moving the window + main color window clipping into the bg/oam/mode7 rendering routines themselves, I was able to greatly simplify the most complicated part of rendering: the final pass where color add/sub effects are applied. As a result, the new PPU core is not only ~35% faster (on graphics intensive screens, even faster on simpler screens), but more accurate as well. Awesome.
In celebration, I´m releasing bsnes v0.008. I can actually run all games I have at >60fps on my Athlon 1.67ghz PC. Probably not something to brag about, though ...
Oh, and I also updated the keyboard polling code to only capture keypresses if the main window has focus. I´ve been meaning to do this for the better part of a year now, but never got around to it.
If, for some reason, you still want to use the old renderer, you can uncomment the first line in src/ppu/bppu/bppu.h and recompile the emulator yourself. Or you can use v0.007a, I´ll leave it up for a bit.
I have done quite a bit, so I´ll try my best to recap most of the fixes since the last release...
- HDMA was not running during DMA transfers
- Emulator did not recognize any filetype other than .smc
- Added configuration file support and imported my vector/string/config libraries into bsnes
- Added option to use system RAM instead of video RAM for display, this can greatly increase speed on certain video cards
- Increased speed by ~15% by adding 256x224 renderer (still very buggy when the SNES mixes video modes mid-frame)
- mvn/mvp opcodes were not setting the DB register
- Fixed joypad input in many games (Super Mario: All Stars, Dragon Quest III, etc.)
- Major speedup with frakeskip option
- Fixed default aspect ratio when emulator is first started
There´s probably a lot more, but that´s all I remember offhand... this release should be a lot closer to the quality of v0.005a, but still needs a bit more polishing.
The rewrite is now complete. I finished adding frameskip, and fixed some crashing issues with loading multiple ROMs. I wrapped all malloc/free calls with memalloc/memfree, which are custom functions that log each call, and let you pass sprintf-style arguments to them to debug memory leaks. Don´t see any, nor have I noticed any in bsnes; but it makes a nice test tool anyway.
I found out today that the mvn/mvp instructions actually set the DB register to the destination bank. Weird. This fixed Final Fantasy V, Chrono Trigger, and Dragon Quest III (which now runs as a result) graphics. Not all of them, but quite a few. I had also previously been setting the M/X flags of the P register when xce was executed. I never anticipated a game using xce while in native mode to switch to... native mode... but apparently, Chrono Trigger does. And my code was incorrect. So now Chrono Trigger gets past the name select screen, but dies a few screens after still.
The only really major flaw I am aware of that bsnes v0.005 did not have is with the battle screens in Squaresoft games. I get horrible flickering and "crushed scanlines" every other frame on them, for some reason. I´ll try and track that down for the next release, but I didn´t want to hold up a new release any longer. As a result, I´ll leave up v0.005a for the time being until I get this problem fixed.
