Deux versions consécutives ont été publiées pour cet émulateur arcade. Les améliorations sont les suivantes:
v0.92.6:
- Anyway it's just a quick fix of 0.92.5 problems : crash if opening the sound options dialog, leaving it, and opening it again (!)
Bad playing frequency of external audio tracks (except the raw format ones !)
- And there was a bad entry added to the hiscore.dat hosted here, it's probably me who added it, but a very long time ago, it was for viewpoint, and the syntax was a mix between the old format and the new one, and the hiscore parser didn't like it (what a surprise !). Since this file was here for more than 1 year, I fixed the parser to accept this syntax too, even if it's the only entry of this kind in the hiscore.dat !
- And I added the hiscore.dat to all the binary packages, linux & windows (going from 2.5 Mb to 2.6 Mb, what a deal... !).
v0.92.5:
- Slow progress, while I was in the audio functions, I added the ability to change the audio driver and the audio device from the gui. For the device, most computers have only the default sound card, but for the one I have plugged to a tv, it has actually 4 devices, 1 for the analog output, 1 for the digital output (the digital plug behind the computer, that's the one I have been using for many years), 1 for hdmi 0, and the last for hdmi 1, these 2 hdmi being what the video card exports.
Which finally allows me to switch easily the sound between the stereo and the tv, I had never actually used the sound output on the hdmi until now on this setup, it doesn't sound bad...
For the driver, it shouldn't be useful for most users, for wndows it's directsound by default. For linux it's pulseaudio if possible, otherwise alsa, otherwise dsp. The names of the output devices change depending on the selected audio driver... ! And each audio driver can have a preferred frequency, so the default frequency changes with it.
Also the neocd raw audio tracks which worked previously only if you had set your audio output at 44.1 Khz (cd quality), now work with any output frequency, and it doesn't sound bad at 11 Khz actually ! (at least for the game which I tested, which was viewpoint). The conversion for the wav/mp3/ogg/flac format was already done automatically, there was only this raw format which had no conversion and which required 44.1 Khz output.
- Very old stuff : I found lately a forgotten file in the git repository, galaxian.c in the sound directory which was a beginning of the emulation of the sound for galaxian, which I had started around 2007, and then completely forgotten, it was imported in the initial commit to git in 2009 and I didn't even notice !
At that time I had given up the idea because the sound for galaxian is quite crazy, there is no sound command, no dedicated cpu for the sound, and the main cpu directly plays with frequencies to generate sounds. Which means you have some basic square signal generated at a very low frequency which must be converted to a playable frequency, and then it changes the base frequency of the signal in real time... ! Add to that that the background sound you hear during gameplay is generated by 3 samples playing at the same time at slightly different frequencies, + 2 channels for the sounds, controlled by timers too because otherwise it's not fun... !
Since I was busy with sound options lately and I felt more comfortable with sample rate conversions, I gave it another try, and this time it's good, galaxian finally has an emulated sound. By the way this game is supposed to date from 1979, it's amazing what such an old game can do ! Until now it had only emudx samples, but it really felt incomplete, in the real game you have a background sound which slowly accelerates when there are fewer and fewer enemies on screen, that was really missing from the emudx version. You can still choose to have emudx sprites and/or emudx sound to compare anyway !
- Except that a few more fixes, the more outstanding one at least for me was a bug in the hiscores which could wrongly reset its status for some game, I found out on some very old one, "ms pacman attacks", which is available from "multipac 1.5", it lost its hiscores a few seconds only into the game ! It probably affected some other games too.
- Lots of small fixes for emudx games, it's been a long time since I didn't touch this, by the way the initialization of emudx games crashed in 0.92.4, so if you want to test that you need this version !
- Also a lot of sound chips now correctly save their state in the savegames, games like batrider now restore correctly their sound finally (yeah it should have been done long ago... oh well !). |
|
