Also thanks to furrtek for making them, I've added status icon emulation to the WonderSwan emulation. They can be disabled under the Video node if desired. I also corrected the rotation support, and added an option to switch between the monaural speaker and stereo headphones. There's never really a reason to use the speaker, especially since you lose the HyperVoice channel that's only available for headphones this way, but the option is there in any case for completeness.
WonderSwan boot ROM dumped, courtesy of furrtek!2019-08-18 14:58:09
Courtesy of furrtek, we now have the WonderSwan boot ROM extracted and emulated! furrtek was able to achieve this via clock glitching the original hardware during boot-up and then extracting the ROM via serial. WonderSwan Color is next up.
The reason this is important is not just the boot screen logo. If you hold down the start button during startup, the WonderSwan boots into a settings menu where you can configure your name, birth date, gender, and blood type. For the last one, remember this is Japan. In Japan, blood types are roughly analogous to the west and horoscopes.
Your settings are stored on an internal EEPROM (memory chip), which WonderSwan games can then read back to customize the game for you: pre-filling in your name, providing easter eggs, etc. Some cartridges further provide a real-time clock, which can trigger events on your birthday.
With the boot ROM now dumped and emulated, these settings can now be configured via emulation.
I fixed all outstanding GUI bugs I could find in hiro for macOS, and also re-added fullscreen support, so aside from missing joypad support, bsnes should be equally functional on all supported operating systems now.
DerKoun released bsnes-hd beta 9, which features some cool new HD windowing and gradient effects. Here's a before-and-after example of the gradient effect. Pretty cool stuff!
I added multi-monitor support to higan and bsnes.
Not complete yet, long ranty technical breakdown on my Twitter feed if you're interested. But it's coming along ...
I'm going to take another shot at writing articles, but this time I want to stay focused on positive, non-divisive topics. Further, my viewpoints on many previous articles have shifted somewhat over time. As such, I'm posting only the previous Experiment! and Emulator Latency articles. But the intention is to add more again in the future.
The full index will be available here, or under the Other menu at the top of the site.
Oooh, now this looks really cool! Hopefully as a USB device it'll work out of the box on PCs. If so, I'll be sure to have it auto-map with future bsnes Windows releases once it's out.
Edit: ah it's wireless, so you need custom Bluetooth drivers. Definitely doable, but a touch less exciting.
A new feature as of bsnes v108.8 is 480p deinterlacing.
Rather than render each field of interlaced content separately, bsnes can optionally render both fields, turning 480i content into 480p60 content.
Thanks to bsnes' multi-threaded PPU renderer, this incurs less than 3% additional CPU resources when enabled.
Below are some before and after demonstrations. I've also posted a video demonstrating this in action here, although the YouTube lossy encoding doesn't quite do the improvement justice.
Under the site menu at the top left, there's now an option for a night theme ("dusk"), which will apply throughout byuu.org. Also, I have updated everything to be easier to use on mobile devices. The preservation database may prove useful for retro game collectors now when hunting in local shops, for instance.
With many thanks to those who subscribed, I was able to request a custom URL. My Youtube channel is now located at https://youtube.com/byuusan. Thanks again!
I've increased font sizes and reflowed the preservation page tables for mobile devices. Hopefully the site looks and responds better on mobile now. If you disagree or have improvement suggestions, ping me at one of the links in Other->Social please ^-^
I added a tags bar to the top of the main page, so you can filter the kinds of information you're interested in. It's something I really, really wish Twitter supported.
On the whole, I'm liking this CMS, and I want to be less reliant on third-party services, so I'll probably start posting more here and less on other sites. We'll see though ...
DerKoun has implemented widescreen support into his bsnes-hd fork. The results when they work are quite stunning, but to fully work, pretty much every game will require manual reprogramming work to handle things like offscreen sprites and loading additional tilemap data.
I'm hoping to find someone interested in producing these ROM hacks. If we can get at least one working patch made for a major SNES title, I will integrate the widescreen support into bsnes official. The idea would be to include the widescreen patches alongside the emulator, so that games could automatically switch to widescreen mode when enabled in the settings.
I built a CMS system for byuu.org, with the intention of posting more frequently to this site's homepage.
For now, the previous site news can be accessed here.
