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The melonDS company celebrates Christmas! Albeit one week early. But this new release of melonDS is a neat little pile of presents.
You have already gotten a glimpse of it, but let's go over all the changes since 0.7.1, because it's been a fast week.
So first of all, the issues we have seen pop up in NSMB, Pokémon, or Etrian Odyssey after the timing renovation, have been fixed. Nicely, the new timings uncovered some stealth GX bugs that would surely have bitten us another day under other circumstances.
So the claim that was made for 0.7.1 ("now your games run better than ever") is finally more than a phony advert
Second big thing is, as you probably guessed by now, microphone support. If your machine has a microphone connected and if you are using SDL 2.0.5 or more recent, you can blow or blare bullshit into it and it just works! If that is not the case, you can also opt to feed a WAV file or white noise as microphone input.
Note that this feature is still experimental. Quality of microphone input may not be optimal, especially when using a physical microphone. WAV input works better.
WAV and white noise modes send input when pressing a microphone hotkey (default is the key right next to right Shift, '?' on QWERTY keyboards). WAV mode can take any reasonably small file, encoded as 8-bit or 16-bit PCM, signed or unsigned, any number of channels (it will read the first channel).
All this can be configured in the new audio settings dialog, where you can also set the volume for audio output.
Which brings us to the new hotkey system. For now, aside from the aforementioned mic hotkey, there is only another one: 'Close/open lid', which simulates closing/opening the DS. Default key is Backspace.
Oh and the hotkey system is an extension of the regular input system, which means you can also assign joystick buttons to these hotkeys.
Speaking of the input system, Windows users may have noticed that the input config dialog was abysmally slow, taking several seconds to open and generally feeling quite laggy. With a quick little fix in libui, that is no more, and the dialog now feels a lot more normal.
Some attempt was made at fixing possible crashes with that dialog under Linux, but those crashes may need more investigation. In my current setup (Ubuntu 16.04), I am unable to reproduce them, or break the input config dialog in any way. I don't know which are caused by melonDS and which are obscure GTK bugs. While one of the stack traces that were reported showed something I could easily work around, the other pointed at some obscure bug where some function internal to GTK is getting a NULL value and crashing.
On a whim, I added support for nocash-style debug print, which enables homebrew to print to the emulator's console. Also, Windows users don't need to get a debug build to get console output -- running the release version of melonDS from cmd will dump the console output there.
We also have some welcome contributions from some fine Github comrades:
* FPS limiter toggle, courtesy abcdjdj
* flatpak manifest, by cpba
* Linux libpcap library names added to the libpcap loader by dogtopus
* and finally Aqueminivan renovating the readme, it looks cool now!
And, last but not least, a whole bunch of misc bugs were fixed:
* black screens in Puzzler World 2
* American Girl - Kit Mystery Challenge! screeching garbage audio in the house
* blending fail in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Sky
* lack of background music in Club Penguin: Herbert's Revenge
* a few wrong entries in romlist.bin were corrected
* config dialogs could be opened multiple times
Merry Christmas!
melonDS 0.7.2, Windows 64-bit
melonDS 0.7.2, Linux 64-bit
melonDS Patreon if you're feeling generous
You have already gotten a glimpse of it, but let's go over all the changes since 0.7.1, because it's been a fast week.
So first of all, the issues we have seen pop up in NSMB, Pokémon, or Etrian Odyssey after the timing renovation, have been fixed. Nicely, the new timings uncovered some stealth GX bugs that would surely have bitten us another day under other circumstances.
So the claim that was made for 0.7.1 ("now your games run better than ever") is finally more than a phony advert
Second big thing is, as you probably guessed by now, microphone support. If your machine has a microphone connected and if you are using SDL 2.0.5 or more recent, you can blow or blare bullshit into it and it just works! If that is not the case, you can also opt to feed a WAV file or white noise as microphone input.
Note that this feature is still experimental. Quality of microphone input may not be optimal, especially when using a physical microphone. WAV input works better.
WAV and white noise modes send input when pressing a microphone hotkey (default is the key right next to right Shift, '?' on QWERTY keyboards). WAV mode can take any reasonably small file, encoded as 8-bit or 16-bit PCM, signed or unsigned, any number of channels (it will read the first channel).
All this can be configured in the new audio settings dialog, where you can also set the volume for audio output.
Which brings us to the new hotkey system. For now, aside from the aforementioned mic hotkey, there is only another one: 'Close/open lid', which simulates closing/opening the DS. Default key is Backspace.
Oh and the hotkey system is an extension of the regular input system, which means you can also assign joystick buttons to these hotkeys.
Speaking of the input system, Windows users may have noticed that the input config dialog was abysmally slow, taking several seconds to open and generally feeling quite laggy. With a quick little fix in libui, that is no more, and the dialog now feels a lot more normal.
Some attempt was made at fixing possible crashes with that dialog under Linux, but those crashes may need more investigation. In my current setup (Ubuntu 16.04), I am unable to reproduce them, or break the input config dialog in any way. I don't know which are caused by melonDS and which are obscure GTK bugs. While one of the stack traces that were reported showed something I could easily work around, the other pointed at some obscure bug where some function internal to GTK is getting a NULL value and crashing.
On a whim, I added support for nocash-style debug print, which enables homebrew to print to the emulator's console. Also, Windows users don't need to get a debug build to get console output -- running the release version of melonDS from cmd will dump the console output there.
We also have some welcome contributions from some fine Github comrades:
* FPS limiter toggle, courtesy abcdjdj
* flatpak manifest, by cpba
* Linux libpcap library names added to the libpcap loader by dogtopus
* and finally Aqueminivan renovating the readme, it looks cool now!
And, last but not least, a whole bunch of misc bugs were fixed:
* black screens in Puzzler World 2
* American Girl - Kit Mystery Challenge! screeching garbage audio in the house
* blending fail in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Sky
* lack of background music in Club Penguin: Herbert's Revenge
* a few wrong entries in romlist.bin were corrected
* config dialogs could be opened multiple times
Merry Christmas!
melonDS 0.7.2, Windows 64-bit
melonDS 0.7.2, Linux 64-bit
melonDS Patreon if you're feeling generous
