MAY 6, 1999
- Super Nintendo
-
¤ Snes9x v1.19a released! (Solaris)
¤ Snes9x v1.19a released! (SunOS)
These two ports came out at about midnight last night,
and the what's new is listed below a little ways in case you don't know yet.
MAY 5, 1999
- Genesis
-
¤ DGen v1.01 released! (Win9x)
Well, Dave got his computer fixed and is now
going to be able to keep updating his new emu. Alright! this version adds
support for a ini file, which should make things a little easier to work.
- MSX
-
¤ fMSX v2.2 Beta 2 released! (AmigaOS)
New fMSX by Hans Guijt for the Amiga. I have
the slightest idea what has been changed in this version, but if you follow
this one, you might want to download it and see!
- Super Nintendo
-
¤ Snes9x v1.19a Source Code released!
I finally have the official whats new for v1.19a
so here it is:
- Games written by the Japanese software company Human seem to need special
SPC700 sound CPU timing, so the ROM load and reset routines now check the
software author company and adjust the CPU cycle length accordingly.
It gets Clock Tower, Super Fire Porwrestling Premium, etc working.
- Added ROM check sum calculation and testing code - Snes9x can now detect
pure, corrupt or hacked ROMs.
- Noticed a fast way to implement the SNES 4096 colour mode, so I implemented
it. Now the colours in ActRaiser 2 look correct.
- Corrected a noise frequency error thanks to information from Takehiro.
- Added a 'start in full screen mode' flag to the Linux port.
- While debugging the new graphics code I thought of a fast way to implement
the SNES direct colour mode, tried it out and now the colours in Actraiser 2
are correct.
- Blast, forgot about the colour window and fixed colour effects. The separate
sub-screen is back again, but all the other graphics speed ups are there.
- Now I've got a z-buffer I keep finding other ways to optimise the SNES
graphics rendering - no need for a separate sub-screen, no need to clear
the sub-screen to the fixed colour, no need to waste CPU time on translucency
effects on hidden pixels, no need to completely clear the main-screen to the
back drop colour, etc., etc.
- Implemented a software z-buffer and changed the SNES graphics rendering to
use it (required change for future 3D card support). Finally fixes the
sprite-to-sprite priority bug that some games suffer from. Also a big speed
increasing for some games (10 fps+), others are slight losers.
- Added code to skip the rendering of completely transparent graphic tiles
rather than comparing each pixel to see if it is transparent; helps the
frame rate a bit on some games.
- Added a fixed for Tetris & Dr. Mario - the game didn't like a multi-player 5
adaptor plugged in to the real SNES when being played, so turned off the
adaptor emulation for this game.
- Added hack for Final Fantasy II - if sync sound isn't on, make attack rate of
1ms actually 0ms (old v1.16 behaviour). Causes a slight click but its better
than samples being cut short.
- Fixed a clip window area invert bug if the colour window was enabled on
on one window and the other window was being used to clip a background layer.
Fixes the finial (I hope) display problem with Gun Hazard.
- Added code to intersect the clip window areas if both a colour window and
a background layer clip window were enabled at the same time. Required by
Gun Hazard.
- Forgot to mark graphic clip windows as needing recomputing when the master
colour window inside/outside/on/off/main-screen/sub-screen PPU register was
updated. Was causing display problems for Gun Hazard.
- Internal H-DMA execution accelerator pointer variables where not always
being recomputed when started H-DMA part way into a frame. Was causing
display problems for Gun Hazard.
- Made H-DMA continue for one extra scan-line to fix a disappearing monster
problem in Dragon Quest 5. Thanks to Alex Jackson for the bug report.
- Zoop seems to require volume envelope height reading by the sound CPU to
always return 0 when the channel is in gain mode.
- The sound code was ignoring updates to the ADSR volume envelope rates while
one was in progress. Fixed that and now the bird song at the start of
Chrono Trigger sounds correct.
- Had to disable the CPU shutdown code for loops reading the horizontal beam
position, it was causing problems for Star Fox. Still no polygons though.
- Oops, sound DSP noise output was broken - accidentally deleted an important
line while removing debug code ready for the last release.
- Added initial 3Dfx support to the Linux port - basically using the Voodoo
card as a bi-linear filtering, scaling blitter. Actually slightly slower than
TV mode, for non-scrolling images due to poor texture upload speeds to the
card, but the full-screen feature is nice and the speed doesn't drop as more
of the screen changes.
MAY 4, 1999
- Bulletin
-
¤ The Universal Videogame List supports Archaic Ruins!
Andrea Doimo, maintainer of the
largest database of gaming information on the Internet has (through the
magic of a cookies-enabled browser) added a graphics scheme to his site
for all traffic passing through from Archaic Ruins! Visit his site today!
We thank UVL for supporting us and want to support it also!
- GameBoy
-
¤ D-Boy v0.50 - released! (MS-DOS)
I heard that this version supports multiple save states,
also a .zip file is now also available instead of just a .lzh file. Now BouKiChi
lamer proofs it himself!
¤ D-Boy page fixed!
- Personal
-
¤ Chris celebrates!
Today marks the one year anniversary of when
I began dating my girlfriend, Tiffany. :). One year is a long time! Just
to make everyone at aR feel better - I'll remind you that last month was
Archaic Ruins's 3rd anniversary :)
- Super Nintendo
-
¤ SNES97 v0.0.1.6 added! (MacOS)
¤ SNES9x v1.19 released! (MacOS)
MAY 3, 1999
- Bulletin
-
¤ got milk? - say what?
I don't know if I will end up hated or not for this
one but I don't really care anyway. Here's an experiment. I opened a site
today which will have an article every week about emulation from my point of
view. This weeks article is about Emulation Legality. Oooh... I can see it
now, trouble. Anyway the name of the site has nothing to do with milk, really
I just thought it would be entertaining for an emu site to be named got milk?.
Send me your thoughts, critisisms, ideas... anything after reading the article.
MAY 2, 1999
- CHIP-8
-
¤ CowCHIP v0.2 added! (Windows 3.1+)
¤ CowCHIP CPU Code Source Code added! (Visual BASIC)
¤ Section revamped!
- Fixes
-
¤ A couple minor fixes to:
- Lynx
-
¤ Handy press release! (Win9x)
"2nd May'99: I'm having a break from Handy for the next few weeks so
don't expect anything on the 0.70 release for a while yet."
- Utilities
-
¤ VBRUN300.DLL added! (Windows 3.1+)
MAY 1, 1999
- Bulletin
-
¤ Life...
Well I'm sorry I have been gone all week long,
as far as my life goes right now isn't the best time. My car died and I don't
have a job and I'm three weeks behind on rent. Things are going good. But I
should be pulling out of this soon. So I will be returning to updating daily
hopefully within the next few days.
- Genesis
-
¤ DGen v1.00 and v1.0b released! (Win9x)
A new Genesis emulator by Dave of DTMNT fame has
been released. Version 1.00 is the normal version and 1.0b is the same but
without sound support for slower systems. Dave also has a little hardware problem
and has asked that anyone who carries this emu announce this:
"The author of DGen, DTMNT (and the future DTMNT2) has had his partition
table corrupted by Windows NT4.0. If you believe you may be able to help,
please read the second text file included with DGen for a description
of the problem."
- Master System / Game Gear and more!
-
¤ BrSMS v1.20 released last week! (MS-DOS)
- added "-coleco" (enable Colecovision emulation)
- MSX
-
¤ NO$MSX v1.1 released! (MS-DOS)
This is a new MSX emulator by nocash which don't
have very much support yet. Give it a try though, if your bored.
- Super Nintendo
-
¤ SNES9X v1.19 released! (Linux-libc6)
Well I don't know what's new but I've heard there
is lots new in this version. I have also heard that the Windows port will be
updated soon too. Be on the look out for it.
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