SNES emulator

2007-06-03 - bsnes v0.020 released

 

Five months and 43 WIP releases in the making, today I am releasing bsnes v0.020. I'd really like to express my thanks to blargg, for he has written a new S-DSP emulator that is an impressive 32 times more precise than all existing S-DSP emulators. It is now bus-accurate, and should produce bit-perfect sound output to that of a real SNES, excepting very minor, very extreme edge cases. Not only did he do this, he went out of his way to develop a special version exclusively for bsnes to ease licensing concerns and take advantage of bsnes' unique features, notably cothreads. I can't thank him enough. Unfortunately, bsnes has taken a ~10% speed hit over v0.019 by using this new S-DSP emulator, but I must stress the speed hit is entirely due to the way bsnes is implemented. blargg's standalone S-DSP emulator is very, very fast. Anyone is free to take a look at his S-DSP emulator, as he has released it as open source under the LGPL, by visiting his homepage.

 

Unfortunately, the new cross-platform UI is not entirely finished. Some sacrifices had to be made to support libui. Specifically, the following features are missing from v0.019, but will hopefully be added back in future releases:

 

* Fullscreen support

* Input Configuration panel cannot capture joypad input. Joypad support is still present, but it must be mapped manually through the Advanced panel or through editing bsnes.cfg by hand

* The Cheat Code Editor is missing, but cht files can still be used from bsnes v0.019, and created by hand

Sufami Turbo support is not accessible from the UI

* The UI on Windows is slightly less polished due to compromises to allow the UI to be readable on Linux.

 

I am sorry for the rough edges listed above, but I wanted to get a new release out, as it has been over five months since the last release, and I really want the world to be able to experience blargg's new S-DSP emulator.

 

 

Changelog:

 

* Added blargg's new S-DSP emulator, runs at 1.024mhz. Many thanks to blargg for this, as this puts all portions of SNES emulation except for the S-PPU at bus-accuracy

* blargg's S-DSP core fixes bugs in both Koushien 2 (J) and Toy Story (U)

* Corrected all S-SMP cycle timings to be hardware accurate. Thanks to blargg for creating an amazing test ROM that tested every possible opcode

* Corrected S-CPU wai instruction timing, fixes Mortal Kombat II

* Reverted HDMA sync emulation once more to fix Breath of Fire II (G) and Secret of Mana (U)

* Completely rewrote user interface to use libui, which is a wrapper that allows the same code to produce the same UI on both Windows (through the Win32 API) and Linux (through the GTK+ API)

* Corrected $2100.d7 OAM reset behavior, thanks to research from anomie

* Massively revamped the Linux port, should compile with no warnings or errors now

* Added 64-bit support to libco, tested on FreeBSD/amd64, should work on Linux as well

* Revamped makefile with suggestions from Nach

* Improved Linux Xv renderer to use the far more common YUY2 format, which should work on most Xorg drivers, allowing hardware accelerated video scaling

* Completely rewrote config file system. bsnes.cfg is now saved to user's profile folder on both Windows and Linux, allowing multi-user support

* A lot more work has been done behind the scenes, including massive code cleanups and portability improvements

News / Download

C64 emulator

Changes:

0.9.2 (based on rev. 13)

- added menu item for online-help

- added separate menu entry for "fast-loading" a program

- fixed bug that LOAD "$",8 did not load the directory (bug ID 1728567)

- fixed crash when loading a file from a .p00 image (bug ID 1728562)

- fixed bug that some keys cannot be typed (bug ID 1728565)

Changelog / Download

Rom Manager

2007/06/02

The beta 2 is now available. Fix from previous beta are:

 

* Error when launch emulator for uncompressed files.

* The option "regroup duplicate" was a general option and not a dat option.

* In some cases, when regroup files, empty archive are created.

* In some cases, when regroup files, old files are not deleted.

* The option "show files in bad archive" was not saved.

* And more...

>> Get it HERE

Real Time Clock (RTC) has been recently implimented by Refraction. PCSX2 now takes the current system time from your OS and inserts the value into PCSX2 upon launch, from that point onwards the emulated RTC counts independently from the OS.

 

So? you wonder, well apart from the BIOS now displaying the correct time and date - you would think this is a minor addition to PCSX2, nothing more than an addition to authenticity? Well you're in for a surprise!

 

It struck me when talking to Refraction over a cup of coffee, Metal Gear Solid 3 uses system time for various fun aspects of the game - Such as being able to kill The End from old age if you set the RTC 1 year ahead after saving during the battle.

 

Metal Gear Solid 3 had never done anything under PCSX2, so with the RTC addition to PCSX2 in mind, I popped the disc into my drive, and eureka it booted!! This however was only the beginning of an epic saga between Zerofrog and the Konami programmers!

 

Zerofrog has spent days wrestling with Konami's ability to push the PS2 hardware to it's limits by making zeroGS KOSMOS push the limits of GPU's, Metal Gear Solid 3 certainly loves it's post processing! Not only has he managed to get the game looking ..well from absolute garbage to gorgeous, he's also managed to stop Snake from slipping through holes in the universe instantly.

 

The game still has issues, Snake still manages to find holes in the universe (falls through geometry), and he still likes to get stuck inside trees, rocks or just teleport off the edge of the world (the video demonstrates the latter beautifully!). The game also still suffers from visual issues, such as missing textures and the specular lighting overlay being drawn wrong, hopefully by the time the next incarnation of PCSX2 comes out, these issues will be mostly resolved.

 

So to celebrate this game going from nothing to ingame and the challenges it threw at us, we're releasing a video and 63 shots!

 

All this maybe great news (especially for MGS fans), but there is more, you may have noticed the nothing status games have been decressing steadily and the playable count is going up on our on site compatibility list, including some rather nice games...and there is a new plugin coming up...but you'll have to wait!

>> Watch the video and snapshots HERE.