bsnes v0.032 released

[Verdauga Greeneyes]

Hmm, as a follow-up question to FitzRoy's, how hard do you think it would be to make the filtering multi-threaded? I can do it in Windows, but I dunno how hard it would be to make it work on all platforms. Would you need to create a new interface to make it work cleanly?

[byuu]

Hey byuu, do you have an idea yet what you'll be doing for the next version? Just curious.

Honestly, I've been thinking about taking it easy for a while, and when I'm feeling up to it, go at the Mecarobot bug again.

But I've been planning to work on other things. Adding full font support to hiro will be an important step toward re-creating the bsnes debugger. Adding S-SMP support to xkas will allow me to eliminate some of my older tools. Cleaning up my website with proper contact info and programming section details would be a good idea. And a few other odds and ends like that.

Won't be such a bad idea, as it'll keep all of those translation files relevant for a good while. I'd hate to make everyone update them every single month.

Another thing I've been strongly considering was working on another emulator. Given ZSNES v2's new direction, and Snes9X's MIA, I think it'd be fun to focus on a new, fast emulator designed with a more modern understanding of what's important and not important to get the best tradeoff of speed vs accuracy. Writing it to be 100% portable C++ would be good, too. I've been on the lookout for a good, ultra low-power system lately.

... but I wouldn't want to do that alone. It'd have to be a group project.

[neo_bahamut1985]

Byuu does deserve the credit that's due IMHO. I mean, take Bsnes's SPU emulation; it uses the Blargg SPC core! I've never heard an emulator have music sound just like the hardware (especially Sqeenix games)!

[Nach]

Byuu does deserve the credit that's due IMHO. I mean, take Bsnes's SPU emulation; it uses the Blargg SPC core! I've never heard an emulator have music sound just like the hardware (especially Sqeenix games)!

What?

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

[FitzRoy]

Hey byuu, do you have an idea yet what you'll be doing for the next version? Just curious.

Honestly, I've been thinking about taking it easy for a while, and when I'm feeling up to it, go at the Mecarobot bug again.

But I've been planning to work on other things. Adding full font support to hiro will be an important step toward re-creating the bsnes debugger. Adding S-SMP support to xkas will allow me to eliminate some of my older tools. Cleaning up my website with proper contact info and programming section details would be a good idea. And a few other odds and ends like that.

Cool, thanks for sharing.

[neo_bahamut1985]

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is he needs credit (and Blargg) for making Bsnes have the best SPC700 I've ever heard.

[AamirM]

Hi,

Another thing I've been strongly considering was working on another emulator. Given ZSNES v2's new direction, and Snes9X's MIA, I think it'd be fun to focus on a new, fast emulator designed with a more modern understanding of what's important and not important to get the best tradeoff of speed vs accuracy. Writing it to be 100% portable C++ would be good, too. I've been on the lookout for a good, ultra low-power system lately.

... but I wouldn't want to do that alone. It'd have to be a group project.

If you ever start that project, you can count me in that (if there is space in that group of course). I have always wanted to know more about SNES hardware internals and working on a SNES emu would be the best way to do so. But does it has to be in C++?

stay safe,

AamirM

[franpa]

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is he needs credit (and Blargg) for making Bsnes have the best SPC700 I've ever heard.

WTF is Squeenix??? are you seriously THAT lazy to type there name?

[odditude]

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is he needs credit (and Blargg) for making Bsnes have the best SPC700 I've ever heard.

WTF is Squeenix??? are you seriously THAT lazy to type there name?

Squeenix is as commonly used now as Wintel used to be.

[Gil_Hamilton]

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is he needs credit (and Blargg) for making Bsnes have the best SPC700 I've ever heard.

WTF is Squeenix??? are you seriously THAT lazy to type there name?

Squeenix is as commonly used now as Wintel used to be.

It's also a more fun name than the official merger name.

And more accurate than Wintel, which ignored the main part of the system(the IBM PC/AT archtecture, which is STILL defining the system), as well as often being applied to Linux machines.

[Deathlike2]

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is he needs credit (and Blargg) for making Bsnes have the best SPC700 I've ever heard.

WTF is Squeenix??? are you seriously THAT lazy to type there name?

Squeenix is as commonly used now as Wintel used to be.

It's also a more fun name than the official merger name.

Sounds like a Kleenex to me.

And more accurate than Wintel, which ignored the main part of the system(the IBM PC/AT archtecture, which is STILL defining the system), as well as often being applied to Linux machines.

Wintel ruled for a long while.

[Snark]

I can't make heads or tails out of what you're trying to say.

What I'm trying to say is he needs credit (and Blargg) for making Bsnes have the best SPC700 I've ever heard.

WTF is Squeenix??? are you seriously THAT lazy to type there name?

Seriously, if you're going to criticize someone's writings, you could at least get "their" (possessive) right...

(http://www.better-english.com/easier/theyre.htm
"Their" is a pretty good test "they're", for people that don't know "there" "theirs" , and stuff.)

[franpa]

Thanks, my english is not that great and i rely on the spell checker a fair bit. I always look for ways to improve and appreciate your input Snark.

[byuu]

Byuu does deserve the credit that's due IMHO. I mean, take Bsnes's SPU emulation; it uses the Blargg SPC core!

I deserve credit for blargg's S-DSP emulator? He even wrote the bsnes interface for me. I literally just dropped it in and compiled. Same for his NTSC filter.

What I've done was greatly refine S-CPU / H-DMA / IRQ timing and emulation, add support for a lot of the S-PPU edge cases and spend a year or two tweaking it to be as compatible as possible for a scanline renderer, and start on S-SMP cycle support. Almost all of this was alongside anomie. blargg came in and greatly refined the S-SMP cycle breakdown, which was by far the hardest part, so he may as well get credit for the entire S-APU being as good as it is today.

If you ever start that project, you can count me in that (if there is space in that group of course). I have always wanted to know more about SNES hardware internals and working on a SNES emu would be the best way to do so. But does it has to be in C++?

The more the merrier. I'd prefer something like Sourceforge/SVN. I'd also prefer C++, if only because of the large volume of code already written.

I was planning to simply drop in bsnes' S-PPU scanline renderer (it's the only thing really well optimized that I've written) and S-CPU + S-SMP cores. Rewrite all the IRQ stuff to use the older, much faster range-based IRQ testing (only failed on F1 Grand Prix and Sink or Swim), and combine that with either blargg's or anomie's fast 32khz S-DSP, whichever is easier to work with. S-SMP would be opcode based, S-CPU would probably be cycle-based with the S-SMP as a slave. Would probably only take a week or two to get it running games. We could further optimize from there.

Ideally, it would be great to get it running on things such as the PSP, but with even Snes9X struggling there, I doubt that'd be possible. This would probably end up being competitive with SNESGT.

Given my current schedule, I'd probably have time to start around Q1'09 or so. I also want to see how ZSNES v2 fares. If it looks reasonable that they'll eliminate all assembler soon (to allow non-x86 ports), has a modern UI, and it's sys reqs are still less than 1GHz, I wouldn't see much point.

[AamirM]

Hi,

The more the merrier. I'd prefer something like Sourceforge/SVN. I'd also prefer C++, if only because of the large volume of code already written.

Ahh...okay. I only asked because I don't know much about advanced OOP stuff which you seem to use currently in bsnes (especially in some libraries).

I was planning to simply drop in bsnes' S-PPU scanline renderer (it's the only thing really well optimized that I've written) and S-CPU + S-SMP cores. Rewrite all the IRQ stuff to use the older, much faster range-based IRQ testing (only failed on F1 Grand Prix and Sink or Swim), and combine that with either blargg's or anomie's fast 32khz S-DSP, whichever is easier to work with. S-SMP would be opcode based, S-CPU would probably be cycle-based with the S-SMP as a slave. Would probably only take a week or two to get it running games. We could further optimize from there.

Could you tell a few docs that I can read to learn more about SNES hardware? The only docs I could find are the ones written by yoshi and qwertie.

I also want to see how ZSNES v2 fares. If it looks reasonable that they'll eliminate all assembler soon (to allow non-x86 ports), has a modern UI, and it's sys reqs are still less than 1GHz, I wouldn't see much point.

That is more likely to hapen.

BTW, I don't know if it has been reported or not but the bsnes icon in the title and task bar appears as a black box in WinXP under 16-bit mode. Sorry if it has been reported already.

stay safe,

AamirM

[grinvader]

Could you tell a few docs that I can read to learn more about SNES hardware? The only docs I could find are the ones written by yoshi and qwertie.

Mmmm, bananas.

[FitzRoy]

BTW, I don't know if it has been reported or not but the bsnes icon in the title and task bar appears as a black box in WinXP under 16-bit mode. Sorry if it has been reported already.

God damn it, I thought I fixed that. I just about give up on this 16 bit crap.

[byuu]

So, mini poll:

For the settings menu, right now we have "Mute Audio Output".

Should we:

A) leave it alone.
B) turn it into a branch-out menu called "Audio" with the following options:
"100% Volume"
"80% Volume"
"60% Volume"
"40% Volume"
"20% Volume"
"0% Volume / Mute"
C) remove it, and add a "Sound" panel to the configuration settings window with a volume slider that ranges between 0% and 100%. This panel would by definition be very sparse, as I have no intention of adding things such as cubic filters and higher sampling rates. I know, I could make it sound notably "better than the original system" ... but no.

Keep in mind that it's much quicker to access things via the menubar, and I imagine muting the sound output is a fairly common user action.

God damn it, I thought I fixed that. I just about give up on this 16 bit crap.

Yeah, don't worry about it. The black box around the icon doesn't look that bad.

[Verdauga Greeneyes]

I'd prefer a hybrid between A and C to be honest.. I don't think it hurts anyone to have it in the menu, and it allows for easy access (though, to be fair, a hotkey can do the same thing. But hotkeys are more confusing, and this isn't necessarily a 'developer only' option)
At the same time, a volume slider would be a nice addition for those sound drivers that don't allow volume adjustment of their own, and you might as well put a mute checkbox next to that.
I realise you've no intention of wasting your time building other filters into bsnes, but are you entirely opposed to the idea? If someone were to step up and make a patch for bsnes that added some sound filters (and whatever buffering system would be needed to make them work, of course), would you add them to the Sound panel?

Edit: by the way, byuu, congrats on bsnes' design. I just added an option for my filter to the GUI in all of 10 minutes (well, the display goes blank when you activate it; its render() function is still empty) Granted, I would have had a harder time figuring it out from scratch, but by doing a search on 'hq2x' (figured that would be pretty unique) I was able to adjust things rather painlessly.

[creaothceann]

100% Volume (default)
75% Volume
66% Volume
50% Volume
33% Volume
25% Volume
0% Volume (mute)

Sound dumping could also be put into that submenu.

As for shortcuts, how about numpad plus/minus as default. A slider sounds great, too.

[neo_bahamut1985]

100% Volume (default)
75% Volume
66% Volume
50% Volume
33% Volume
25% Volume
0% Volume (mute)

Sound dumping could also be put into that submenu.

As for shortcuts, how about numpad plus/minus as default. A slider sounds great, too.

Seconded; it would make it much more convenient.

[krom]

In answer to the poll I would like C to be implemented, because it would be great to have a volume slider, and I think that this option would clutter up bsnes the least.

I have no intention of adding things such as cubic filters and higher sampling rates.

I am not one for filters, but I would love to try out 192,000 hz 32 bit spc emulation thru bsnes... do you know if it is possible to hardcode it easily into the source, or would it require many changes?

[Deathlike2]

A slider makes more sense within the config menu, but predefined menu options can't hurt (customizable with 3-5 options, including 0% and 100% options) would be better.

[Verdauga Greeneyes]

I guess you could always use

Code: Select all

0%
...
100%
Custom

if you wanted to combine the two. But adding both predefined settings and a slider may be overkill.

[Deathlike2]

Hotkeys for increasing/decreasing and/or predefined volume settings isn't a bad thing.. some people might find that useful.