Cet émulateur MSX et ColecoVision a été mis à jour. Les améliorations sont les suivantes:
This is a major release, in which we introduce the new Graphical User Interface, replacing the OSD menu. A faster and more powerful debugger is now included in openMSX itself. Configuration for MSX joystick/JoyMega has been improved drastically using the new GUI. As of now, a system with OpenGL 2 support is required to run openMSX.
The GUI
We already had two separate GUI applications:
- openMSX Catapult, a tool to control common functionality of openMSX, in a limited way.
- openMSX Debugger, a great and helpful tool, but never officially released and packaged.
Keeping the GUI separate from the emulation core seemed like a good idea at first. Keeping the state of both applications in sync turned out to be a hard problem, however. Functions that seemed easy, were in fact very hard to implement in this structure.
In this release we integrated the GUI directly in openMSX itself. All information is now guaranteed in sync and updated real-time (which would have been very hard in the old structure).
As this is the first release with the new GUI, not everything will be perfect straight away. Feedback or help to improve things further will be highly appreciated. The Catapult and openMSX Debugger applications remain available for the time being. We will (try to) keep them working, but they won't receive any new development anymore - from us anyway. When keeping them working becomes too much of a burden, we will abandon these applications altogether.
Joystick emulation
Another big change is the joystick emulation. There are now fixed joystick and JoyMega (MegaDrive controller) pluggables (2 for each), which can also be configured via the GUI and also support keyboard inputs, so they also replace the old keyjoystick devices. This gives optimal flexibility for configuring how you want to control MSX controllers.
On top of that, it is now possible to plug and unplug host controllers at run-time.
Rendering
Rendering has also undergone a big change. We removed the "SDL" renderer, as the GUI requires an accelerated backend, for which we use OpenGL 2, which was already required for the (already default and now only) SDLGL-PP renderer.
We also removed 1x scaling, so the minimum is now 2x. Video recording and screenshots on the 320x240 resolution are still possible, though. All of this allowed us to simplify the code a lot, making it easier to add new features and maintain the code.
Other important changes
As for any custom key bindings you might have: we renamed some keys to match the SDL library names instead of inventing our own. Old names are still recognized, but be careful if you also run older openMSX versions, as openMSX will use the new names and the old openMSX will not recognize them. Examples are: PRINT -> PrintScreen, META -> GUI.
Here's the list with all highlights and details:
MSX device support:
- OPL4: fixed detail in YMF262 register mirroring
- turboR PCM:
*fixed sample frequency to 15700Hz (not 15750Hz as found in some documentation)
*implement sample buffer (bit 0 on port 0xA5) to improve sound quality
- flash ROMs: added a lot of accuracy to its emulation
- WD2793 and TC8566AF FDC's: fixed several details
- Konami mapper: added missing mirroring
- improvements on I8254 mode 3 used in some RS-232C interfaces
- added support for the concept 16-bit NEO mappers, which may be used by
someone in the future. If this doesn't happen, support will be dropped again
- added support for the ASCII16-X mapper which will be used by some upcoming
games
- fixed mapper of Mitsubishi ML-TS2 modem software
- added support for Circuit Designer RD dongle (thanks Sandy Pleyte!)
- added new machines/extensions, thanks to:
*Peter Hanraets and Arjen Zeilemaker: Hitachi MPF-310H
*Peter Hanraets: Hitachi MB-H70
*bsittler: USA version of Yamaha CX5M
*Takamichi Suzukawa: National CF-SM003
*Tristan Zondag: German Spectravideo SVI-738
*Oliver Klink: French Canon V-20
*Patrick: Yeno DPC-64
*DamnedAngel: Hitachi MB-H21
- Peter Hanraets, Takamichi Suzukawa, Arjen Zeilemaker and Benoit Delvaux: Sony HB-T600
- Others: Philips VU-0040, General Paxon PCT-55, Sanyo MPC-64, OPL3 Cartridge with Moonsound compatible port mapping
New or improved emulator features:
- removed SDL renderer
- added new GUI:
*main menu bar with these menu items:
.Machine: Select MSX machine, Firmware switch, Pause emulator, Reset MSX, Power on/off, Test MSX hardware (much faster than in Catapult)
.Media: Cartridge slots with ROM cartridges or extensions, Disk drives, Tape deck, Hard disk, CD-ROM, Laserdisc
.Connectors: joystick ports, printer ports, MIDI ports, etc.
.Save state: Load/Save state, Load/Save replay, Reverse/replay settings
.Tools: Virtual keyboard, Copy/paste, Capture audio/video/screenshot, Disk Manipulator, Trainer, Cheat Finder, SCC viewer, Audio channel viewer, OSD Toys
.Settings: Video, Sound, Speed, Input/Configure MSX joysticks, GUI/Configure GUI shortcuts, Misc/Configure OSD icons, show status bar, ...
.Debugger: Toolbar, Disassembly view, CPU registers, CPU flags, Slots, Stack, Breakpoints, Symbol Manager, Watch expressions, Bitmap viewer, Tile viewer, Sprite viewer, VDP register viewer, Palette, Hex editor
.Help: Links to manuals, About
*Reverse bar
*OSD icons
*Status bar
*Console
*Messages
*Drag and drop
*Shortcuts
*Separate pop-out windows
*Windows can be docked on other windows or in a tab widget
*3 styles: Dark (default), Light, Classic
*configurable font and font size. Default: DejaVu
- OSD menu: removed in favour of new GUI
- only warn once for unsupported size in Konami mappers
- suppress warning messages during reversing
- fully configurable MSX controller mapping for joysticks (msxjoystick1/2
pluggables) and JoyMega devices (joymega1/2 pluggables) - see above
- low level debugger (scripting): added support for symbol management
- allow to set a breakpoint (or any Tcl callback) when the VDP dot clock direction is written "wrongly"
- added VGM recording for OPL3
- added minimal support for unplugging and replugging host controllers
- added support for RS232Net: connect MSX RS-232C interfaces to the local network
- removed several OSD scripts which have been replaced by the GUI, sometimes almost 1 to 1:
*reverse bar
*tile viewer
*sprite viewer
*palette editor
*VDP register viewer
*tabbed machine view
*display_message
*quit menu
*OSD keyboard
*load_icons
- removed support for savestates with .xml.gz extension
- do not save SRAM to file if unmodified
- added support to run openMSX fully in headless mode
- allow to specify the device name of IDE devices in their config XML file
- base the Boosted MSX2 EN on the Philips NMS 8245 instead of 8250
- fixed crash when multiple debug-devices were used at once
- fixed possible crash on specific combination of watchpoints and replay
- fixed possible crash on no longer supported savestates: we try to keep old savestates working. Nevertheless occasionally we do remove stuff. Loading an old savestate which contains such stuff used to crash, now we give a clean error message.
- fixes for load_settings command
Build system, packaging, documentation:
- added support for loongarch
- required GNU compiler is now at least g++-11
- required clang compiler is at least clang++-16
- required Visual Studio Compiler is at least 2022
- on macOS, at least Xcode 15.4 is required
- Android build is totally broken, and will require a lot of effort and help to get back up, which is not planned by us.
- 3rd party updates of SDL (2.30.1), SDL2_ttf (2.22.0), GLEW (2.2.0)
- added patch to add aarch64 support to libtheora 3rdparty build
- fixed link error in libvorbis for Xcode 15 on macOS
- avoid pkg-config build error with Clang 15 on macOS
- quite a large update of the manual (mostly to include the new GUI)
...and of course the usual various bug fixes and performance improvements. |
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