Today I am posting the first release of the new bsnes emulator.
bsnes is designed to be a revival of the classic bsnes design, focusing specifically on performance and ease of use for SNES emulation.
In addition to all of the features of higan, bsnes supports the following features:
The one feature I regret not being able to support in this release is Windows dynamic rate control. I put in my best attempt, but XAudio2's API is simply not fine-grained enough, and the WASAPI driver is not mature enough. I hope that DRC support can be added to the Windows port in the near future, and I would like to offer a large cash bounty to anyone who can help me make this happen.
Due to higan being in the middle of a large restructuring, I have decided to release bsnes now, and wait for v108 to release higan. higan has not been discontinued, but the next release will be radically different.
I've upgraded my web server (TLS 1.3!), so it'll take a bit of time to restore all the older file download links. Sorry for the inconvenience in the mean time.
I've been using amethyst as my primary text editor for several weeks now, and this release addresses all of the minor issues I've encountered during that time.
Changelog:
amethyst is a new lightweight text editor; currently for GTK (Linux, BSD) only.
It uses a tree-view navigation with lazy loading of directories and files, and also features a hex editor (currently read-only) for binary files.
It is pretty specifically designed to my exact tastes, which was the entire point of writing it in the first place, but it does have settings files to configure the MIME types, window geometry, fonts, and colors.
If nothing else, it could make a good base to create your own custom editor from. It comes in at around 500 lines of actual code on top of hiro (my GUI toolkit abstraction layer.)
amethyst has been bumped to v2, now with file management support in tree-view mode: create, delete, and rename files and folders (recursively.)
Coming soon: amethyst v3 with built-in mail client.
I'm releasing a beta version of bsnes, for the purpose of gathering feedback and ensuring that the first official release of bsnes is as solid as possible.
With the exception of dynamic rate control for automatic audio/video sync, and no pack-in video shaders or cheat code database, it is mostly feature complete. However, please do not form a lasting opinion of bsnes based on this beta.
Today I'm announcing the revival of the bsnes project.
This is going to be a standalone SNES emulator, utilizing the higan SNES core, but with a much faster multi-threaded PPU renderer. The performance should hopefully exceed the old bsnes-balanced releases, while being just as accurate.
The bsnes project is also going to focus heavily on ease of use, providing support for direct ROM file loading, automatic gamepad mapping (where possible), soft-patching support, etc.
The goal is to provide all of the recent higan SNES emulation improvements and the SNES preservation project work to a wider audience.
This release adds auto-saving RAM support and a new tool to save per-game text notes. It also adds 64 new SNES PAL game verifications to the icarus database, courtesy of DoNotWant and Smarthuman.
This release supersedes higan v105, and is released to fix a critical issue that was affecting the newly completed English translation of Tengai Makyou Zero. It also has fixes for two other games.
Many special thanks to Cydrak for putting this release together during my vacation! =^-^=
Changelog:
After two years, a new version of bass has been released, which contains many substantial changes: expressions, multi-argument defines, inline macros, and much more.
Unfortunately, code written for bass v14 is unlikely to be compatible with v15, and code changes will be necessary.
However, the goal going forward is for bass to stabilize. I wanted to offer a guarantee that all code compiled with v15 will be forward-compatible, but given the large number of changes, this seems a bad idea. Instead, I'd like to run with v15 for a decent length of time, and if no serious issues arise, then we can consider this for the next release.
Do note that unlike previous releases, backward-incompatible changes won't occur to v15 unless they are of significant, quantifiable benefit.
This release provides several major improvements to Mega Drive emulation which enhances compatibility a good deal. It also includes important Super Famicom mosaic emulation improvements, plus a much-needed SuperFX save state issue fix.
This will be the last release for a while: I have an upcoming vacation, and following that, I'll be shifting my focus back to the SNES preservation project until my backlog of 125 PAL games is cleared.
Changelog: