Nuance 0.5.0 Released

[Riff]

Nuance 0.5.0 has been released. A great deal of effort has been made to make this version of the emulator as fast as possible.

Whats new in 0.5.0
===============

• Fixed TimeToSleep, making Snake playable again (but still requires disabling MIDI in source code)
• Fixed many compiler bugs, fixing Walkthru and Room demos
• Modified minibios initialization procedure to fix media MPE crashes when AudioInit called prior to SprInit
• Added support for SetISRExitHook BIOS routine
• Added syscall interface for improved program performance when running on emulator
• Added compiler support for bilinear memory access instructions and conditional branches. Virtually all instructions are now compilable.
• Added functionality required by the bootloader application.
• Eliminated need to set the DVDBase variable manually.

The latest version of the emulator is available here.

 

[K3V]

Nice work, I've posted it to the front page.

 

[Riff]

A couple of things:

1. 0.5.1 will be released in short time due to an oversight that virtually guarantees programs will crash instantly if one is so brave as to enable constant propagation and dead code elimination.
2. Included with 0.5.0 is a build of the bootloader that will work with the emulator. I sent Skah_T the modified bootloader source but I don't think the official distribution has been updated. Yaroze Classics does work in the emulator using the modified bootloader. Simply place the new bootload.cof file in the same directory as the Yaroze Classics bootload.dat file and run bootload.cof.
3. Doom also works in the emulator if the source is built with the proper options. The makefile needs to be modified so that the game uses the BIOS file routines in place of the CD access library. The game is actually very playable and runs better than any of the commercial games.

I'm still on a lowly Throuroughbred 2800+ (2.25 Ghz) so I'm anxious to hear about how games run on faster systems, particularly multi-core systems. I will probably get a quad-core processor when they become available at which point I will switch the emulator back to a multiithreaded approach. I will say one thing: don't bother setting the refresh rate higher than 5 fps if you don't have a video card that supports GLSL. I used rdtsc to time software rendering compared to doing color space conversion via shaders. Software rendering took 15-16 milliseconds compared to 0.9-1.1 milliseconds for shaders. Hurray for massive parallelism!

 

[james fowler]

Multi thread emu

HI! okay I wrote all this down and hit a friggin key faaaar into this mssg . so here f=g go again.

For years I have been running emus because I am soo tired of all these goddam blah! games eye-popping visuals ... no real content. I just wanted to say thank u 4 all the hard work in doing this. Minter Is my king man! where the hell are the real games not these 10gb discs I get bored of 20 mins into it. TK3 , T2k , syndicate wars , doom , quake , dune , descent , bioforge ,grim fandango , warinc. ,etc... I keep a fairly large DB of all my owned old consoles and pc stuff 500 gb or so. My N501 controller connection broke and cannot be fixed , because of the proprietary plug-end. I have been hoping for something like this for sometime, and wanted u 2 know that on my dual core 6300 w/an A-bit fp-in9 board dual sli BFg 8200 w/vista xp ult. and my disk of T3k , fired right up! but it is running around 10 fps although I just found this emu tonite, and have'nt really learned how to tweak it, that , if u would like 2 know, how it is running I would b happy 2 keep u updated. Although I am not a coder, so the learning curve is not that easy , but I shall strive to learn. Anyways, Many thanks and props to you for all the hard work. It is appreciated , and I eagerly look forward to your next WIP of this. feel free 2Email me if you would like a tester, I have had a couple years working for westwood studios , so ..... anywho THX James