Commit Graph

5 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
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.
2017-03-09 07:20:40 +11:00
Tim Allen 89d47914b9 Update to v102r14 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - (MS,GG,MD)/PSG: flip output bit from noise channel [TmEE]
  - MD/YM2612: rewrite YM2612::Channel functions to
    YM2612::Channel::Operator functions¹
  - MD/YM2612: pitch/octave I/O registers should set reload, not value
    (fixes sound in most games)
  - MD/YM2612: don't try to sign-extend raw PCM values (fixes Shining
    Force opening music)
  - MD/YM2612: various algorithm simplifications; conversions from
    `*`, `/`, `%` to `<<`, `>>`; etc.

Overall ... Sonic the Hedgehog sounds really, really great. Almost
perfect, but there's a bit of clamping going on in the special zones.
Langrisser II sounds really great. Shining Force sounds pretty much
perfect. Bare Knucles (Streets of Rage) does pretty badly ... punches
sound more like dinging a salad fork on a wine glass, heh. Altered Beast
is extremely broken ... no music at the title screen, very distorted
in-game music. I suspect a bug outside of the YM2612 is affecting this
game.

So, the YM2612 emulation isn't perfect, but it's a really good start to
the most complex sound chip in all of higan. Hopefully the VRC7 and
YM2413 will prove to be less ferocious ... not that I'm in any rush to
work on either. The former is going to need the NES mapper rewrite to be
done first, and the latter is cool but not very necessary since all
those games have fallbacks to the inferior PSG audio.

But really ... I can't thank Cydrak enough for doing this for me. It
would have probably taken me months to parse through all of the
documentation on this chip (most of which is in a 55-page thread on
spritesmind that is filled with wrong/outdated information at the start,
and corrections as you go deeper.) Not to mention, learning about what
the hell detuning, low-frequency oscillation, tremolo, vibrato, etc were
all about. Or how those algorithms to compute the final output work. Or
the dozens of special cases littered in there to make everything sound
good. Fierce, nasty chip that.

Now the last real problem is save states ... the Mega Drive is going to
be the trickiest of all to implement with libco. There are lots of areas
where one chip will deadlock another chip while it completes some
operation. We don't have a choice but to force those stalls to abort
anyway, in order to let libco reach the start of its entry point once
again. I don't know what kind of impact that'll have on states ... I
suspect they'll work almost as reliably as the SNES does, but I can't
know that until I implement it. It's going to be pretty nasty, though.

¹: this basically removes a lot of unnecessary op. prefixes and the
need to capture `auto& op = operators[index]` at the start of every
function.

I wanted to have subfunctions like
`YM2612::Channel::Operator::Envelope::run()`, etc but unfortunately,
pretty much all of the envelope, phase, pitch, level functions need to
access each other's state.
2017-03-03 21:45:07 +11:00
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.
2017-03-02 07:40:55 +11:00
Tim Allen 4c3f9b93e7 Update to v102r12 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - MD/PSG: fixed 68K bus Z80 status read address location
  - MS, GG, MD/PSG: channels post-decrement their counters, not
    pre-decrement [Cydrak]¹
  - MD/VDP: cache screen width registers once per scanline; screen
    height registers once per frame
  - MD/VDP: support 256-width display mode (used in Shining Force, etc)
  - MD/YM2612: implemented timers²
  - MD/YM2612: implemented 8-bit PCM DAC²
  - 68000: TRAP instruction should index the vector location by 32 (eg
    by 128 bytes), fixes Shining Force
  - nall: updated hex(), octal(), binary() functions to take uintmax
    instead of template<typename T> parameter³

¹: this one makes an incredible difference. Sie noticed that lots of
games set a period of 0, which would end up being a really long period
with pre-decrement. By fixing this, noise shows up in many more games,
and sounds way better in games even where it did before. You can hear
extra sound on Lunar - Sanposuru Gakuen's title screen, the noise in
Sonic The Hedgehog (Mega Drive) sounds better, etc.

²: this also really helps sound. The timers allow PSG music to play
back at the correct speed instead of playing back way too quickly. And
the PCM DAC lets you hear a lot of drum effects, as well as the
"Sega!!" sound at the start of Sonic the Hedgehog, and the infamous,
"Rise from your grave!" line from Altered Beast.

Still, most music on the Mega Drive comes from the FM channels, so
there's still not a whole lot to listen to.

I didn't implement Cydrak's $02c test register just yet. Sie wasn't 100%
certain on how the extended DAC bit worked, so I'd like to play it a
little conservative and get sound working, then I'll go back and add a
toggle or something to enable undocumented registers, that way we can
use that to detect any potential problems they might be causing.

³: unfortunately we lose support for using hex() on nall/arithmetic
types. If I have a const Pair& version of the function, then the
compiler gets confused on whether Natural<32> should use uintmax or
const Pair&, because compilers are stupid, and you can't have explicit
arguments in overloaded functions. So even though either function would
work, it just decides to error out instead >_>

This is actually really annoying, because I want hex() to be useful for
printing out nall/crypto keys and hashes directly.

But ... this change had to be made. Negative signed integers would crash
programs, and that was taking out my 68000 disassembler.
2017-02-27 19:45:51 +11:00
Tim Allen d76c0c7e82 Update to v102r08 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:

  - PCE: restructured VCE, VDCs to run one scanline at a time
  - PCE: bound VDCs to 1365x262 timing (in order to decouple the VDCs
    from the VCE)
  - PCE: the two changes above allow save states to function; also
    grants a minor speed boost
  - PCE: added cheat code support (uses 21-bit bus addressing; compare
    byte will be useful here)
  - 68K: fixed `mov *,ccr` to read two bytes instead of one [Cydrak]
  - Z80: emulated /BUSREQ, /BUSACK; allows 68K to suspend the Z80
    [Cydrak]
  - MD: emulated the Z80 executing instructions [Cydrak]
  - MD: emulated Z80 interrupts (triggered during each Vblank period)
    [Cydrak]
  - MD: emulated Z80 memory map [Cydrak]
  - MD: added stubs for PSG, YM2612 accesses [Cydrak]
  - MD: improved bus emulation [Cydrak]

The PCE core is pretty much ready to go. The only major feature missing
is FM modulation.

The Mega Drive improvements let us start to see the splash screens for
Langrisser II, Shining Force, Shining in the Darkness. I was hoping I
could get them in-game, but no such luck. My Z80 implementation is
probably flawed in some way ... now that I think about it, I believe I
missed the BusAPU::reset() check for having been granted access to the
Z80 first. But I doubt that's the problem.

Next step is to implement Cydrak's PSG core into the Master System
emulator. Once that's in, I'm going to add save states and cheat code
support to the Master System core.

Next, I'll add the PSG core into the Mega Drive. Then I'll add the
'easy' PCM part of the YM2612. Then the rest of the beastly YM2612 core.
Then finally, cap things off with save state and cheat code support.

Should be nearing a new release at that point.
2017-02-20 19:13:10 +11:00