bsnes v0.036 released

[Robert]

SNES emulator

 

2008-09-14 - bsnes v0.036 released

 

This release fixes a somewhat serious bug introduced in v035, and also vastly improves Windows support for non-ANSI filenames.

 

The bug was triggered when HDMA would occur during DMA. If the DMA were long enough, subsequent HDMA transfers would be blocked. This caused graphical glitches in Star Ocean, Super Mario Kart, and possible more games. If you noticed any regressions from v034 to v035, this was almost certainly the cause. Once again, we're operating under the assumption that there are no known bugs currently, so please let us know here if you find any.

 

I've also rewritten the file handling for the emulator. On Windows, attempting to load a file with non-ANSI characters (eg Russian, Japanese, etc) would cause these characters to be removed. This meant that no version of bsnes thus far could load these files. This problem was exacerbated when I ported the user interface to Unicode (UTF-16), this caused even config and locale file loading to crash the emulator.

 

The root of the problem is that Windows only accepts non-ANSI strings in UTF-16 format, whereas bsnes' UI wrapper converts strings to UTF-8 interally. When passing these file names to the standard file functions (fopen(), std::ifstream, etc), file loading would fail. To fix this, I replaced all file access functions with a new version that would convert the UTF-8 filenames back to UTF-16, and use appropriate access functions (_wfopen(), _wmkdir(), etc.)

 

... but there is still one limitation to this: ZIP and GZ support use zlib, and JMA support uses libjma. Neither of these libraries convert UTF-8 strings to UTF-16 before attempting to open files. Due to licensing issues, as well as technical issues, I am unable to correct this at this time. What this means is that loading ZIP, GZ and JMA files; on Windows only; and with Unicode characters in the file name only; will cause the image load to fail. Loading uncompressed images (SMC, SFC, etc) will work with or without Unicode on all platforms.

 

I tried to be as thorough as possible with this fix: command-line arguments (via CommandLineToArvW + GetCommandLineW), user path (via SHGetFolderPathW), real path (via _wfullpath),folder creation (via _wmkdir) and file access/existence checks (via _wfopen) were updated in all cases. I also updated file loading for ROMs (SMC, SFC, etc), save RAM (SRM), real-time clock save (RTC), cheat files (CHT), UPS patches (UPS) and both configuration files (bsnes.cfg and locale.cfg.) Configuration file loading should work even if your username contains non-ANSI characters, and it should also detect config files put in the same folder as the bsnes executable, even if the path to the executable contains non-ANSI characters.

 

Lastly, I'd like to apologize for the poor support for non-ANSI filenames in the past. Using an English version of Windows didn't expose the problems to me. I'll be more thorough in the future with this.

>> Get it HERE.