ... we'll just have to pull it out of v102 when we are ready. Note that I left the SNES reset vector simulation code in, even though it's not possible to trigger, for the time being. Also ... the Super Game Boy core is still disconnected. To be honest, it totally slipped my mind when I released v102 that it wasn't connected again yet. This one's going to be pretty tricky to be honest. I'm thinking about making a third GameBoy::Interface class just for SGB, and coming up with some way of bypassing platform-> calls when in this mode. |
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Tim Allen | bf90bdfcc8 |
Update to v101r31 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - converted Emulator::Interface::Bind to Emulator::Platform - temporarily disabled SGB hooks - SMS: emulated Game Gear palette (latching word-write behavior not implemented yet) - SMS: emulated Master System 'Reset' button, Game Gear 'Start' button - SMS: removed reset() functionality, driven by the mappable input now instead - SMS: split interface class in two: one for Master System, one for Game Gear - SMS: emulated Game Gear video cropping to 160x144 - PCE: started on HuC6280 CPU core—so far only registers, NOP instruction has been implemented Errata: - Super Game Boy support is broken and thus disabled - if you switch between Master System and Game Gear without restarting, bad things happen: - SMS→GG, no video output on the GG - GG→SMS, no input on the SMS I'm not sure what's causing the SMS\<-\>GG switch bug, having a hard time debugging it. Help would be very much appreciated, if anyone's up for it. Otherwise I'll keep trying to track it down on my end. |
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Tim Allen | 5df717ff2a |
Update to v101r12 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - new md/bus/ module for bus reads/writes - abstracts byte/word accesses wherever possible (everything but RAM; forces all but I/O to word, I/O to byte) - holds the system RAM since that's technically not part of the CPU anyway - added md/controller and md/system/peripherals - added emulation of gamepads - added stub PSG audio output (silent) to cap the framerate at 60fps with audio sync enabled - fixed VSRAM reads for plane vertical scrolling (two bugs here: add instead of sub; interlave plane A/B) - mask nametable read offsets (can't exceed 8192-byte nametables apparently) - emulated VRAM/VSRAM/CRAM reads from VDP data port - fixed sprite width/height size calculations - added partial emulation of 40-tile per scanline limitation (enough to fix Sonic's title screen) - fixed off-by-one sprite range testing - fixed sprite tile indexing - Vblank happens at Y=224 with overscan disabled - unsure what happens when you toggle it between Y=224 and Y=240 ... probably bad things - fixed reading of address register for ADDA, CMPA, SUBA - fixed sign extension for MOVEA effect address reads - updated MOVEM to increment the read addresses (but not writeback) for (aN) mode With all of that out of the way, we finally have Sonic the Hedgehog (fully?) playable. I played to stage 1-2 and through the special stage, at least. EDIT: yeah, we probably need HIRQs for Labyrinth Zone. Not much else works, of course. Most games hang waiting on the Z80, and those that don't (like Altered Beast) are still royally screwed. Tons of features still missing; including all of the Z80/PSG/YM2612. A note on the perihperals this time around: the Mega Drive EXT port is basically identical to the regular controller ports. So unlike with the Famicom and Super Famicom, I'm inheriting the exension port from the controller class. |
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Tim Allen | 427bac3011 |
Update to v101r06 release.
byuu says: I reworked the video sizing code. Ended up wasting five fucking hours fighting GTK. When you call `gtk_widget_set_size_request`, it doesn't actually happen then. This is kind of a big deal because when I then go to draw onto the viewport, the actual viewport child window is still the old size, so the image gets distorted. It recovers in a frame or so with emulation, but if we were to put a still image on there, it would stay distorted. The first thought is, `while(gtk_events_pending()) gtk_main_iteration_do(false);` right after the `set_size_request`. But nope, it tells you there's no events pending. So then you think, go deeper, use `XPending()` instead. Same thing, GTK hasn't actually issued the command to Xlib yet. So then you think, if the widget is realized, just call a blocking `gtk_main_iteration`. One call does nothing, two calls results in a deadlock on the second one ... do it before program startup, and the main window will never appear. Great. Oh, and it's not just the viewport. It's also the widget container area of the windows, as well as the window itself, as well as the fullscreen mode toggle effect. They all do this. For the latter three, I couldn't find anything that worked, so I just added 20ms loops of constantly calling `gtk_main_iteration_do(false)` after each one of those things. The downside here is toggling the status bar takes 40ms, so you'll see it and it'll feel a tiny bit sluggish. But I can't have a 20ms wait on each widget resize, that would be catastrophic to performance on windows with lots of widgets. I tried hooking configure-event and size-allocate, but they were very unreliable. So instead I ended up with a loop that waits up to a maximm of 20ms that inspects the `widget->allocation.(width,height)` values directly and waits for them to be what we asked for with `set_size_request`. There was some extreme ugliness in GTK with calling `gtk_main_iteration_do` recursively (`hiro::Widget::setGeometry` is called recursively), so I had to lock it to only happen on the top level widgets (the child ones should get resized while waiting on the top-level ones, so it should be fine in practice), and also only run it on realized widgets. Even still, I'm getting ~3 timeouts when opening the settings dialog in higan, but no other windows. But, this is the best I can do for now. And the reason for all of this pain? Yeah, updated the video code. So the Emulator::Interface now has this: struct VideoSize { uint width, height; }; //or requiem for a tuple auto videoSize() -> VideoSize; auto videoSize(uint width, uint height, bool arc) -> VideoSize; The first function, for now, is just returning the literal surface size. I may remove this ... one thing I want to allow for is cores that send different texture sizes based on interlace/hires/overscan/etc settings. The second function is more interesting. Instead of having the UI trying to figure out sizing, I figure the emulation cores can do a better job and we can customize it per-core now. So it gets the window's width and height, and whether the user asked for aspect correction, and then computes the best width/height ratio possible. For now they're all just doing multiples of a 1x scale to the UI 2x,3x,4x modes. We still need a third function, which will probably be what I repurpose videoSize() for: to return the 'effective' size for pixel shaders, to then feed into ruby, to then feed into quark, to then feed into our shaders. Since shaders use normalized coordinates for pixel fetching, this should work out just fine. The real texture size will be exposed to quark shaders as well, of course. Now for the main window ... it's just hard-coded to be 640x480, 960x720, 1280x960 for now. It works nicely for some cores on some modes, not so much for others. Work in progress I guess. I also took the opportunity to draw the about dialog box logo on the main window. Got a bit fancy and used the old spherical gradient and impose functionality of nall/image on it. Very minor highlight, nothing garish. Just something nicer than a solid black window. If you guys want to mess around with sizes, placements, and gradient styles/colors/shapes ... feel free. If you come up with something nicer, do share. That's what led to all the GTK hell ... the logo wasn't drawing right as you resized the window. But now it is, though I am not at all happy with the hacking I had to do. I also had to improve the video update code as a result of this: - when you unload a game, it blacks out the screen - if you are not quitting the emulator, it'll draw the logo; if you are, it won't - when you load a game, it black out the logo These options prevent any unsightliness from resizing the viewport with image data on it already I need to redraw the logo when toggling fullscreen with no game loaded as well for Windows, it seems. |
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Tim Allen | ac2d0ba1cf |
Update to v101r05 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - 68K: fixed bug that affected BSR return address - VDP: added very preliminary emulation of planes A, B, W (W is entirely broken though) - VDP: added command/address stuff so you can write to VRAM, CRAM, VSRAM - VDP: added VRAM fill DMA I would be really surprised if any commercial games showed anything at all, so I'd probably recommend against wasting your time trying, unless you're really bored :P Also, I wanted to add: I am accepting patches\! So if anyone wants to look over the 68K core for bugs, that would save me untold amounts of time in the near future :D |
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Tim Allen | 1df2549d18 |
Update to v101r04 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - pulled the (u)intN type aliases into higan instead of leaving them in nall - added 68K LINEA, LINEF hooks for illegal instructions - filled the rest of the 68K lambda table with generic instance of ILLEGAL - completed the 68K disassembler effective addressing modes - still unsure whether I should use An to decode absolute addresses or not - pro: way easier to read where accesses are taking place - con: requires An to be valid; so as a disassembler it does a poor job - making it optional: too much work; ick - added I/O decoding for the VDP command-port registers - added skeleton timing to all five processor cores - output at 1280x480 (needed for mixed 256/320 widths; and to handle interlace modes) The VDP, PSG, Z80, YM2612 are all stepping one clock at a time and syncing; which is the pathological worst case for libco. But they also have no logic inside of them. With all the above, I'm averaging around 250fps with just the 68K core actually functional, and the VDP doing a dumb "draw white pixels" loop. Still way too early to tell how this emulator is going to perform. Also, the 320x240 mode of the Genesis means that we don't need an aspect correction ratio. But we do need to ensure the output window is a multiple 320x240 so that the scale values work correctly. I was hard-coding aspect correction to stretch the window an additional \*8/7. But that won't work anymore so ... the main higan window is now 640x480, 960x720, or 1280x960. Toggling aspect correction only changes the video width inside the window. It's a bit jarring ... the window is a lot wider, more black space now for most modes. But for now, it is what it is. |
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Tim Allen | 1c0ef793fe |
Update to v100r04 release.
byuu says: I now have enough of three instructions implemented to get through the first four instructions in Sonic the Hedgehog. But they're far from complete. The very first instruction uses EA addressing, which is similar to x86's ModRM in terms of how disgustingly complex it is. And it also accesses Z80 control registers, which obviously isn't going to do anything yet. The slow speed was me being stupid again. It's not 7.6MHz per frame, it's 7.67MHz per second. So yeah, speed is so far acceptable again. But we'll see how things go as I keep emulating more. The 68K decode is not pretty at all. |
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Tim Allen | 76a8ecd32a |
Update to v100r03 release.
byuu says: Changelog: - moved Thread, Scheduler, Cheat functionality into emulator/ for all cores - start of actual Mega Drive emulation (two 68K instructions) I'm going to be rather terse on MD emulation, as it's too early for any meaningful dialogue here. |
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Tim Allen | 3dd1aa9c1b |
Update to v100r02 release.
byuu says: Sigh ... I'm really not a good person. I'm inherently selfish. My responsibility and obligation right now is to work on loki, and then on the Tengai Makyou Zero translation, and then on improving the Famicom emulation. And yet ... it's not what I really want to do. That shouldn't matter; I should work on my responsibilities first. Instead, I'm going to be a greedy, self-centered asshole, and work on what I really want to instead. I'm really sorry, guys. I'm sure this will make a few people happy, and probably upset even more people. I'm also making zero guarantees that this ever gets finished. As always, I wish I could keep these things secret, so if I fail / give up, I could just drop it with no shame. But I would have to cut everyone out of the WIP process completely to make it happen. So, here goes ... This WIP adds the initial skeleton for Sega Mega Drive / Genesis emulation. God help us. (minor note: apparently the new extension for Mega Drive games is .md, neat. That's what I chose for the folders too. I thought it was .smd, so that'll be fixed in icarus for the next WIP.) (aside: this is why I wanted to get v100 out. I didn't want this code in a skeleton state in v100's source. Nor did I want really broken emulation, which the first release is sure to be, tarring said release.) ... So, basically, I've been ruminating on the legacy I want to leave behind with higan. 3D systems are just plain out. I'm never going to support them. They're too complex for my abilities, and they would run too slowly with my design style. I'm not willing to compromise my design ideals. And I would never want to play a 3D game system at native 240p/480i resolution ... but 1080p+ upscaling is not accurate, so that's a conflict I want to avoid entirely. It's also never going to emulate computer systems (X68K, PC-98, FM-Towns, etc) because holy shit that would completely destroy me. It's also never going emulate arcade machines. So I think of higan as a collection of 2D emulators for consoles and handhelds. I've gone over every major 2D gaming system there is, looking for ones with games I actually care about and enjoy. And I basically have five of those systems supported already. Looking at the remaining list, I see only three systems left that I have any interest in whatsoever: PC-Engine, Master System, Mega Drive. Again, I'm not in any way committing to emulating any of these, but ... if I had all of those in higan, I think I'd be content to really, truly, finally stop writing more emulators for the rest of my life. And so I decided to tackle the most difficult system first. If I'm successful, the Z80 core should cover a lot of the work on the SMS. And the HuC6280 should land somewhere between the NES and SNES in terms of difficulty ... closer to the NES. The systems that just don't appeal to me at all, which I will never touch, include, but are not limited to: * Atari 2600/5200/7800 * Lynx * Jaguar * Vectrex * Colecovision * Commodore 64 * Neo-Geo * Neo-Geo Pocket / Color * Virtual Boy * Super A'can * 32X * CD-i * etc, etc, etc. And really, even if something were mildly interesting in there ... we have to stop. I can't scale infinitely. I'm already way past my limit, but I'm doing this anyway. Too many cores bloats everything and kills quality on everything. I don't want higan to become MESS v2. I don't know what I'll do about the Famicom Disk System, PC-Engine CD, and Mega CD. I don't think I'll be able to achieve 60fps emulating the Mega CD, even if I tried to. I don't know what's going to happen here with even the Mega Drive. Maybe I'll get driven crazy with the documentation and quit. Maybe it'll end up being too complicated and I'll quit. Maybe the emulation will end up way too slow and I'll give up. Maybe it'll take me seven years to get any games playable at all. Maybe Steve Snake, AamirM and Mike Pavone will pool money to hire a hitman to come after me. Who knows. But this is what I want to do, so ... here goes nothing. |