Commit Graph

4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tim Allen 7c9b78b7bb Update to v102r07 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - PCE: emulated PSG volume controls (vastly enhances audio quality)
  - PCE: emulated PSG noise as a square wave (somewhat enhances audio
    quality)
  - PCE: added save state support (currently broken and deadlocks the
    emulator though)

Thankfully, MAME had some rather easy to read code on how the volume
adjustment works, which they apparently ripped out of expired patents.
Hooray!

The two remaining sound issues are:

1. the random number generator for the noise channel is definitely not
hardware accurate. But it won't affect the sound quality at all. You'd
only be able to tell the difference by looking at hex bytes of a stream
rip.
2. I have no clue how to emulate the LFO (frequency modulation). A comment
in MAME's code (they also don't emulate it) advises that they aren't
aware of any games that even use it. But I'm there has to be at least one?

Given LFO not being used, and the RNG not really mattering all that much
... the sound's pretty close to perfect now.
2017-02-13 10:09:03 +11:00
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.
2017-02-11 10:56:42 +11:00
Tim Allen bf70044edc Update to v102r05 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - higan: added Makefile option,
    `build=(release|debug|instrument|optimize)` , defaults to release
  - PCE: added preliminary PSG (sound) emulation

The Makefile thing is just to make it easier to build debug releases
without having to hand-edit the Makefile. Just say "gmake build=debug"
and you'll get -g, otherwise you'll get -O3 -s. I'll probably start
adding these build= blocks to my other projects. Or maybe I'll put it
into nall, in which case release will need a different name ... a stable
-01, and a fast -03 mode. I also want to add a mode to generate
profiling information (via gprof.)

Unfortunately, the existing documentation on the PCE's PSG is as
barebones as humanly possible.

Right now, I support waveform mode, direct D/A mode, and noise
generation mode. However for noise, I'm not actually generating a proper
square wave, and I don't know the PRNG algorithm used for choosing the
random values. So for now, I'm just feeding in nall::random() values to
it.

I'm also not sure about the noise mode's frequency counter. Magic Kit is
implying it's 64*~frequency, but that results in an 11-bit period. It
seems only logical that we'd want a 12-bit period. So my guess is that
it's actually 12-bit, and halfway through it alternates between two
randomly generated values every 32 samples, and the two values are
generated every time the period hits zero.

Next up, it's not clear when the period counter is reloaded, either for
the waveform or the noise mode. So for now, when enabling the channel, I
reload the waveform period. And when enabling noise mode, I reload the
noise period. I don't know if you need to do it when writing to the
frequency registers or not.

Next, it's not clear whether the period is a decrement-and-compare, or a
compare-and-decrement, and whether we reload with frequency,
frequency-1, or frequency+1. There's this cryptic note in
pcetext.txt:

> The PSG channel frequency is 12 bits, $001 is the highest frequency,
> $FFF is the next to lowest frequency, and $000 is the lowest frequency.

As best I can tell, he's trying to say that it's decrement-and-compare.

Whatever the case, there's periodic popping noises every few seconds. I
thought it might be because this is the first system with a fractional
sampling rate (~3.57MHz), but rounding the frequency to a whole number
doesn't help at all, and emulator/audio should be able to handle
fractional resampling rates anyway.

The popping noises could also be due to PSG writes being cycle-timed,
and my HuC6280 cycle timings not being very great yet. The PSG has no
kind of interrupts, so I think careful timing is the only way to do
certain things, especially D/A mode.

Next up, I really don't understand the frequency modulation mode at all.
I don't have any idea whatsoever how to support that. It also has a
frequency value that we'll need to understand how the period works and
reloads. Basic idea though is the channel 1 output turns into a value to
modulate channel 0's frequency by, and channel 1's output gets muted.

Next up, I don't know how the volume controls work at all. There's a
master volume left+right, per-channel volume left+right, and per-channel
overall volume. The documentation lists their effects in terms of
decibels. I have no fucking clue how to turn decibels into multiply-by
values. Let alone how to stack THREE levels of audio volume controls
>_>

Next, it looks like the output is always 5-bit unsigned per-channel, but
there's also all the volume adjustments. So I don't know the final
bit-depth of the final output to normalize the value into a signed
floating point value between -1.0 and +1.0. So for now, half the
potential speaker range (anything below zero) isn't used in the
generated output.

As bad as all this sounds, and it is indeed bad ... the audio's about
~75% correct, so you can definitely play games like this, it just won't
be all that much fun.
2017-02-10 08:56:59 +11:00
Tim Allen 0ad70a30f8 Update to v101r30 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - SMS: added cartridge ROM/RAM mirroring (fixes Alex Kidd)
  - SMS: fixed 8x16 sprite mode (fixes Wonder Boy, Ys graphics)
  - Z80: emulated "ex (sp),hl" instruction
  - Z80: fixed INx NF (should be set instead of cleared)
  - Z80: fixed loop condition check for CPxR, INxR, LDxR, OTxR (fixes
    walking in Wonder Boy)
  - SFC: removed Debugger and sfc/debugger.hpp
  - icarus: connected MS, GG, MD importing to the scan dialog
  - PCE: added emulation skeleton to higan and icarus

At this point, Master System games are fairly highly compatible, sans
audio. Game Gear games are running, but I need to crop the resolution
and support the higher color palette that they can utilize. It's really
something else the way they handled the resolution shrink on that thing.

The last change is obviously going to be the biggest news.

I'm very well aware it's not an ideal time to start on a new emulation
core, with the MS and MD cores only just now coming to life with no
audio support.

But, for whatever reason, my heart's really set on working on the PC
Engine. I wanted to write the final higan skeleton core, and get things
ready so that whenever I'm in the mood to work on the PCE, I can do so.

The skeleton is far and away the most tedious and obnoxious part of the
emulator development, because it's basically all just lots of
boilerplate templated code, lots of new files to create, etc.

I really don't know how things are going to proceed ... but I can say
with 99.9% certainty that this will be the final brand new core ever
added to higan -- at least one written by me, that is. This was
basically the last system from my childhood that I ever cared about.
It's the last 2D system with games that I really enjoy playing. No other
system is worth dividing my efforts and reducing the quality and amount
of time to work on the systems I have.

In the future, there will be potential for FDS, Mega CD and PCE-CD
support. But those will all be add-ons, and they'll all be really
difficult and challenge the entire design of higan's UI (it's entirely
cartridge-driven at this time.) None of them will be entirely new cores
like this one.
2017-01-12 07:27:30 +11:00