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Snes9x.COM: News |
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| Download Archive |
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| After several requests for older versions of Snes9x, I've decided to put up all the versions of Snes9x I could find on the Archive page... Actually they were still on the server, just "unavailable"... If you want an older version of Snes9x then go to the Download page, then select "Archive"...
Jerremy, 18-8-2000 07:42:00
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| New free games/demo's online |
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| I finally updated the Free games/demo's section of the site. It has 11 "new" games/demo's online.
Jerremy, 18-8-2000 07:21:00
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| New Snes9x Release |
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Hopefully I've fixed all the problems people were reporting that were new to the 1.30 beta release.
Install this version over the beta release, don't uninstall the previous version first; otherwise there's a slight chance the uninstaller might remove your desktop folder and you'd have to reboot your machine to fix it. See the message I posted in the Developer Journal for details.
Here's what is new:
- Forgot to force GUI surface to be displayed when some dialogs where popped up - problem only happened on full-screen mode with triple or double buffering enabled, or when using 3dfx mode. It appeared as if Snes9x had locked up, but pressing Esc would pop down the hidden dialog.
- Added a couple of options to the Settings dialog. Now its possible to disable S-RAM auto-save which was causing Snes9x to write to the hard disk every 30 seconds on some games, causing the occational skipped frame.
- Fixed Reset option which was accidentally broken when Netplay support was added.
- Added support for Dirt Racer - it leaves the Super FX chip running all the time, so the default CPU emulation method never allocated any time to other CPUs and the emulation seemed to lock up.
- NMI timing changed again. Now an NMI can only be triggered once per frame and enabling an NMI after the normal trigger scan line triggers an NMI immediately. This fixes display glitches in Ys 5, Stargate and Daffy Duck.
- Fixed the WAI instruction to only 'wake up' once an actual NMI has triggered, rather than just waking up when it should have triggered. This fixes Battletoads, broken since version 1.29(ish).
- Changed NMI again. Made reading or writting to PPU register 0x4210 not clear NMI pending flag. Seems to allow all the NMI timing sensitive ROMs I had on my list to now work without any special hacks. Illusion of Gaia now works again.
- Another NMI fix - cleared the CPU pending NMI flag at start of frame; Battletoads intro was crashing without this. A long DMA was stopping the SNES CPU so it couldn't and shouldn't respond to the NMI signal from the PPU.
- Fixed Netplay problem when game didn't have any S-RAM and Sync Using Reset was being used. An error dialog was displayed and the client would disconnect from the server.
Gary, 23-7-2000 07:59:00
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| Finally, a New Snes9x Windows Release... |
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Go grab it from the downloads section (thanks Jerremy).
The changes since the last release:
- The Windows auto-frame skip code was broken - badly. It didn't re-sync a
timer value with timer events being generated, causing Snes9x to deliberately
stop and wait for an event when it didn't need to, slowing down the overall
emulation speed and increasing the number of frames skipped.
- Improved the Windows cheat search dialog - its now possible to compare
against a value and more comparison functions are available.
- Finally worked out why Voodoo 3 support was so buggy in Snes9x - the Voodoo 3
card generates a WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message when switching to Voodoo mode (the
Voodoo 1 and 2 cards don't); Snes9x thought that some other application had
changed the screen depth or resolution and tried to adjust its window to
match - triggering another WM_DISPLAYCHANGE message. No idea how the code
worked at all; it must have been only by chance and very dependant on the
driver version you were using!
- Implemented Netplay on the Windows port - but its buggy as hell. I seem to
be having major Windows multi-threading problems. Comments I've seen seem to
suggest that Windows 95/98 don't implement true multi-threading; hmmm...
- Not happy with the current Netplay, so I scrapped it and tried again;
the protocol is much improved and not using select to control game timing
seems to have removed lots of the threading-type problems I was having.
- Attempted to switch to just using Borland's C++ Builder to build the Windows
port - and failed, again. Although C++ Builder can build Snes9x from sources,
it can't then link in the asm CPU cores. I had hoped Borland might have
fixed this with their latest release - they haven't.
- Several attempts to get Anti Resonance's super-fast sound CPU and sound DSP
code working in Snes9x, but all failed. Part of the problem was his code was
written using TASM and the object files it generated would only work under
Windows - but all my SNES debugging code was in the Linux port. Anti' fixed
that, and I then had some success getting his code working, but its just too
unstable at the moment for a main-stream release.
- Included an option to use Anti Resonance's alternate sample decoding routine;
it can approximate the wind and noise sound effects heard in several Square
Soft games.
- Thanks to Lindsey Dubb for the mode 7 bi-linear filtering code - it
generates a nice smooth image when a game scales the screen using the SNES'
mode 7, but you'll a fast machine if you don't want the frame rate to drop.
- Thanks again to Lindsey Dubb, he improved the colour addition/subtraction
subtraction routines - they are just a little slower but now mostly perform
full 15-bit precision addition and subtraction rather than the previous
13-bits of precision. Many more colour shades can be seen - look at the
improved shading on the Mario Kart or F-Zero track for example.
- Added a reverse stereo option, for people with sound cards that swap the two
channels.
- Added a sound config dialog to the Windows port - now you can access extra
sound options that have always been there, but just no GUI interface to
access them.
- Fixed the 32-bit windowed support on the Windows port.
- Adjusted the NMI timing by a few microseconds to get Metal Warriors working
again.
- Added a few more sound playback rate choices. Most modern sound cards allow
any value to be used from a large range, rather than just a select few, may
be I ought to add text field so you could just type a value in?
- Used Factory Setup 4 to build a new installer package for the Windows port -
just shipping a zip file was confusing novice users and many (mostly AOL
users) seemed to have an odd program mapped to .zip files, further confus
Gary, 9-7-2000 16:58:00
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| Server problems |
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| Some of you may be wondering why the server isn't running or running slowly. We had a server crash of such a severity that we had to re-install the server. We are working hard to get the server up and running again, but this may take a while. If the server isn't running or if you get an error opening a page, then please check back a few hours(days) later. Currently the message board isn't working, and other parts of the site may still be down. These will eventually all start to work again in a few days.
Jerremy, 3-7-2000 17:59:00
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Go back in time
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