Release notes for 1.87February 4, 2008

* Added the new Standard theme to the Shadow skin.

* Fixed many bugs in the *beta* video capture system, including support for Direct3D 7 games.

* Fixed a bug that could crash a game when using buggy skins and launching the game.

* Improved the icons for group voice chat.

* Fixed a problem that could cause balloon tooltips to flash for a long time when coming out of game (or standby mode).

* Temporarily disabled the World of Warcraft infoview because it could hang Xfire for a period of time; we plan to restore it next release.

* Added Xfire In-Game 2.0 support including the mouse to the following games:

18 Wheels of Steel Across America 18 Wheels of Steel Convoy 18 Wheels of Steel Haulin 18 Wheels of Steel Pedal to the Metal

Birth of America Championship Manager 2007 City of Heroes City of Heroes EU

City of Heroes Test Server City of Villains City of Villains EU Condition Zero: Deleted Scenes

Cricket 07 Day of Defeat 1.3 Deathmatch Classic (Steam) Defcon

Deus Ex Digital Paintball Dungeon Siege Earth's Special Forces

FIFA 07 Firearms Half-Life (Steam) Half-Life 2: Deathmatch

Half-Life 2: Substance Live for Speed Natural Selection Pirates of the Caribbean

Prey Pro Evolution Soccer 6 Quake 4 Ricochet (Steam)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Chernobyl SAS Into the Lion's Den Scrapland Shattered Union

Sven Co-op Tactical Ops Team Fortress Classic (Steam) The Specialists

X-Men Legends 2

* New games supported:

PKRCasino, Twelve Sky, Regnum Online, Beyond Divinity, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men Demo, Hard To Be a God Demo, Indiana Jones and the Emperors Tomb, Grand Theft Auto, Peggle Deluxe, Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Battlestar Galactica, Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, Dawn of War: Soulstorm Demo, Teewars, Metal Gear Solid, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Divine Divinity, Hard Truck: 18 Wheels of Steel, Stranded II, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Wild Metal Country, GGPO.net, and Jewel Quest.

Xfire Website

SNES emulator

bsnes v0.028 has been released. The major focus of this release was cleaning up the code even more, and greatly enhancing the Linux port to be an equal with the Windows port.

 

For Linux users, please note that the safest drivers were chosen by default, rather than the most full-featured drivers. The active driver can be changed by editing settings->configuration->advanced->system.(video, audio, input), and then restarting bsnes. You can also edit the drivers by hand, by editing ~/.bsnes/bsnes.cfg

 

Available Linux drivers are: video ("opengl", "xv", "sdl" (default)), audio ("openal", "oss", "ao" (default)), input ("sdl" (default), "x"). In particular, the SDL video driver and libao audio driver are very poor performers. The SDL video driver lacks hardware accelerated scaling, and runs tremendously slow. The libao audio driver has horrendous, ~150ms+ latency.

 

OpenGL is the best video driver, but it requires OpenGL graphics libraries to be installed to use. These do not typically come with open-source video drivers. The Xv driver will at least allow hardware accelerated scaling, offering a tremendous speedup, but some ATI drivers have poor (or even missing) X-Video implementations.

 

OpenAL is the best audio driver, but ALSA works very poorly with it. OSS4 works far better with the OpenAL driver. The OSS driver has the lowest latency (~15-20ms), but requires the most CPU power. It too has problems when using the ALSA emulation layer.

 

While the SDL input driver is superior to the X driver (and is the default), if your joypad fails to work correctly and prevents you from mapping any keys (highly unlikely), you can always revert to the keyboard-only X driver.

 

At any rate, I strongly encourage you to try out each driver and choose the ones that work best for you.

 

Changelog:

* OpenGL (with hardware filter mode support) and SDL video drivers added to Linux port

* OpenAL (with speed regulation disable support) and OSS audio drivers added to Linux port [Nach]

* SDL input driver (with joypad support) added to Linux port

* Emulator pause option added

* Added option to select behavior of bsnes when idle: allow input, ignore input or pause emulator

* Added support to remap common GUI actions to key/joypad presses on the "Input Configuration" screen

* bsnes will now clamp the video output size when it is larger than the screen resolution

* GUI library has been enhanced, and renamed to hiro

* Fullscreen mode now always centers video, rather than approximates

* Fullscreen mode now works correctly on Linux/Openbox

* Extra layer of abstraction in src/ui has been removed, as GUI lib unifies all ports anyway

* Video, audio and input drivers unified into standard library, named ruby

* All custom headers have been merged into a new template library, named nall

* Makefile rewritten, vastly improved. Allows quick toggling of compiled-in drivers

* Makefile: all object files now placed in /src/obj, binary placed in /

* libco greatly enhanced, no longer requires an assembler to build [byuu, blargg, Nach]

* libco SJLJ driver added; bsnes should now build on any Unix-derivative now (Solaris, OS X, PS3, etc) [Nach]

* Fixed register $213e.d4 PPU1 open bus behavior [zones]

* Windows port will not activate screensaver while bsnes is running [Nightcrawler]

* Visual C++ target no longer requires stdint.h

* And lots more -- mostly code refactoring related

>> Get it HERE.

EMULATORS

=========

Official Source Patch and Fix patch

MameUI32 / 64 0.122.8.1

MAME32XT 0.122u8fix

MAMEUIFX32 0.122u8 FIX

SDLMAME

SDLMAME for Ubuntu

MAME Plus!

DATS

====

Story.dat / mamescore.ini / default.el

Catlist.ini

AGEMAME

=======

Patch

NOTES

=====

Updated to MAME 0.122u8 - MAMEUI 0.122u8

 

- Fixed MAME Testers bug Jackalc0122u7Yel.

- Fixed MAME Testers bug Macross2079u1Gre.

- Fixed official 0.122u8 bug in TAITO_F3 driver. (Some games don't boot)

- Fixed MAME Testers bug Elecyoyo0121u2Yel.

- Fixed missing some sound effects in IREM M62 games.

MAME Plus! 0.122u8

* [MESS] fixed PCE controller [Emuman]

* [CPS1] added kodh [Creamymami]

* sync with 0.122u8 [xvi]

* updated Japanese mameinfo (0.122u7 1/30) [mame e2j]

* [MESS] sync with svn 1640 [Emuman]

* catlist v0.122u7 [s_bastian]

* sync with 0.122u7 [xvi]

* updated mame32jp.lst (080118) [mamelist jp]

- ######## LATEST EMULATION NEWS WILL APPEAR BELOW ######## -

Commodore Plus/4 emulator

Changes in version 1.2.5.1

--------------------------

 

* the full speed mode (Alt+W) now restores the original speed setting when turned off

* added a "go to program counter" button to the disassembler in the debugger

* some new utilities have been added

* a few minor bugs have been fixed

>> Get it HERE.