Higan updated news!

[AsPika2219]

Higan version 099 was released today!

Time for a new release. There are a few important emulation improvements and a few new features; but for the most part, this release focuses on major code refactoring, the details of which I will mostly spare you.

The major change is that, as of v099, the SNES balanced and performance cores have been removed from higan. Basically, in addition to my five other emulation cores, these were too much of a burden to maintain. And they've come along as far as I was able to develop them. If you need to use these cores, please use these two from the v098 release.

I'm very well aware that ~80% of the people using higan for SNES emulation were using the two removed profiles. But they simply had to go. Hopefully in the future, we can compensate for their loss by increasing the performance of the accuracy core.

If you want to know more about the removal of these two profiles, please read this article for a more in-depth explanation.

• SFC: balanced profile removed
• SFC: performance profile removed
• SFC: expansion port devices can now be changed during gameplay (atlhough you shouldn't)
• SFC: fixed bug in SharpRTC leap year calculations
• SFC: emulated new research findings for the S-DD1 coprocessor
• SFC: fixed CPU emulation-mode wrapping bug with pei, [dp], [dp]+y instructions [AWJ]
• SFC: fixed Super Game Boy bug that caused the bottom tile-row to flicker in games
• GB: added MBC1M (multi-cart) mapper; icarus can't detect these so manual manifests are needed for now
• GB: corrected return value when HuC3 unmapped RAM is read; fixes Robopon [endrift]
• GB: improved STAT IRQ emulation; fixes Altered Space, etc [endrift, gekkio]
• GB: partial emulation of DMG STAT write IRQ bug; fixes Legend of Zerd, Road Rash, etc
• nall: execute() fix, for some Linux platforms that had trouble detecting icarus
• nall: new BitField class; which allows for simplifying flag/register emulation in various cores
• ruby: added Windows WASAPI audio driver (experimental)
• ruby: remove attempts to call glSwapIntervalEXT (fixes crashing on some Linux systems)
• ui: timing settings panel removed
• video: restored saturation, gamma, luminance settings
• video: added new post-emulation sprite system; light gun cursors are now higher-resolution
• audio: new resampler (6th-order Butterworth biquad IIR); quite a bit faster than the old one
• audio: added optional basic reverb filter (for fun)
• higan: refresh video outside cooperative threads (workaround for shoddy code in AMD graphics drivers)
• higan: individual emulation cores no longer have unique names
• higan: really substantial code refactoring; 43% reduction in binary size

Download it here!

http://download.byuu.org/higan_v099-windows.7z

 

[AsPika2219]

Higan reached into version 100!!! Nice number, Byuu! Here the info!

I feel it's important to stress right away that this is not "version 1.00", nor is it a major milestone release. Rather than arbitrary version numbers, all of my software simply bumps version numbers by one for each official release. As such, higan v100 is simply higan's 100th release.

That said, the primary focus of this release has been code clean-ups. These are always somewhat dangerous in that regressions are possible. We've tested through sixteen WIP revisions, one of which was open to the public, to try and minimize any regressions. But all the same, please report any regressions if you discover any.

Change Log!

• FC: render during pixels 1-256 instead of 0-255 [hex_usr]
• FC: rewrote controller emulation code
• SFC: 8% speedup over the previous release thanks to PPU optimizations
• SFC: fixed nasty DB address wrapping regression from v099
• SFC: USART developer controller removed; superseded by 21fx
• SFC: Super Multitap option removed from controller port 1; ports renamed 2-5
• SFC: hidden option to experiment with 128KB VRAM (strictly for novelty)
• higan: audio volume no longer divided by number of audio streams
• higan: updated controller polling code to fix possible future mapping issues
• higan: replaced nall/stream with nall/vfs for file-loading subsystem
• tomoko: can now load multi-slotted games via command-line
• tomoko: synchronize video removed from UI; still available in the settings file
• tomoko, icarus: can navigate to root drive selection on Windows
• all: major code cleanups and refactoring (~1MB diff against v099)

Here the notes!

Note 1: the audio volume change means that SGB and MSU1 games won't lose half the volume on the SNES sounds anymore. However, if one goes overboard and drives the sound all the way to max volume with the MSU1, clamping may occur. The obvious solution is not to drive volume that high (it will vastly overpower the SNES audio, which usually never exceeds 25% volume.) Another option is to lower the volume in the audio settings panel to 50%. In general, neither is likely to ever be necessary.

Note 2: the synchronize video option was hidden from the UI because it is no longer useful. With the advent of compositors, the loss of the complicated timing settings panel, support for the WonderSwan and its 75hz display, the need to emulate variable refresh rate behaviors in the Game Boy, the unfortunate latency spike and audio distortion caused by long Vsync pauses, and the arrival of adaptive sync technology ... it no longer makes sense to present this option. However, as stated, you can edit settings.bml to enable this option anyway if you insist and understand the aforementioned risks.

Download it here!

http://byuu.org/emulation/higan/