byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/dsp returns with new iir/biquad.hpp and resampler/cubic.hpp files
- nall/queue.hpp added (simple ring buffer ... nall/vector wouldn't
cause too many moves with FIFO)
- audio streams now only buffer 20ms; so even if multiple audio streams
desync, latency can never exceed 20ms
- replaced blackman windwed sinc FIR hermite audio filter with transposed
direct form II biquadratic sixth-order IIR butterworth filter (better
attenuation of frequencies above 20KHz, faster, no need for decimation,
less code)
- put in experimental eight-tap echo filter (a lot better than what I
had before, but still rather weak)
- substantial cleanups to the SuperFX GSU processor core (slightly
faster, 479KB->100KB object file, 42.7KB->33.4KB source code size,
way less code duplication)
We'll definitely want to test the whole SuperFX library (not many games)
just to make sure there's no regressions caused by this one.
Not sure what I want to do with audio processing effects yet. I've always
really wanted lots of fun controls to customize audio, and now finally
with this new biquad filter, I can finally start implementing real
effects. For instance, an equalizer wouldn't be too complicated anymore.
The new reverb effect is still a poor man's version. I need to find human
readable source for implementing a comb-filter properly. I'm pretty sure
I can already treat nall::queue as an all-pass filter since all that
does is phase shift (fancy audio term for "delay audio"). What's really
going to be hard is figuring out how to expose user-friendly settings for
controlling it. It looks like you need a bunch of coprime coefficients,
and I don't think casual users are going to be able to hand-enter coprime
values to get the echo effect they want. I uh ... don't even know how
to calculate coprime values dynamically right now >_> But we're going
to have to, as they are correlated to the output sampling rate.
We'll definitely want to make some audio profiles so that users can
quickly select pre-configured themes that sound nice, but expose the
underlying coefficients so that they can tweak stuff to their liking. This
isn't just about higan, this is about me trying to learn digital signal
processing, so please don't be too upset about feature creep or anything
on this.
Anyway ... I'm having some difficulties with my audio right now. When
the reverb effect is enabled, there's a bunch of static on system
reset for just a moment. But this should not be possible. nall::queue
is initializing all previous reverb sample elements to 0.0. I don't
understand where static is coming in from. Further, we have the same
issue with both the windowed sinc and the biquad filters ... a bit of
a popping sound when starting a game. Any help tracking this down would
be appreciated.
There's also one really annoying issue ... I can't seem to do reverb
or volume adjustments with normalized samples. If I say "volume *= 0.5"
in higan/audio/audio.cpp line 68, it doesn't just halve the volume, it
adds a whole bunch of distortion. This makes absolutely zero sense to
me. The sample values are between 0.0 (mute) and 1.0 (full volume) here,
so multiplying a double by 0.5 shouldn't cause distortion. So right now,
I'm doing these adjustments with less precision after denormalizing back
to int16. Anyone ever see something like that? :/
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:
Changelog:
- ruby: if DirectSoundCreate fails (no sound device present), return
false from init instead of crashing
- nall: improved edge case return values for
(basename,pathname,dirname,...)
- nall: renamed file_system_object class to inode
- nall: varuint_t replaced with VariadicNatural; which contains
.bit,.bits,.byte ala Natural/Integer
- nall: fixed boolean compilation error on Windows
- WS: popa should not restore SP
- GBA: rewrote the CPU/APU cores to use the .bit,.bits functions;
removed registers.cpp from each
Note that the GBA changes are extremely major. This is about five hours
worth of extremely delicate work. Any slight errors could break
emulation in extremely bad ways. Let's hold off on extensive testing
until the next WIP, after I do the same to the PPU.
So far ... endrift's SOUNDCNT_X I/O test is failing, although that code
didn't change, so clearly I messed up SOUNDCNT_H somehow ...
To compile on Windows:
1. change nall/string/platform.hpp line 47 to
return slice(result, 0, 3);
2. change ruby/video.wgl.cpp line 72 to
auto lock(uint32_t*& data, uint& pitch, uint width, uint height) -> bool {
3. add this line to the very top of hiro/windows/header.cpp:
#define boolean FuckYouMicrosoft
byuu says:
Note: balanced/performance profiles still broken, sorry.
Changelog:
- added nall/GNUmakefile unique() function; used on linking phase of
higan
- added nall/unique_pointer
- target-tomoko and {System}::Video updated to use
unique_pointer<ClassName> instead of ClassName* [1]
- locate() updated to search multiple paths [2]
- GB: pass gekkio's if_ie_registers and boot_hwio-G test ROMs
- FC, GB, GBA: merge video/ into the PPU cores
- ruby: fixed ~AudioXAudio2() typo
[1] I expected this to cause new crashes on exit due to changing the
order of destruction of objects (and deleting things that weren't
deleted before), but ... so far, so good. I guess we'll see what crops
up, especially on OS X (which is already crashing for unknown reasons on
exit.)
[2] right now, the search paths are: programpath(), {configpath(),
"higan/"}, {localpath(), "higan/"}; but we can add as many more as we
want, and we can also add platform-specific versions.
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:
- replaced popen() with execvp() / CreateProcess()
- suppressed (hid) controllers with no mappable inputs from the input
settings panel
This gets rid of the window flashing when loading games with
higan+icarus. And hiding of empty devices should be a huge usability
improvement, especially since "None" was appearing at the top of the
list before for the SNES.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- int_t<bits> replaced with Integer<bits>
- uint_t<bits> replaced with Natural<bits>
- fixed "Synchronize Audio" menu option that broke recently
- all of sfc/performance ported to "auto function() -> return;" syntax
With this WIP, all of higan is finally ported over to the new function
declaration syntax. Thank the gods.
There's still going to be periodic disruption for diffs from porting
over signed->int, unsigned->uint, and whatever we come up with for the
new Natural<> and Integer<> classes. But the worst of it's behind us
now.
byuu says:
After 20 months of development, higan v095 is released at long last!
The most notable feature is vastly improved Game Boy Advance emulation.
With many thanks to endrift, Cydrak, Jonas Quinn and jchadwick, this
release contains substantially improved CPU timings and many bugfixes.
Being one of only two GBA emulators to offer ROM prefetch emulation,
higan is very near mGBA in terms of accuracy, and far ahead of all
others. As a result of these fixes, compatibility is also much higher
than in v094.
There are also several improvements to SNES emulation. Most
significantly is support for mid-scanline changes to the background mode
in the accuracy profile.
Due to substantial changes to the user interface library used by higan,
this release features yet again a brand-new UI. With the exception of
video shaders and NSS DIP switch selection, it is at feature-parity with
the previous UI. It also offers some new features that v094 lacked.
The cheat code database has also been updated to the latest version by
mightymo.
byuu says:
I'll post more detailed changes later, but basically:
- fixed Baldur's Gate bug
- guess if no flash ROM ID present (fixes Magical Vacation, many many
others)
- nall cleanups
- sfc/cartridge major cleanups
- bsxcartridge/"bsx" renamed to mcc/"mcc" after the logic chip it uses
(consistency with SGB/ICD2)
- ... and more!
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:
Note: for Windows users, please go to nall/intrinsics.hpp line 60 and
correct the typo from "DISPLAY_WINDOW" to "DISPLAY_WINDOWS" before
compiling, otherwise things won't work at all.
This will be a really major WIP for the core SNES emulation, so please
test as thoroughly as possible.
I rewrote the 65816 CPU core's dispatcher from a jump table to a switch
table. This was so that I could pass class variables as parameters to
opcodes without crazy theatrics.
With that, I killed the regs.r[N] stuff, the flag_t operator|=, &=, ^=
stuff, and all of the template versions of opcodes.
I also removed some stupid pointless flag tests in xcn and pflag that
would always be true.
I sure hope that AWJ is happy with this; because this change was so that
my flag assignments and branch tests won't need to build regs.P into
a full 8-bit variable anymore.
It does of course incur a slight performance hit when you pass in
variables by-value to functions, but it should help with binary size
(and thus cache) by reducing a lot of extra functions. (I know I could
have used template parameters for some things even with a switch table,
but chose not to for the aforementioned reasons.)
Overall, it's about a ~1% speedup from the previous build. The CPU core
instructions were never a bottleneck, but I did want to fix the P flag
building stuff because that really was a dumb mistake v_v'
byuu says:
Okay yeah, lots of SNES coprocessor games were horribly broken. They
should be fixed now with the below changes:
Old syntax:
auto programROM = root["rom[0]/name"].text();
auto dataROM = root["rom[1]/name"].text();
load_memory(root["ram[0]"]);
New syntax:
auto rom = root.find("rom");
auto ram = root.find("ram");
auto programROM = rom(0)["name"].text();
auto dataROM = rom(1)["name"].text();
load_memory(ram(0));
Since I'm now relying on the XShm driver, which is multi-threaded, I'm
now compiling higan with -fopenmp. On FreeBSD, this requires linking
with -Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib -Wl,-rpath=/usr/local/lib/gcc49 to get
the right version of GOMP.
This gives a pretty nice speed boost for XShm, I go from around 101fps
to 111fps at 4x scale on the accuracy profile. The combination of
inlining the accuracy-PPU and parallelizing the XShm renderer about
evenly compensates now for the ~20% CPU overclock I gave up a while ago.
The WIP also has some other niceties from the newer version of nall.
Most noticeably, cheat code database searching is now instantaneous. No
more 3-second stall.
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:
Lots of changes this time around. FreeBSD stability and compilation is
still a work in progress.
FreeBSD 10 + Clang 3.3 = 108fps
FreeBSD 10 + GCC 4.7 = 130fps
Errata 1: I've been fighting that god-damned endian.h header for the
past nine WIPs now. The above WIP isn't building now because FreeBSD
isn't including headers before using certain types, and you end up with
a trillion error messages. So just delete all the endian.h includes from
nall/intrinsics.hpp to build.
Errata 2: I was trying to match g++ and g++47, so I used $(findstring
g++,$(compiler)), which ends up also matching clang++. Oops. Easy fix,
put Clang first and then else if g++ next. Not ideal, but oh well. All
it's doing for now is declaring -fwrapv twice, so you don't have to fix
it just yet. Probably just going to alias g++="g++47" and do exact
matching instead.
Errata 3: both OpenGL::term and VideoGLX::term are causing a core dump
on BSD. No idea why. The resources are initialized and valid, but
releasing them crashes the application.
Changelog:
- nall/Makefile is more flexible with overriding $(compiler), so you can
build with GCC or Clang on BSD (defaults to GCC now)
- PLATFORM_X was renamed to PLATFORM_XORG, and it's also declared with
PLATFORM_LINUX or PLATFORM_BSD
- PLATFORM_XORG probably isn't the best name ... still thinking about
what best to call LINUX|BSD|SOLARIS or ^(WINDOWS|MACOSX)
- fixed a few legitimate Clang warning messages in nall
- Compiler::VisualCPP is ugly as hell, renamed to Compiler::CL
- nall/platform includes nall/intrinsics first. Trying to move away from
testing for _WIN32, etc directly in all files. Work in progress.
- nall turns off Clang warnings that I won't "fix", because they aren't
broken. It's much less noisy to compile with warnings on now.
- phoenix gains the ability to set background and foreground colors on
various text container widgets (GTK only for now.)
- rewrote a lot of the MSU1 code to try and simplify it. Really hope
I didn't break anything ... I don't have any MSU1 test ROMs handy
- SNES coprocessor audio is now mixed as sclamp<16>(system_sample
+ coprocessor_sample) instead of sclamp<16>((sys + cop) / 2)
- allows for greater chance of aliasing (still low, SNES audio is
quiet), but doesn't cut base system volume in half anymore
- fixed Super Scope and Justifier cursor colors
- use input.xlib instead of input.x ... allows Xlib input driver to be
visible on Linux and BSD once again
- make install and make uninstall must be run as root again; no longer
using install but cp instead for BSD compatibility
- killed $(DESTDIR) ... use make prefix=$DESTDIR$prefix instead
- you can now set text/background colors for the loki console via (eg):
- settings.terminal.background-color 0x000000
- settings.terminal.foreground-color 0xffffff
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:
Commands can be prefixed with: (cpu|smp|ppu|dsp|apu|vram|oam|cgram)/ to
set their source. Eg "vram/hex 0800" or "smp/breakpoints.append execute
ffc0"; default is cpu.
These overlap a little bit in odd ways, but that's just the way the SNES
works: it's not a very orthogonal system. CPU is both a processor and
the main bus (ROM, RAM, WRAM, etc), APU is the shared memory by the
SMP+DSP (eg use it to catch writes from either chip); PPU probably won't
ever be used since it's broken down into three separate buses (VRAM,
OAM, CGRAM), but DSP could be useful for tracking bugs like we found in
Koushien 2 with the DSP echo buffer corrupting SMP opcodes. Technically
the PPU memory pools are only ever tripped by the CPU poking at them, as
the PPU doesn't ever write.
I now have run.for, run.to, step.for, step.to. The difference is that
run only prints the next instruction after running, whereas step prints
all of the instructions along the way as well. run.to acts the same as
"step over" here. Although it's not quite as nice, since you have to
specify the address of the next instruction.
Logging the Field/Vcounter/Hcounter on instruction listings now, good
for timing information.
Added in the tracer mask, as well as memory export, as well as
VRAM/OAM/CGRAM/SMP read/write/execute breakpoints, as well as an APU
usage map (it tracks DSP reads/writes separately, although I don't
currently have debugger callbacks on DSP accesses just yet.)
Have not hooked up actual SMP debugging just yet, but I plan to soon.
Still thinking about how I want to allow / block interleaving of
instructions (terminal output and tracing.)
So ... remaining tasks at this point:
- full SMP debugging
- CPU+SMP interleave support
- aliases
- hotkeys
- save states (will be kind of tricky ... will have to suppress
breakpoints during synchronization, or abort a save in a break event.)
- keep track of window geometry between runs
byuu says:
I've completely redone the ethos InputManager and ruby to work on
HID::Device objects instead of one giant scancode pool.
Currently only the udev driver supports the changes to ruby, so only
Linux users will be able to compile and run this WIP build.
The nice thing about the new system is that it's now possible to
uniquely identify controllers, so if you swap out gamepads, you won't
end up with it working but with all the mappings all screwed up. Since
higan lets you map multiple physical inputs to one emulated input, you
can now configure your keyboard and multiple gamepads to the same
emulated input, and then just use whatever controller you want.
Because USB gamepad makers failed to provide unique serial#s with each
controller, we have to limit the mapping to specific USB ports.
Otherwise, we couldn't distinguish two otherwise identical gamepads. So
basically your computer USB ports act like real game console input port
numbers. Which is kind of neat, I guess.
And the really nice thing about the new system is that we now have the
capability to support hotplugging input devices. I haven't yet added
this to any drivers, but I'm definitely going to add it to udev for v094
official.
Finally, with the device ID (vendor ID + product ID) exposed, we gain
one last really cool feature that we may be able to develop more in the
future. Say we created a joypad.bml file to include with higan. In it,
we'd store the Xbox 360 controller, and pre-defined button mappings for
each emulated system. So if higan detects you have an Xbox 360
controller, you can just plug it in and use it. Even better, we can
clearly specify the difference between triggers and analog axes, and
name each individual input. So you'd see "Xbox 360 Gamepad #1: Left
Trigger" instead of higan v093's "JP0::Axis2.Hi"
Note: for right now, ethos' input manager isn't filtering the device IDs
to look pretty. So you're going to see a 64-bit hex value for a device
ID right now instead of something like Joypad#N for now.
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.
Tim Allen