**Known issues:**
- button menus do not show up with Windows Vista/7 theme
- snesreader's multi-file archive dialog box doesn't redraw itself on
Windows when you choose different games
Windows Qt is buggy as always. Nothing we can do but keep waiting. I'm
also going to hold off on including pixel shaders until Direct3D PS
support is in. It's just going to annoy the 98% of users who can't use
them if I include them now. Yes, Windows OpenGL support is that bad.
Anyway, from v058 wip10, the following changes were made:
- cheat code editor grays out the slot#s when they are empty. I can't
put "Empty" in the text boxes for various reasons.
- added "Clear Selected" button and multi-selection support to cheat
editor. This is meant to quickly erase all slots.
- settings and tools windows start at 600x360 when bsnes.cfg is not
found / empty
- fixed the emulationSpeed section to start with input. instead of
config.
- open-folder concept requires the folders to end in .sfc to work now,
once again doesn't care what the ROM inside is named
(this is meant to mimic OS X .app folders)
- 21fx API extended to map to $2200, $2201 for now; mostly as a test
for A-bus access (21fx->VRAM DMA, etc)
(old $21fx registers remain for now)
I intend to release this on Saturday as-is even if a few small bugs
are reported. But if there's something major we can make another RC
build.
Starting with this release, I wish to take bsnes in a new direction. It has always excelled in accuracy, as the only SNES emulator to offer a full 100% compatibility rate with all known commercial software. But over the years, it has also gained an impressive array of features and enhancements not found anywhere else. It is also the only actively developed SNES emulator with rapid, periodic releases. Its only achilles heel is the steep system requirements, which is quickly being overcome by aggressive new optimizations and steadily-increasing hardware speeds.
In an effort to make bsnes even more accessible to everyone, starting with this release, bsnes is now fully open source software, licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. I would like to work toward positioning bsnes as a truly general use emulator, and would welcome any help with this.
Specifically, I am looking for an interested Debian maintainer to package bsnes for Linux users; as well as for anyone interested in helping to optimize and improve bsnes as a whole. It also seems that many still do not know about bsnes, I'd appreciate advice and help on spreading the word. Please leave a message on my forum if you are interested.
I would also welcome and support any forks that target specific areas: a speed-oriented version, a tool-assisted speedrun version, netplay bindings, and so on. As part of this targeting, I've also released a custom debugger-enabled version, which trades a bit of speed in turn for best-in-class debugging capabilities.
Please check back here over the following few days, I'll be writing up documentation explaining all of the various unique features of bsnes, as well as detailed compilation instructions for programmers.
Changelog:
- corrected a small bug in HDMA processing; fixes College Football '97 flickering
- corrected ROMBR and PBR SuperFX register masking; fixes Voxel demo [MooglyGuy]
- DSP-4 driver AI bug fixed [Jonas Quinn]
- added save state support to the S-DD1, S-RTC, DSP-1, DSP-2 and ST-0010 co-processors
- fixed a freeze issue when the S-SMP encounters STOP and SLEEP opcodes
- Cx4 save states no longer need floating-point values, and are thus fully portable now
- added new custom file loading dialog; allows non-modal usage, screenshot previews and ROM info summary, among many other benefits
- added support for IPS soft-patching
- added blargg's File_Extractor library
- added support for archives compressed using 7-zip, RAR and BZip2; which is in addition to existing support for Gzip, ZIP and JMA
- state manager now properly updates the timestamp column on saves [FitzRoy]
- added OpenGL renderer to OS X port
- fixed system beep issue with keyboard input on OS X port
- fixed menubar visibility issue on OS X port
- fixed a Display handle leak on Linux port [snzzbk]
- X-video driver now releases SHM memory properly upon exit [emon]
- fixed Direct3D rendering issue that was blurring video on some cards [Fes]
- enhanced window positioning code for all platforms
- debugger is now GUI-driven instead of via command-line
- memory hex editor is now fully usable
- added PPU video RAM viewer to debugger
- added S-CPU and S-SMP tracing capabilities to debugger
- Qt version upgraded to 4.5.2, and compiled with optimizations enabled; runs faster but makes the binary slightly larger
- too many code cleanups to list
The most notable feature for this release is the addition of SuperFX support. This enables an additional eight commercial games, and two unreleased betas, to run with full support. Most notably of these would be Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island and Starfox. Though timing is not quite perfect just yet, there should be no known issues with any titles at the time of this release. That means there should only be two official, commercially-released titles that are not compatible with bsnes at this time: Quick-move Shogi Match with Nidan Rank-holder Morita 1 and 2 (using the ST011 and ST018 co-processors, respectively.)
SuperFX support was the work of many people. GIGO was a great help by providing the source code to his SuperFX emulator (for reference; the implementation in bsnes is my own design), _Demo_ was very helpful in getting Starfox to work properly, and Jonas Quinn provided roughly a half-dozen very important bug fixes that affected nearly every SuperFX game. Without them, this release would not be possible. So please do thank them if you appreciate SuperFX support in bsnes.
Please note that SuperFX emulation is very demanding. I hate to have to repeat this, but once again: bsnes is a reference emulator. It exists to better understand the SNES hardware. It is written in such a manner as to be friendly to other developers (both emulator authors and game programmers), and the findings are meant to help improve other emulators. As far as I know, bsnes is the first emulator to fully support all SuperFX caching mechanisms (instruction cache, both pixel caches, ROM and RAM buffering caches, ...); as well as many other obscure features, such as full support for ROM / RAM access toggling between the SNES and SuperFX CPUs, and multiplier overhead timing. By emulating these, I was able to discover what additional components are needed to emulate Dirt Racer and Power Slide, two titles that no emulator has yet been able to run (they aren't very good games, you weren't missing much.) It should be possible to backport these fixes to faster emulators now.
That said, with a Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3GHz, on average I get ~100fps in Super Mario World 2, ~95fps in Starfox and ~85fps in Doom. Compare this to ~165fps in Zelda 3, a game that does not use the SuperFX chip. My binary releases also target 32-bit x86 architecture. For those capable of building 64-bit binaries, especially Linux users, that should provide an additional ~10% speedup. Be sure to profile the application if you build it yourself.
Lastly on the SuperFX front, note that Starfox 2 is fully playable, but that most images floating around have corrupted headers. I do not attempt to repair bad headers, so these images will not work. Please either use NSRT on the Japanese version, or use Gideon Zhi's English fan translation patch, if you are having trouble running this title.
With that out the way, a few other improvements have been made to this release: xinput1_3.dll is no longer required for the Windows port (though you will need it if you want to use an Xbox 360 controller), the video drivers in ruby now allocate the smallest texture size possible for blitting video, and the code has been updated with preliminary compilation support for Mac OS X. Note that I will not be releasing binaries for this: it is primarily meant for developers and for porting my other libraries to the platform. Richard Bannister maintains a much better OS X port with full EE support and a native Apple GUI that follows their interface guidelines much better than a Qt port ever could. He has also synced the Mac port with this release. You can find a link to that in the bsnes download section.
A new release quite a bit faster than I was expecting, but a lot has changed. Most importantly is a new Windows input driver, "RawInput". The downside is that this makes bsnes require at least Windows XP, as Windows 2000 and earlier lack RawInput support. The upside is that input from multiple keyboards and mice can be distinguished from each other — very useful for dual-Justifier support in Lethal Enforcers. Users of previous versions of bsnes will need to manually select the new driver via Settings->Configuration->Advanced->Input driver, and will need to re-map all assigned input keys, including the default user interface hotkeys. Or alternatively, delete the configuration file under %APPDATA%\.bsnes or ~/.bsnes.
Also new is an XInput driver, which avoids the DirectInput driver limitation of being unable to distinguish the two shoulder trigger buttons. This makes bsnes require DirectX 9.0c or later for the necessary drivers. Note that Windows Vista SP0 does not ship with these, so if you haven't installed it yet, you'll need to do so. This driver is part of the "RawInput" driver mentioned above.
This part is important: if you receive an error regarding xinput1_3.dll, you need to download and install the DirectX 9.0c run-time.
For those on Windows 2000, or without DirectX 9.0c, it is still possible to compile and run bsnes with the older DirectInput driver only; but I won't be providing a binary myself for this — at least not at this time.
More bad news for some: hiro, my Win32 / GTK+ API wrapper, has been discontinued and removed from the source tree for this release. Qt 4.5.0+ is now required for the user interface. Very sorry to the Linux distros that do not have packages for QT 4.5 yet. You'll need to continue with v041 for now.
- eliminated S-DD1 DMA enslavement to the S-CPU; this allows the S-DD1 to behave more like the real chip, and it also simplifies the S-CPU DMA module
- eliminated S-PPU enslavement to the S-CPU; all processor cores now run independently of each other
- added cycle-level S-PPU timing for OAM address reset and OBSEL; fixes scanline glitches in Mega Lo Mania and Winter Olympics
- removed ppu.hack.* settings; as they are no longer needed due to above changes
- corrected VRAM tiledata cache bug; fixes Super Buster Bros v1.0 reset glitch
- added memory export and trace logging key bindings to user interface
- removed WAV logging (to trim the emulation core)
- embedded readme and license texts inside executable
- simplified S-CPU, S-SMP flag register handling
- source code cleanup for S-CPU timing module
- GUI-Linux: added style improvements to the listbox and combo box controls
- GUI-Linux: finally added filetype filter support to the file open dialog
- GUI-all: shrunk configuration panel [FitzRoy]
- GUI-all: modified paths panel descriptions for clarity [FitzRoy]
- Core: simplified CPU / SMP flag calculations
- Added ALSA audio output driver to Linux port [Nach]
- Improved font handling for Windows and Linux ports
- Greatly cleaned up the user interface
- Windows port now uses Unicode instead of ANSI
- Added localization support
- Config and locale files can now be placed inside bsnes executable directory for single-user mode, if desired
- Fixed crashing bug with HQ2x on Linux/amd64 port [RedDwarf, Nach]
- Hid "Power Cycle" option by default, as it is too similar to "Reset"
- Slighty tweaked program icon [FitzRoy]
- Minor code cleanups -- replaced union bitfields with templates, improved memory allocation, etc
New release posted. Perhaps the most important change was fixing a bug in the Windows port when the keyboard was used for input. For some reason, the IsDialogMessage() function I use for tab key support was causing the main window to emit the Windows error beep every time a key was pressed after a few minutes of use. I do not know why this is, so I have simply disabled the tab key support to prevent this from happening.
Other than that, lots of polishing went into this release. UPS soft-patching will work with the recently released Der Langrisser v1.02 translation, for those curious. You can also store the UPS patches in GZ/ZIP/JMA support, and bsnes will detect this and decompress the patches first. Use the same ".ups" file extension for this, as it detects via file header.
If you wish to try out the newly added OpenGL support: start bsnes, go to Settings->Configuration->Advanced and set system.video to "wgl" (or "glx" for Linux users), and then restart the emulator. Please bear in mind that ATI's OpenGL drivers are an industry-wide joke, so I'd only recommend trying this on an nVidia or Intel video card.
Changelog:
- Fixed bug and re-enabled HDMA bus sync delays
- Emulated newly discovered IRQ timing edge case
- Optimized offset-per-tile rendering
- Added state-machine implementation of S-DSP core, ~5% speedup
- Added SPC7110 detection, will now warn that this chip is unsupported
- Fixed very annoying Windows port OS beeping noise when using keyboard for input
- Linux port will now save most recent folder when no default ROM path is selected
- Added OpenGL rendering support to Windows port [krom]
- Fixed Direct3D pixel mode scaling bug [krom, sinamas, VG]
- Improved SNES controller graphic [FitzRoy]
- Added UPS (not IPS) soft-patching support; UPS patch must be made against unheadered ROM
- As always, cleaned up source code a bit
A new version of bsnes has been released. It contains a few minor emulation fixes, as well as user interface improvements. Behind the scenes, the source has been cleaned up more in preparation for running the CPU and PPU (video processor) separately from each other (eg with no enslavement.) This is required for implementing a clock cycle based PPU renderer.
- Greatly improved invalid DMA transfer behavior, should be nearly perfect now
- Major code cleanup -- most importantly, almost all PPU timing-related settings moved back to PPU, from CPU
- Added option to auto-detect file type by inspecting file headers rather than file extensions
- Rewrote video filter system to move it out of the emulation core -- HQ2x and Scale2x will work even in hires and interlace modes now, 50% scanline filter added
- Re-added bsnes window icon
- Added new controller graphic when assigning joypad keys [FitzRoy]
- Redundant "Advanced" panel settings which can be configured via the GUI are no longer displayed
- Improved speed regulation settings
- XP and Vista themes will now apply to bsnes controls
- Added "Path Settings" window to allow easy selection of default file directories
- Tab key now mostly works throughout most of the GUI (needs improvement)
- Main window will no longer disappear when setting a video multipler which results in a window size larger than the current desktop resolution
- Added two new advanced options: one to control GUI window opacity, and one to adjust the statusbar text
