byuu says:
Absolutely major improvements to the WS/C emulation today.
Changelog: (all WS/C related)
- fixed channel 3 sweep pitch adjustment
- fixed channel 3 sweep value sign extension
- removed errant channel 5 speed setting (not what's really going on)
- fixed sign extension on channel 5 samples
- improved DAC mixing of all five audio channels
- fixed r26 regression with PPU timing loop
- fixed sprite windowing behavior (sprite attribute flag is window mode;
not window enable)
- added per-scanline register latching to the PPU
- IRQs should terminate HLT even when the IRQ enable register bits are
clear
- fixed PALMONO reads
- added blur emulation
- added color emulation (based on GBA, so it heavily desaturates colors;
not entirely correct, but it helps a lot)
- no longer decimating audio to 24KHz; running at full 3.072MHz through
the windowed sinc filter [1]
- cleaned up PPU portRead / portWrite functions significantly
- emulated a weird quirk as mentioned by trap15 regarding timer
frequency writes enabling said timers [2]
- emulated LCD_CTRL sleep bit; screen can now be disabled (always draws
black in this case for now)
- improved OAM caching; but it's still disabled because it causes huge
amounts of sprite glitches (unsure why)
- fixed rendering of sprites that wrap around the screen edges back to
the top/left of the display
- emulated keypad interrupts
- icarus: detect orientation bit in game header
- higan: use orientation setting in manifest to set default screen
rotation
[1] the 24KHz -> 3.072MHz sound change is huge. Sound is substantially
improved over the previous WIPs. It does come at a pretty major speed
penalty, though. This is the highest frequency of any system in higan
running through an incredibly (amazing, yet) demanding sinc resampler.
Frame rate dropped from around 240fps to 150fps with the sinc filter on.
If you choose a different audio filter, you'll get most of that speed
back, but audio will sound worse again.
[2] we aren't sure if this is correct hardware behavior or not. It seems
to very slightly help Magical Drop, but not much.
The blur emulation is brutal. It's absolutely required for Riviera's
translucency simulation of selected menu items, but it causes serious
headaches due to the WS's ~75hz refresh rate running on ~60hz monitors
without vsync. It's probably best to leave it off and just deal with the
awful flickering on Riviera's menu options.
Overall, WS/C emulation is starting to get quite usable indeed. Couple
of major bugs that I'd really like to get fixed before releasing it,
though. But they're getting harder and harder to fix ...
Major Bugs:
- Final Fantasy battle background music is absent. Sound effects still
work. Very weird.
- Final Fantasy IV scrolling during airship flight opening sequence is
horribly broken. Scrolls one screen at a time.
- Magical Drop flickers like crazy in-game. Basically unplayable like
this.
- Star Hearts character names don't appear in the smaller dialog box
that pops up.
Minor Bugs:
- Occasional flickering during Riviera opening scenes.
- One-frame flicker of Leda's sprite at the start of the first stage.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS: fixed 8-bit sign-extended imul (fixes Star Hearts completely,
Final Fantasy world map)
- WS: fixed rcl/rcr carry shifting (fixes Crazy Climber, others)
- WS: added sound DMA emulation (Star Hearts rain sound for one example)
- WS: added OAM caching, but it's forced every line for now because
otherwise there are too many sprite glitches
- WS: use headphoneEnable bit instead of speakerEnable bit (fixes muted
audio in games)
- WS: various code cleanups (I/O mapping, audio channel naming, etc)
The hypervoice channel doesn't sound all that great just yet. But I'm
not sure how it's supposed to sound. I need a better example of some
more complex music.
What's left are some unknown register status bits (especially in the
sound area), keypad interrupts, RTC emulation, CPU prefetch emulation.
And then it's all just bugs. Lots and lots of bugs that need to be
fixed.
EDIT: oops, bad typo in the code.
ws/ppu/ppu.cpp line 20: change range(256) to range(224).
Also, delete the r.speed stuff from channel5.cpp to make the rain sound
a lot better in Star Hearts. Apparently that's outdated and not what the
bits really do.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- WS: added HblankTimer and VblankTimer IRQs; although they don't appear
to have any effect on any games that use them :/
- WS: added sound emulation; works perfectly in some games (eg Riviera);
is completely silent in most games (eg GunPey)
The sound emulation only partially supports the hypervoice (headphone
only) channel. I need to implement the SDMA before it'll actually do
anything useful. I'm a bit confused about how exactly things work. It
looks like the speaker volume shift and clamp only applies to speaker
mode and not headphone mode, which is very weird. Then there's the
software possibility of muting the headphones and/or the speaker.
Preferably, I want to leave the emulator always in headphone mode for
the extra audio channel. If there are games that force-mute the
headphones, but not speakers, then I may need to force headphones back
on but with the hypervoice channel disabled. I guess we'll see how
things go.
Rough guess is probably that the channels default to enabled after the
IPLROM, and games aren't bothering to manually enable them or something.
Tim Allen