Nnooiissee, 27-9-2001 20:10:00

I'm also on the look out for a willing volunteer to take over the Snes9x Windows port - basically I think the GUI is missing many useful features and desperately needs a complete rewrite, so its no easy task. You'll need C/C++ and Windows API skills; i386 assembler knowledge would help. Drop me an e-mail if you're interested.

New in this release:

• Added SDD-1 unknown graphics data logging at the dumper's request. A bit late but might help with Street Fighter 2 Alpha's data dumping. Creates a romname.dat file in the freeze file folder.
• Implemented 16-bit texture support for OpenGL modes in Windows and Linux. Had to support a new pixel format type to do it - RGB5551 (one bit of alpha) which caused me some major problems - black was no longer always pixel value zero!
• Removed the Bump map OpenGL mode from the Windows port (didn't look so good anyway and was slow).
• Added a hidden novelty OpenGL mode (clue: a keyboard shortcut activates it)
• Reverted back to FMod version 3.20 after reports that version 3.33 broke AD3 support.
• Implemented a better work-around for the broken select system call in the Linux kernel - the original work-around was long-winded and stopped working when I implemented OpenGL support under Linux.
• Added the same speed-up hack to the OpenGL code that the Glide code already supported. Basically, if your OpenGL implementation supports 16-bit textures then OpenGL mode should be as fast, or faster than the 3dfx Glide mode.
• Hopefully fixed Glide support.
• Reverted back to the original colour blending code. The newer code, although more accurate in most cases, had too many glitches and was slower.
• Included multiple Japanese games fixes from Iwashi San.
• Fixed a timing problem caused by a speed up hack that was affecting Top Gear 3000. No the game still isn't playable yet, but I noticed the problem while investigating the DSP-4 chip used by the game.

Gary, 26-9-2001 15:32:00

Jerremy, 14-9-2001 11:06:00

For some reason Gary forgot to update the news when releasing the new version, so if you by any chance missed the new release of Snes9x, then go to the download page now !!! ;)

New since v1.37:

• Added support for Star Ocean and Street Fighter 2 Alpha decompressed graphics packs from dejap. Used a binary chop search rather than a linear search to locate correct decompressed graphics more quickly - should help emulation speed during later stages of the game.
• Included OpenGL support into the Linux port and speeded up the Windows OpenGL implementation slightly. The real speed up would occur if I could figure out how/if 16-bit textures are supported in OpenGL because at the moment the 16-bit software rendered SNES image must be converted to 24-bit before being uploaded as a texture...
• Included the latest ZSNES DSP-1 code. Now Pilotwings, SD Racer and Suzuka 8 Hours are playable. Aim For The Ace, Super Air Diver 1 & 2 and Syutoko Battle 94 are also playable, but with bugs. Thanks to zsKnight, _demo_, et al for all their hard work.
• Another Daffy Duck: Marvin Missions screen flicker problem worked around - writing to the IRQ enable register shouldn't clear any pending IRQs, but Sieken 3 seems to require this or else the game hangs. Special-cased Daffy Duck for now.
• An NMI emulation bug was triggering a Panic Bomberman World game bug, crashing it. Basically, if a game enables NMIs after the normal trigger point, the NMI should not trigger if the game has already read the NMI clear register.
• Panic Bomberman World requires SPC700 memory to be initialised to zero on reset otherwise the game hangs when a tune finishes and another one should start.
• Added mouse pointer auto-hide to the Windows port. Much better than the turn the mouse pointer into a black dot method I was using before. - Included the latest ZSNES Super FX code. Not sure if it fixes actually fixes any games.
• Added an offset hack for Strike Gunner to get the scrolling ground layer to line up correctly - another offset-per-tile bug hacked around for now.
• Arrr! Left in some debugging code in the last release that prevented all games that need the slower SPC700 timing from working. Removed it.
• Hmm. The broken cut-scenes in Deep Space 9 seem to indicate that I haven't got the emulated clock speed of the 65c816 CPU correct yet. And not by a little bit - a 9% too slow error. Hacked special timing for the game for now.
• Added triple-buffering to Windows port - enabling double-buffering actually enables triple-buffering if you have enough free video RAM, defaulting to double-buffering if you don't.
• Fixed another crash bug in the interpolated mode 7 code - if no scaling was being used (either up or down) and screen repeat was enabled and the screen was flipped horizontally, the routine would crash Snes9x. Was causing Snes9x to crash during rock monster boss stage of Castlevania 4.
• Oops. Got the initialisation of the default SNES screen width and height round the wrong way - could cause a X Windows System error message on the UNIX port after loading a ZSNES freeze file.
• Included the unofficial Windows port emulation fixes for several games including Kentouou World championship and TKO Super Championship.
• Included ??? improved Anti Res. sound sample decoding routine and updated the C version to match.
• Included Anti Res. improved sample decompression code he sent me ages ago, but for some reason I didn't include. Sorry. This version seems good enough to leave enabled all the time.

On another note, if you're a webmaster and you offer S

Jerremy, 20-7-2001 18:42:00

Jerremy, 29-6-2001 18:45:00