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:
Changelog:
- nall: converted range, iterator, vector to 64-bit
- added (very poor) ColecoVision emulation (including Coleco Adam
expansion)
- added MSX skeleton
- added Neo Geo Pocket skeleton
- moved audio,video,resource folders into emulator folder
- SFC heuristics: BS-X Town cart is "ZBSJ" [hex_usr]
The nall change is for future work on things like BPA: I need to be able
to handle files larger than 4GB. It is extremely possible that there are
still some truncations to 32-bit lurking around, and even more
disastrously, possibly some -1s lurking that won't sign-extend to
`(uint64_t)0-1`. There's a lot more classes left to do: `string`,
`array_view`, `array_span`, etc.
byuu says:
This synchronizes bsnes/higan with many recent internal nall changes.
This will be the last WIP until I am situated in Japan. Apologies for the
bugfixes that didn't get applied yet, I ran out of time.
byuu says:
I added (imperfect) memory conflict timing to the SA1.
Before:
- WRAM↔↔ROM ran 7% too fast
- ROM↔↔ROM ran 100% too fast
- WRAM↔↔IRAM ran 7% too fast
- ROM↔↔IRAM ran 7% too fast
- IRAM↔↔IRAM ran 287% too fast
- BWRAM↔↔BWRAM ran 100% too fast
- HDMA ROM↔↔ROM ran 15% too fast
- HDMA WRAM↔↔ROM ran 15% too fast
- DMA ROM↔↔ROM ran 100% too fast
After:
- ROM↔↔ROM runs 14% too fast
- HDMA WRAM↔↔ROM runs 7% too fast
- DMA ROM↔↔ROM runs 4% too fast
If you enable this with the fast PPU + DSP, your framerate in SA1 games
will drop by 51%. And even if you disable it, you'll still lose 9% speed
in SA1 games, and 2% speed in non-SA1 games, because of changes needed
to make this support possible.
By default, I'm leaving this off. Compile with `-DACCURATE_SA1` (or
uncomment the line in sfc/sfc.hpp) if you want to try it out.
This'll almost certainly cause some SA1 regressions, so I guess we'll
tackle those as they arise.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed bug in Emulator::Game::Memory::operator bool()
- nall: renamed view<string> back to `string_view`
- nall:: implemented `array_view`
- Game Boy: split cartridge-specific input mappings (rumble,
accelerometer) to their own separate ports
- Game Boy: fixed MBC7 accelerometer x-axis
- icarus: Game Boy, Super Famicom, Mega Drive cores output internal
header game titles to heuristics manifests
- higan, icarus, hiro/gtk: improve viewport geometry configuration;
fixed higan crashing bug with XShm driver
- higan: connect Video::poll(),update() functionality
- hiro, ruby: several compilation / bugfixes, should get the macOS
port compiling again, hopefully [Sintendo]
- ruby/video/xshm: fix crashing bug on window resize
- a bit hacky; it's throwing BadAccess Xlib warnings, but they're
not fatal, so I am catching and ignoring them
- bsnes: removed Application::Windows::onModalChange hook that's no
longer needed [Screwtape]
byuu says:
The main thing I worked on today was emulating the MBC7 EEPROM.
And... I have many things to say about that, but not here, and not now...
The missing EEPROM support is why the accelerometer was broken. Although
it's not evidently clear that I'm emulating the actual values
incorrectly. I'll think about it and get it fixed, though.
bsnes went from ~308fps to ~328fps, and I don't even know why. Probably
something somewhere in the 140KB of changes to other things made in this
WIP.
byuu says:
Changes to hiro will break all but the GTK target. Not that it matters
much given that the only ruby drivers that function are all on BSD
anyway.
But if you are fortunate enough to be able to run this ... you'll find
lots of polishing improvements to the bsnes GUI. I posted some
screenshots on Twitter, if anyone were interested.
byuu wrote:
Sigh ...
asio.hpp needs #include <nall/windows/registry.hpp>
[Since the last WIP, byuu also posted the following message. -Ed.]
ruby drivers have all been updated (but not tested outside of BSD), and
I redesigned the settings window. The driver functionality all exists on
a new "Drivers" panel, the emulator/hack settings go to a
"Configuration" panel, and the video/audio panels lose driver settings.
As does the settings menu and its synchronize options.
I want to start pushing toward a v107 release. Critically, I will need
DirectSound and ALSA to support dynamic rate control. I'd also like to
eliminate the other system manifest.bml files. I need to update the
cheat code database format, and bundle at least a few quark shaders --
although I still need to default to Direct3D on Windows.
Turbo keys would be nice, if it's not too much effort. Aside from
netplay, it's the last significant feature I'm missing.
I think for v107, higan is going to be a bit rough around the edges
compared to bsnes. And I don't think it's practical to finish the bsnes
localization support.
I'm thinking we probably want another WIP to iron out any critical
issues, but this time there should be a feature freeze with the next
WIP.
byuu says:
I stand corrected, I managed to create and even larger diff than ever.
This one weighs in at 309KiB `>__>`
I'll have to create a changelog later, I'm too tired right now to go
through all of that.
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:
This WIP fixes all the critical pending issues I had open. I'm sure
there's many more that simply didn't make their way into said list. So
by all means, please report important issues you're aware of so they can
get fixed.
Changelog:
- ruby: add variable texture support to GDI video driver [bug
reported by Cydrak]
- ruby: minor cleanups to XShm video driver
- ruby: fix handling of up+down, left+right hat cases for XInput
driver [bug reported by Cydrak]
- nall: fixed vector class so that compilation with GCC 7.1 should
succeed [SuperMikeMan]
- sfc: initialize most DSP registers to random values to fix Magical
Drop [Jonas Quinn]
- sfc: lower PPU brightness when luma=0 from 50% scale to 25% scale;
helps scenes like Final Fantasy III's intro
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added 30 new PAL games to icarus (courtesy of Mikerochip)
- new version of libco no longer requires mprotect nor W|X permissions
- nall: default C compiler to -std=c11 instead of -std=c99
- nall: use `-fno-strict-aliasing` during compilation
- updated nall/certificates (hopefully for the last time)
- updated nall/http to newer coding conventions
- nall: improve handling of range() function
I didn't really work on higan at all, this is mostly just a release
because lots of other things have changed.
The most interesting is `-fno-strict-aliasing` ... basically, it joins
`-fwrapv` as being "stop the GCC developers from doing *really* evil
shit that could lead to security vulnerabilities or instabilities."
For the most part, it's a ~2% speed penalty for higan. Except for the
Sega Genesis, where it's a ~10% speedup. I have no idea how that's
possible, but clearly something's going very wrong with strict aliasing
on the Genesis core.
So ... it is what it is. If you need the performance for the non-Genesis
cores, you can turn it off in your builds. But I'm getting quite sick of
C++'s "surprises" and clever compiler developers, so I'm keeping it on
in all of my software going forward.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/vector rewritten from scratch
- higan/audio uses nall/vector instead of raw pointers
- higan/sfc/coprocessor/sdd1 updated with new research information
- ruby/video/glx and ruby/video/glx2: fuck salt glXSwapIntervalEXT!
The big change here is definitely nall/vector. The Windows, OS X and Qt
ports won't compile until you change some first/last strings to
left/right, but GTK will compile.
I'd be really grateful if anyone could stress-test nall/vector. Pretty
much everything I do relies on this class. If we introduce a bug, the
worst case scenario is my entire SFC game dump database gets corrupted,
or the byuu.org server gets compromised. So it's really critical that we
test the hell out of this right now.
The S-DD1 changes mean you need to update your installation of icarus
again. Also, even though the Lunar FMV never really worked on the
accuracy core anyway (it didn't initialize the PPU properly), it really
won't work now that we emulate the hard-limit of 16MiB for S-DD1 games.
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:
Note: you will need the new icarus (and please use the "no manifest"
system) to run GBA games with this WIP.
Changelog:
- fixed caching of r(d) to pass armwrestler tests [Jonas Quinn]
- DMA to/from GBA BIOS should fail [Cydrak]
- fixed sign-extend and rotate on ldrs instructions [Cydrak]
- fixed 8-bit SRAM reading/writing [byuu]
- refactored GBA/cartridge
- cartridge/rom,ram.type is now cartridge/mrom,sram,eeprom,flash
- things won't crash horribly if you specify a RAM size larger than
the largest legal size in the manifest
- specialized MROM / SRAM classes replace all the shared read/write
functions that didn't work right anyway
- there's a new ruby/video.glx2 driver, which is not enabled by default
- use this if you are running Linux/BSD, but don't have OpenGL 3.2 yet
- I'm not going to support OpenGL2 on Windows/OS X, because these OSes
don't ship ancient video card drivers
- probably more. What am I, clairvoyant? :P
For endrift's tests, this gets us to 1348/1552 memory and 1016/1260
timing. Overall, this puts us back in second place. Only no$ is ahead
on memory, but bgba is even more ahead on timing.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- return open bus instead of mirroring addresses on the bus (fixes
Mario&Luigi, Minish Cap, etc) [Jonas Quinn]
- add boolean flag to load requests for slotted game carts (fixes slot
load prompts)
- rename BS-X Town cart from psram to ram
- icarus: add support for game database
Note: I didn't rename "bsx" to "mcc" in the database for icarus before
uploading that. But I just fixed it locally, so it'll be in the next
WIP. For now, make it create the manifest for you and then rename it
yourself. I did fix the PSRAM size to 256kbit.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- synchronizes lots of nall changes
- changes displayed program title from tomoko to higan(*)
- browser dialog sort is case-insensitive
- .sys folders look at user-selected library path; no longer hard-coded
Tried to get rid of the file modes from the Windows browser dialog, but
it was being a bitch so I left it on for now.
- The storage locations and binary still use tomoko. I'm not really sure
what to do here. The idea is there may be more than one "higan" UI in
the future, but I don't want people to go around calling the entire
program by the UI name. For official Windows releases, I can rename
the binaries to "higan-{profile}.exe", and by putting the config files
with the binary, they won't ever see the tomoko folder. Linux is of
course trickier.
Note: Windows users will need to edit hiro/components.hpp and comment
out these lines:
#define Hiro_Console
#define Hiro_IconView
#define Hiro_SourceView
#define Hiro_TreeView
I forgot to do that, and too lazy to upload another WIP.
byuu says:
Finally!! Compilation works once again on Windows.
However, it's pretty buggy. Modality isn't really working right, you can
still poke at other windows, but when you select ListView items, they
redraw as empty boxes (need to process WM_DRAWITEM before checking
modality.)
The program crashes when you close it (probably a ruby driver's term()
function, that's what it usually is.)
The Layout::setEnabled(false) call isn't working right, so you get that
annoying chiming sound and cursor movement when mapping keyboard keys to
game inputs.
The column sizing seems off a bit on first display for the Hotkeys tab.
And probably lots more.
byuu says:
This updates higan to use the new Markup::Node changes. This is a really
big change, and one slight typo anywhere could break certain classes of
games from playing.
I don't have ananke hooked up again yet, so I don't have the ability to
test this much. If anyone with some v094 game folders wouldn't mind
testing, I'd help out a great deal.
I'm most concerned about testing one of each SNES special chip game.
Most notably, systems like the SA-1, HitachiDSP and NEC-DSP were using
the fancier lookups, eg node["rom[0]/name"], which I had to convert to
a rather ugly node["rom"].at(0)["name"], which I'm fairly confident
won't work. I'm going to blame that on the fumes from the shelves I just
stained >.> Might work with node.find("rom[0]/name")(0) though ...? But
so ugly ... ugh.
That aside, this WIP adds the accuracy-PPU inlining, so the accuracy
profile should run around 7.5% faster than before.
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:
New terminal is in. Much nicer to use now. Command history makes a major
difference in usability.
The SMP is now fully traceable and debuggable. Basically they act as
separate entities, you can trace both at the same time, but for the most
part running and stepping is performed on the chip you select.
I'm going to put off CPU+SMP interleave support for a while. I don't
actually think it'll be too hard. Will get trickier if/when we support
coprocessor debugging.
Remaining tasks:
- aliases
- hotkeys
- save states
- window geometry
Basically, the debugger's done. Just have to add the UI fluff.
I also removed tracing/memory export from higan. It was always meant to
be temporary until the debugger was remade.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added SA-1 MDR; fixes bug in SD Gundam G-Next where the main
battleship was unable to fire
- added out-of-the-box support for any BSD running Clang 3.3+ (FreeBSD
10+, notably)
- added new video shader, "Display Emulation", which changes the shader
based on the emulated system
- fixed the home button to go to your default library path
- phoenix: Windows port won't send onActivate unless an item is selected
(prevents crashing on pressing enter in file dialog)
- ruby: removed vec4 position from out Vertex {} (helps AMD cards)
- shaders: updated all shaders to use texture() instead of texture2D()
(helps AMD cards)
The "Display Emulation" option works like this: when selected, it tries
to load "<path>/Video Shaders/Emulation/<systemName>.shader/"; otherwise
it falls back to the blur shader. <path> is the usual (next to binary,
then in <config>/higan, then in /usr/share/higan, etc); and <systemName>
is "Famicom", "Super Famicom", "Game Boy", "Game Boy Color", "Game Boy
Advance"
To support BSD, I had to modify the $(platform) variable to
differentiate between Linux and BSD.
As such, the new $(platform) values are:
win -> windows
osx -> macosx
x -> linux or bsd
I am also checking uname -s instead of uname -a now. No reason to
potentially match the hostname to the wrong OS type.
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.
byuu