SNES emulator

2007-08-04 - bsnes v0.022 released

 

Today marks a milestone for bsnes, and possibly for SNES emulation as a whole. With this new release, bsnes' compatibility has now reached 100.0%, with zero game-specific hacks. With every last commercially released game tested by both FitzRoy and tetsuo55 for at least five minutes each, all known bugs have been resolved.

 

Now, needless to say, I am referring to the emulation of the base SNES unit. As many SNES cartridges contain additional coprocessors on their PCBs, there are still unplayable titles. So how can I claim compatibility of 100%? Because I don't consider special chips inside game cartridges as part of the base SNES hardware. I realize that many people enjoy these games, and I do actively attempt to emulate as many coprocessors as possible (six are supported thus far). However, coprocessors such as the SuperFX and SA-1 continue to pose very significant challenges.

 

So, after nearly three years of development, I've finally achieved my primary goal. But it wasn't a complete victory ... I've learned a lot over the years. Emulation accuracy is not black and white -- there are heavy costs to pay and forced tradeoffs to achieve it. I no longer believe there is only one absolute path for emulation, as I did in 2004.

 

So does this mean bsnes is now perfect? Of course not. There are many technical details that are not emulated correctly. This also does mean that there are no bugs, merely that there are no bugs that we are aware of. While absolute verification of 100% compatibility is obvioulsy impossible, even by actually beating every single game from start to finish, this very well should be the first time any SNES emulator could claim zero known bugs with all known games tested. I very much expect this announcement to entice many new users to begin actively searching for bugs, in an effort to discredit my above claim. My response? Go for it!

 

Changelog:

 

* Fixed buffer overflow that was manifesting as corrupted tiles in Lemmings 2

* OAM and CGRAM addresses are now invalidated during active display, however the algorithms for how this address invalidation occurs is currently still unknown, so reads/writes are mapped to static addresses for now

* Re-added cheat code editor.

* Windows only: keypresses when main emulation window is not active are ignored once again

More news / Download

The rumors are true. id Software's game library is now on Steam!

id Software's id Tech 5 engine saw it's debut at The Apple Conferences 2 months ago with a brand new franchise. Shacknews has confirmed that the new title being developed is called "Rage."

Speaking at a QuakeCon keynote, id co-founder and programmer John Carmack noted, "Everybody knows we're going to do a good job with the run and gun action stuff...but we are branching out."

Now Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has finally been dated. September 28 in Europe and October 2 in North America.

Now while not related to id Software, Epic's VP Mark Rein has confirmed that the PS3 version of UT3 will be Keyboard and Mouse compatible. Rejoice gamers, you don't have to use that second rate controller method to enjoy something ment to be played on a PC.

-wiz

Edit: Quake Arena is also heading too Xbox Live also. (Not Quake II Arena)

Multi-system emulator

.8.4-rc1:

 

* Added preliminary support for inputting text directly into the selected address space in the debugger's memory editor.

 

* Moved the temporal video blurring code in mednafen.cpp to vblur.cpp

 

* Added settings "filesys.snap_samedir", "filesys.sav_samedir", "filesys.state_samedir", and "filesys.movie_samedir", default 0, that when set to 1, will read/write the respective files from/to the same directory the game was loaded from. If you want to use these, PLEASE read the documentation first, there are caveats!

 

* PCE CD, PC-FX: Added support for MS WAV file offsets and lengths in TOC files.

 

* PCE CD, PC-FX: Fixed a bug that caused CD-DA playback to be off by one sector(the first sector specified was being skipped).

 

* Began work to allow settings to be temporarily overridden during netplay and movie playback.

 

* PCE, PC-FX: Added settings "pce.disable_softreset" and "pcfx.disable_softreset", default 0, which when set to 1 will disable simultaneous pressing of RUN and SEL. The current implementation kind of abuses the driver-side code that disallows opposing diagonal buttons being pressed at the same time, so if we ever change that (undocumented) feature to go with the last-pressed direction rather than clearing both, the description of these settings in the documentation will need to be updated.

 

* PCE CD, PC-FX: Read operations and CD-DA playback will now be stopped when the RST signal is asserted(fixes soft reset issues on PCE CD games).

Changelog / Download

A new FBA is here. Putting it up on here for now as the official site appears to be down again.

 

I've been extremely busy with other things so this release comes after a bigger gap than normal but there is plenty of new stuff.

 

This list is nothing like exhaustive. These are only the highlights of a big new version;

 

* Thanks to the contributions of OopsWare we have some nice new drivers

o PGM Hardware

o Video System Hardware

o 1945k III

o Gals Panic

o Power Instinct

o Shadow Force

* I have been busy with the following

o Added a Sega System 18 driver

o Added Ace Attacker, Excite League and Super League to the Sega System 16 drivers

o Added various bootlegs to the Sega System 16 driver

o Added driver for Kaneko 16 Hardware

o Added Honey Dolls, Snow Bros. 3, and The Winter Bobble to the Pandora based driver

o Added a generic lightgun interface to the burn library and converted all existing drivers to use it

o Emulated column and row scroll in System 16 tilemaps (still has a few issues with a few instances)

o Added support for (multiple) YM2612/3438 sound chips (as used by System 18)

o Added support for the RF5C68 PCM sound chip (still has issues which escape me at present, used by System 18)

o Fixed an issue with high BPP support in the generic tiles interface

o Matched all sets to MAME 0.117u3 and added some clones to various drivers

* Added Ganbare Ginkun and Riot to the Tecmo 16 driver [bisonSAS]

* Added kev's preliminary Dec0 driver to debug builds [kev]

http://www.barryharris.me.uk/