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:
Changelog:
- manifest: memory/battery now resides under type at
memory/type/battery
- genius: volatile option changed to battery; auto-disables when not
RAM or RTC type
- higan: added new Emulator::Game class to parse manifests for all
emulated systems consistently
- Super Famicom: board manifest appended to manifest viewer now
- Super Famicom: cartridge class updated to use Emulator::Game objects
- hiro: improve suppression of userland callbacks once
Application::quit() is called
- this fixes a crash in genius when closing the window with a tree
view item selected
My intention is to remove Emulator::Interface::sha256(), as it's not
really useful. They'll be removed from save states as well. I never
bothered validating the SHA256 within them, because that'd be really
annoying for ROM hackers.
I also intend to rename Emulator::Interface::title() to label() instead.
Most everything is still broken. The SNES still needs all the board
definitions updated, all the other cores need to move to using
Emulator::Game.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- Emulator::Interface::videoResolution() -\> VideoResolution renamed
to videoInformation() -\> VideoInformation
- added double VideoInformation::refreshRate
- higan: added `binary := (application|library)` — set this to
`library` to produce a dynamic link library
- higan: removed `-march=native` for macOS application builds; and for
all library builds
- higan: removed `console` build flag; uncomment `link += -mwindows`
instead
- nall/GNUmakefile: `macosx` platform renamed `macos`
- still need to do this for nall/intrinsics.hpp
- Game Gear: return region=NTSC as the only option, so that the system
frequency is always set correctly
- hiro/cocoa: fixed typo [Sintendo]
- hiro/Windows: removed GetDpiForMonitor, as it's Windows 8+ only; DPI
is no longer per-monitor aware
- icarus: core Icarus class now has virtual functions for
directory::create, <file::exists>, <file::copy>, <file::write>
- icarus: Sufami Turbo can import save RAM files now
- icarus: setting `ICARUS_LIBRARY` define will compile icarus without
main(), GUI components
- ruby/video/Direct3D: choose the current monitor instead of top-left
monitor for fullscreen exclusive [Cydrak]
- ruby/video/Direct3D: do not set `WS_EX_TOPMOST` on fullscreen
exclusive window [Cydrak]
- this isn't necessary for exclusive mode, and it just makes
getting out of the application more difficult
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/GNUmakefile: build=release changed to -O2, build=optimize is
now -O3
- hiro: added Monitor::dpi(uint index) → Position [returns logical
DPI for x, y]
- Position is a bad name, but dpi(monitor).(x,y)() make more sense
than .(width,height)()
- hiro: Position, Size, Geometry, Font changed from using signed int
to float
- hiro: Alignment changed from using double to float
- hiro: added skeleton (unused) Application::scale(), setScale()
functions
Errata:
- hiro/cocoa's Monitor::dpi() is untested. Probably will cause issues
with macOS' automatic scaling.
- hiro/gtk lacks a way to get both per-monitor and per-axis (x,y) DPI
scaling
- hiro/qt lacks a way to get per-monitor DPI scaling (Qt 5.x has this,
but I still use Qt 4.x)
- and just to get global DPI, hiro/qt's DPI retrieval has to use
undocumented functions ... fun
The goal with this WIP was basically to prepare hiro for potential
automatic scaling. It'll be extremely difficult, but I'm convinced that
it must be possible if macOS can do it.
By moving from signed integers to floats for coordinates, we can now
scale and unscale without losing precision. That of course isn't the
hard part, though. The hard part is where and how to do the scaling. In
the ideal application, hiro/core and hiro/extension will handle 100% of
this, and the per-platform hiro/(cocoa,gtk,qt,windows) will not be aware
of what's going on, but ... to even make that possible, things will need
to change in every per-platform core, eg the per-platform code will have
to call a core function to change geometry, which will know about the
scaling and unscale the values back down again.
Gonna be a lot of work, but ... it's a start.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- gb/interface: fix Game Boy Color extension to be "gbc" and not "gb"
[hex\_usr]
- ms/interface: move Master System hardware controls below controller
ports
- sfc/ppu: improve latching behavior of BGnHOFS registers (not
hardware verified) [AWJ]
- tomoko/input: rework port/device mapping to support non-sequential
ports and devices¹
- todo: should add move() to inputDevice.mappings.append and
inputPort.devices.append
- note: there's a weird GCC 4.9 bug with brace initialization of
InputEmulator; have to assign each field separately
- tomoko: all windows sans the main presentation window can be
dismissed with the escape key
- icarus: the single file selection dialog ("Load ROM Image...") can
be dismissed with the escape key
- tomoko: do not pause emulation when FocusLoss/Pause is set during
exclusive fullscreen mode
- hiro/(windows,gtk,qt): implemented Window::setDismissable() function
(missing from cocoa port, sorry)
- nall/string: fixed printing of largest possible negative numbers (eg
`INT_MIN`) [Sintendo]
- only took eight months! :D
¹: When I tried to move the Master System hardware port below the
controller ports, I ran into a world of pain.
The input settings list expects every item in the
`InputEmulator<InputPort<InputDevice<InputMapping>>>>` arrays to be
populated with valid results. But these would be sparsely populated
based on the port and device IDs from inside higan. And that is done so
that the Interface::inputPoll can have O(1) lookup of ports and devices.
This worked because all the port and device IDs were sequential (they
left no gaps in the maps upon creating the lists.)
Unfortunately by changing the expectation of port ID to how it appears
in the list, inputs would not poll correctly. By leaving them alone and
just moving Hardware to the third position, the Game Gear would be
missing port IDs of 0 and 1 (the controller ports of the Master System).
Even by trying to make separate MasterSystemHardware and
GameGearHardware ports, things still fractured when the devices were no
longer contigious.
I got pretty sick of this and just decided to give up on O(1)
port/device lookup, and moved to O(n) lookup. It only knocked the
framerate down by maybe one frame per second, enough to be in the margin
of error. Inputs aren't polled *that* often for loops that usually
terminate after 1-2 cycles to be too detrimental to performance.
So the new input system now allows non-sequential port and device IDs.
Remember that I killed input IDs a while back. There's never any reason
for those to need IDs ... it was easier to just order the inputs in the
order you want to see them in the user interface. So the input lookup is
still O(1). Only now, everything's safer and I return a
maybe<InputMapping&>, and won't crash out the program trying to use a
mapping that isn't found for some reason.
Errata: the escape key isn't working on the browser/message dialogs on
Windows, because of course nothing can ever just be easy and work for
me. If anyone else wouldn't mind looking into that, I'd greatly
appreciate it.
Having the `WM_KEYDOWN` test inside the main `Application_sharedProc`, it
seems to not respond to the escape key on modal dialogs. If I put the
`WM_KEYDOWN` test in the main window proc, then it doesn't seem to get
called for `VK_ESCAPE` at all, and doesn't get called period for modal
windows. So I'm at a loss and it's past 4AM here >_>
byuu says:
Changelog:
- added \~130 new PAL games to icarus (courtesy of Smarthuman
and aquaman)
- added all three Korean-localized games to icarus
- sfc: removed SuperDisc emulation (it was going nowhere)
- sfc: fixed MSU1 regression where the play/repeat flags were not
being cleared on track select
- nall: cryptography support added; will be used to sign future
databases (validation will always be optional)
- minor shims to fix compilation issues due to nall changes
The real magic is that we now have 25-30% of the PAL SNES library in
icarus!
Signing will be tricky. Obviously if I put the public key inside the
higan archive, then all anyone has to do is change that public key for
their own releases. And if you download from my site (which is now over
HTTPS), then you don't need the signing to verify integrity. I may just
put the public key on my site on my site and leave it at that, we'll
see.
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:
- nall::lstring -> nall::string_vector
- added IntegerBitField<type, lo, hi> -- hopefully it works correctly...
- Multitap 1-4 -> Super Multitap 2-5
- fixed SFC PPU CGRAM read regression
- huge amounts of SFC PPU IO register cleanups -- .bits really is lovely
- re-added the read/write(VRAM,OAM,CGRAM) helpers for the SFC PPU
- but they're now optimized to the realities of the PPU (16-bit data
sizes / no address parameter / where appropriate)
- basically used to get the active-display overrides in a unified place;
but also reduces duplicate code in (read,write)IO
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed major nall/vector/prepend bug
- renamed hiro/ListView to hiro/TableView
- added new hiro/ListView control which is a simplified abstraction of
hiro/TableView
- updated higan's cheat database window and icarus' scan dialog to use
the new ListView control
- compilation works once again on all platforms (Windows, Cocoa, GTK,
Qt)
- the loki skeleton compiles once again (removed nall/DSP references;
updated port/device ID names)
Small catch: need to capture layout resize events internally in Windows
to call resizeColumns. For now, just resize the icarus window to get it
to use the full window width for list view items.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- fixed icarus to save settings properly
- fixed higan's full screen toggle on OS X
- increased "Add Codes" button width to avoid text clipping
- implemented cocoa/canvas.cpp
- added 1s delay after mapping inputs before re-enabling the window
(wasn't actually necessary, but already added it)
- fixed setEnabled(false) on Cocoa's ListView and TextEdit widgets
- updated nall::programpath() to use GetModuleFileName on Windows
- GB: system uses open collector logic, so unmapped reads return 0xFF,
not 0x00 (passes blargg's cpu_instrs again) [gekkio]
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:
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:
Updated to compile with all of the new hiro changes. My next step is to
write up hiro API documentation, and move the API from alpha (constantly
changing) to beta (rarely changing), in preparation for the first stable
release (backward-compatible changes only.)
Added "--fullscreen" command-line option. I like this over
a configuration file option. Lets you use the emulator in both modes
without having to modify the config file each time.
Also enhanced the command-line game loading. You can now use any of
these methods:
higan /path/to/game-folder.sfc
higan /path/to/game-folder.sfc/
higan /path/to/game-folder.sfc/program.rom
The idea is to support launchers that insist on loading files only.
Technically, the file can be any name (manifest.bml also works); the
only criteria is that the file actually exists and is a file, and not
a directory. This is a requirement to support the first version (a
directory lacking the trailing / identifier), because I don't want my
nall::string class to query the file system to determine if the string
is an actual existing file or directory for its pathname() / dirname()
functions.
Anyway, every game folder I've made so far has program.rom, and that's
very unlikely to change, so this should be fine.
Now, of course, if you drop a regular "game.sfc" file on the emulator,
it won't even try to load it, unless it's in a folder that ends in .fc,
.sfc, etc. In which case, it'll bail out immediately by being unable to
produce a manifest for what is obviously not really a game folder.
byuu says:
I imagine you guys will like this WIP very much.
Changelog:
- ListView check boxes on Windows
- ListView removal of columns on reset (changing input dropdowns)
- DirectSound audio duplication on latency change
- DirectSound crash on 20ms latency
- Fullscreen window sizing in multi-monitor setups
- Allow joypad bindings of hotkeys
- Allow triggers to be mapped (Xbox 360 / XInput / Windows only)
- Support joypad rumble for Game Boy Player
- Video scale settings modified from {1x,2x,3x} to {2x,3x,4x}
- System menu now renames to active emulation core
- Added fast forward hotkey
Not changing for v095:
- not adding input focus settings yet
- not adding shaders yet
Not changing at all:
- not implementing maximize
byuu says:
Changelog (since the last open beta):
- icarus is now included. icarus is used to import game files/archives
into game paks (folders)
- SNES: mid-scanline BGMODE changes now emulated correctly (used only by
atx2.smc Anthrox Demo)
- GBA: fixed a CPU bug that was causing dozens of games to have
distorted audio
- GBA: fixed default FlashROM ID; should allow much higher compatibility
- GBA: now using Cydrak's new, much improved, GBA color emulation filter
(still a work-in-progress)
- re-added command-line loading support for game paks (not for game
files/archives, sorry!)
- Qt port now compiles and runs again (may be a little buggy;
Windows/GTK+ ports preferred)
- SNES performance profile now compiles and runs again
- much more
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:
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:
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