Mednafen 0.8.4 rc2 released

[Robert]

Multi-system emulator

 

0.8.4-rc2:

 

Added meaningful descriptions to the command.* settings.

 

PC-FX: Added an experimental feature to use mmap() to create a virtual 32-bit address space to speed up V810 instruction reads. Enable by setting "pcfx.use_mmap" to 1. Of course, it won't work on 32-bit CPUs! Please read the documentation, there are caveats!

 

PC-FX: Removed some redundant logic in the KING BG 8x1 drawing functions.

 

PC-FX: FX VCE and VDC port access are now emulated as 16-bit, as in the real PC-FX, instead of 8-bit.

 

PC-FX: Altered the debugger's memory peek and disassembly functions to not read the emulated memory map in the 0x80000000-0xEFFFFFFF region. (Reading those addresses can cause side effects, and this is a temporary workaround)

 

PC-FX: Changed the V810 memory read handlers to read RAM faster than BIOS ROM. This will probably increase host CPU usage while in the BIOS loading screen, but decrease it in the actual game.

 

PC-FX: Altered the V810 opcode fetch logic to do 16-bit reads instead of 32-bit, fixing potential crash issues

when Mednafen is run on CPUs that don't support unaligned memory accesses.

 

PC-FX: Factored-out a few address masks in the memory read and write handlers.

 

PC-FX: Replaced most of the V810 signed-variable bit-size converting code that uses conditional branches to code that uses 2 shifts, taking advantage of modern 2's-complement CPU's arithmetic right-shift capabilities. It reduces generated machine code size slightly, and should provide a slight speed boost as well.

 

PC-FX: Optimized V810 address mode decoding by removing an unnecessary conditional jump.

 

Added an important warning to the documentation regarding Mednafen's ripped CD image support:

 

Mednafen does *not* correct bit errors in the user data of "raw" data track rips. It is strongly recommended to use "cooked" data track rips(2048 bytes/sector for mode 1, not counting any subchannel data) with Mednafen.

 

PC-FX: Improved exception handling, and added untested emulation of the TRAP instruction.

 

Debugger: Rewrote the memory load and dump functions to be faster, and also to fix a bug in the load function that would trash memory if the user tried to load more data than the specified file contained.

 

Debugger: Using the Goto function will no longer cause memory edit mode to be exited.

 

Debugger: Fixed a bug that occurred when entering a prompt(goto, change charset, etc.) while in editing mode, that caused keyboard focus to be misdirected.

 

SexyAL: The ALSA driver will try to set smaller period sizes when lower playback rates are used.

 

GBA: Changed the heuristics used to detect SRAM/Flash usage, though they're still not perfect...if a game tries to use flash memory improperly, it could be detected as using SRAM instead, or silently corrupt parts of flash memory...

 

GB: Fixed sound register initialization on reset, fixes missing sound in A Boy and His Blob

 

GB: Slightly increased the contrast of GBC colors.

 

GB: Reworked blitting of mono GB colors for future features.

 

GB: Removed a redeclaration of a variable in the same scope in a function in gfx.cpp.

 

Debugger: Fixed PCE VRAM breakpoints to work with block memory transfer instructions.

 

Debugger: Fixed parsing of single-address breakpoints after range breakpoints.

 

Mednafen will now print out SDL version information when it starts.

 

(The Win32 build will now be distributed with SDL 1.2.12)

 

Debugger: Fixed -/+ opacity adjustment to not be done when entering text(such as in a dialog).

 

Debugger: Fixed null termination of the ASCII string buffer displayed in the memory watch section.

 

PCE, PC-FX: Fixed the frequency of the highest-frequency noise generation register setting, hopefully!

 

PCE, PC-FX: Changed the LFSR to 16-bit, and to use a maximized tap configuration, to make the noise sound a bit closer to a real PC Engine's(at least, in my opinion! It still sounds slightly more bassy than a real PC Engine, but that might be due to filters on the PC Engine's sound output...).

 

Non-power-of-2-sized-textures will not be used when a pixel shader is selected and enabled, to prevent a severe graphical corruption regression introduced in 0.8.3-beta. I'm not sure if it's a problem with Mednafen's pixel shaders or the graphics card...

 

SMS: Fixed soft reset.

 

SexyAL: Removed smallc.c, and modified the OSS driver to use snprintf() instead of the single function smallc.c provided.

 

SexyAL: "sexyal.h" is now included before all other header files.

 

SexyAL: Revamped parts of the ALSA driver to fix reported lockup issues under certain conditions.

>> Get it HERE.