Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in the field of psychology or marketing, not an article on information technology." -- John Kirsch
Nkeynes released another update for lxdream. Quoting the author:
"This is the first version where we can say that most software should
“just work”, outside of a small number of known issues - so please
report any other problems you encounter. Note however that the focus of
0.9 has been on accuracy - performance has not substantially changed
from earlier versions. That will be the main aim of the work for 0.9.1
“Speedy”, along with timing precision and a few other things."
Changes since 0.8.4
Improved accuracy + compatibility (many bugfixes)
Shadow volumes
Render-to-texture support
Fogging
Light-gun support
» Check out the lxdream homepage
» Download it from here
I'm doin a little catch up on the news.
A new version of Demul was released earlier bringing it up to version 0.4.7a. I did not find a changelog so I guess you'll have to try it out and find out how it performs for you.
New release for lxdream. Version 0.8.4 sports the following updates. No radical changes to compatiblity.Nkeynes also makes available binaries for Debian(unstable) and OS X (10.4+).
What’s new
Fully native OS X support
Renderer rewrite (fixes perspective correction among other problems)
A new beta version of the dreamcast emulator Makaron has been released recently. After the previous versions have been rather unstable, it seems that this version has now been built with stability in mind again. Let's take a look at the changes:
T9/4 and T10 were rather unstable but this time around I'm more happy with both GD and DMA code. It's not just bugfixes though, there are several new features in this version:
- support for VMU sounds
- improved Z-buffering
- fully functional DSP
- experimental anisotropic filtering
DSP is enabled by default. It might slow down things a bit, though (as usual) if you have a fast C2D you won't notice it. I'm really considering running whole AICA on separate thread now by the way, so it should improve in future for multi-core systems.
Please note that there's a slight slowdown noticable (in audio) when sequenced music is being played, in all Makaron versions released so far. This is sort of design flaw (and due to rather demanding hardware setup) and will be someday corrected.
Anisotropic filtering is too enabled by default, to 8x - it will be scaled down if your card can't support such mode. This will only be a problem for those cheap cards that support AFx8 but are very slow at it, in this case you might get quite a performance drop. If this becomes an issuse I'll tell you how to disable AF :)
A new update has been released for the dreamcast emulator Demul, increasing the version to v0.4.2! This new version is just a small update, which we should see more often from now. Here is what has been posted about this new version (translated):
As promised, we will start to spread more smaller builds from now an.Today just a small update by numerous requests, we added an autodetection for the region.
Nice new feature - should you be able to read russian, you can find many screenshots and additional information over in this thread. I've re-packed the package and moved the plugins to it's own folder.
Great news for all dremcast fans: dknute has updated his homepage with the 10th test release of his DC emulator Makaron. This emulator features a great compatibility, if you want to see some games in action, make sure to check out the blog for many screenshots.
Here are the most important changes and notes for Makaron T10:
T10 might be a bit slower than T9 series. It'll most likely affect only low-end systems as there isn't really much of a difference (if any) on my E6600.
WinCE games usually crash when emulation speed drops below certain treshold. In other words, if you got fast system you should get stable performance.
Due to changes in GD-DMA code loading times are back. It's considered normal behaviour since this is how Dreamcast works. Thanks to those changes compatibility has improved and following titles should now boot and work: All Dream Preview discs, original MIL-CDs, Street Fighter Zero 3, SEGA Tetris Online and Tetris 4D.
CD-DA (audio tracks) will play, but still use the older method of fetching data. This might cause Makaron to crash but it's very unlikely as data reads and playing audio are mutualy exclusive tasks.
There are some minor changes in full-screen setup code (the debug window will be hidden and not forcibly refreshed). No 16:x aspect ratios yet.
Changes to sorting/drawing code broke shadows in Virtua Fighter 3tb. I'm not planning on fixing that anytime soon though, as it would break many other things. Late T9 versions have this problem too, by the way.
Makaron now disables screen saver when run. It's only going to be a problem if it crashes, as it might not re-enable it on exit. Just so you know.
If you manually enable MMU the recompiler will not switch to address translation mode until it's actually requested, so there's no speed penalty in BIOS and most games. Some however (like Ikaruga) use only partial translation and this can be emulated without full-blown MMU support. It'll work either way but will be a lot slower with MMU enabled. Some WinCE games are automatically recognized (this works only for GD images) and MMU will be turned on when necessary. In short: keep it off unless Makaron complains about it.
Please keep in mind that Makaron is configured through an INI file - if you are too lazy or don't know how this works, make sure to take a look at MKFro, a frontend for Makaron, which has also been updated to work with T10.
» Download Makaron T10 directly from NGEmu now.
» Check out the official homepage for many more notes on this test release.
» Thanks to legend100 for reporting this news item!
MasterPhW was kind enough to inform us about this post over at Emu-Russia, in which the authors of Demul released a new WIP version of their dreamcast emu! As this release is not stable yet, it hasn't been posted on the official homepage yet.
Let's take a look at the (translated) news post:
I hope you awaited this release as much as we did. After a year and a half of silence, development became active again, so this is not the last version to be released this year. I don't want to dissapoint you, but the emulator is still far away from being final. Much work is left, but as the emulator already plays quite a lot and is actively being developed again, we want to collect feedback.
We decided to release to the public for comprehensive testing, as a lot of bugs are still left, but we at least need to know where the bugs happen - this is why the main page has not been updated, instead the release is spread here. The main functions and operation principles described in the old readme.txt remain unchanged from the previous version, though the following innovations have been added:
Most important: BIOS files are now directly loaded from the MAME romset and must lie in a folder with the rom files as DC.ZIP, as with most other emus. The kernel has been rewritten several time, that was some tough work (especially for the Core2Duo). Together with the above changes, games for WinCE started to work. Okay, not all and not completly, but it's a start. The sound code is new, and with all games we tested it works almost perfect (...) Now it is also possible to change the region directly from the emulator menu, so the need to change the bios or flash files is completly gone. A small correction in the processing of triagnles solved problems on with Nvidia drivers (e.g. Sonic 2). Some old bugs (though not all) have also been corrected.
[Update] Thanks to Rikki, we are now able to offer you the download as well, even though the forum is still unreachable - so go ahead and give this emulator a try!
So much for me playing Crysis tonight -_-.....anywho, Makaron has a new test release for people to play around with. Alot of internal changes have taken place inside the emulation core. Here is the blog post:
Here is Makaron Test 9
for your pleasure. There are lots of internal changes, but nothing
revolutionary - so don't expect it to be much better/faster compared to
earlier versions. From user point of view, it's almost the same as T8.
Quite frankly the only reason I'm releasing it is to test some new
stuff inside. For example, it's only thanks to user input that I found
the NVidia FX series cards bug so fast (and actually it affected all
cards, just that FX couldn't cope with it at all).
There are also
people out there who simply have to test anything new that is released,
because they love emulating stuff. So this is like a small gift for
them, to enjoy for few moments before the novelty wears off :)
Like
I said, there are tons of small (and not so small) internal changes to
the emulation engine. Some of this stuff is so new it wasn't even
tested much yet, so expect bugs. If you find a game that doesn't work
now and it used to, please drop me a note - I'd like to find and fix
the regressions first.
I won't go into much detail, but here's a list of things I consider interesting enough to explain a bit:
Dynamic Z-buffer range compression
This
is a new method of dealing with overblown Z/W values. Most of the work
is done in vertex shader so there should be no noticable speed impact.
I mean, if there is then your graphics card was too slow to begin with
and this is just another drop in the bucket.
Now I can handle
geometry more like PVR2 does, which is good because this allows proper
shadow casting. Very much like NANs, infinities are now detected and
handled CPU-side - so far it appears to work as expected. All this and
no Z-precision issuses, not that I'm aware of at least. Unless there's
a game out there making a real use of 32-bit floating point HDR in
Z-buffer this might just be THE solution :)
Note: There are games
that still do not render properly due to other bugs, also this does
nothing to cure transparency/ordering problems.
Shader Model 2 is now default
Makaron
will now use VS 2.0 and PS 2.x (x being 0, a or b - where available),
and fall back to 1.1/1.4 if it has to. What's more, I might be dropping
SM1 support sometime in future. There are so many problems with it...
I've had VS 1.1 break geometry which VS 2.0 handled just fine. And let
me remind you again that palletized textures filtering is disabled on
PS 1.4 beacuse it's too primitive for that kind of processing.
It's
also about features that older cards do not have - like multiple render
targets, or floating-point type surfaces. The Z compression code is
considerably shorter compiled for 2.0 profile than it is for 1.1 by the
way. Funny thing though, even if SM3 code is shorter it actually
executes slower on most cards. That and the bugs I found in the drivers
made me choose SM2 as the best perfomer.
Texture caching fixed
At
least I hope it is :) Makaron MT version should no longer crash so much
or trash textures. That does mean the single-threaded version will be a
bit slower though - it's a tradeoff I've made to allow for proper
locking. Some bugs still remain, mostly to be seen in Soul Calibur, but
that's another story.
Shadows now work
Well, most of the
time, and so are enabled by default. There are several ways it can be
done - so far I was unable to come up with one method capable of
handling all cases. Maybe there isn't one... Well, for now you can
switch between different algorithms - you'll need to do that for Crazy
Taxi series at least.
You really should be using multiple-core
system for Makaron, mind you - this is the target PC I'm aiming for.
SH4 speed is very important, but once you can do rendering in parallel
most games will happily run full-speed on as little as 70-100MIPS.
Seeing as AthlonXP clocked at 2000MHz is just below the required
minimum, I'd say any mid-level X2 or C2D system will do fine.
The
known bugs you will surely ecounter are mostly in AICA (sound module)
code. The volume levels are still wrong - not sure why, I made the
tables up to the specs. And yet PCM range often exceeds 16-bit, causing
major distortions even if clipped. Also, ARM speed has been reduced to
1.5MIPS - this should make Soul Reaver happy. This is not exactly
correct either, and will probably break some other games... I'll keep
looking for a better solution.
As usuall, if there are any
silly-yet-critical bugs discovered, I'll fix them right away. Other
ones will have to wait for next "major" release :P
WARNING! Be careful not to overwrite your VMU or INI files when moving to T9!
» Download Makaron Test 9 here
» Visit the Makaron blog
lxdream is a new Sega Dreamcast emulator for Linux. Version 0.8.1 sports a few fixes, with the additions of fullscreen output and GDI disc image format.
Changes since 0.8:
Fix configure script to abort if it doesn’t find a required library (eg, libGL.so or libz.so)
Add checks to the configure script for linux/cdrom.h, and avoid building the CD-Rom driver if it’s not found.
Add preliminary support for nulldc-style gdi images
Implement gdrom mode select command (mostly stub)
Fix some non-64bit-safe code
Fix the maple 0Ă—00000700 issue
Quick quote from nkeynes:
"I wasn’t originally planning to do a point release, but it’s
probably worth fixing a few issues that were reported on the forums
(mostly configure / portability related). Plus you get full-screen and
GDI image support thrown in for free too!
I’d be interested to know how this fares on x86-based *BSD systems
if anyone wants to test it out - hopefully it should be possible to at
least build it now."
New quick fix release for nullDC. A couple of bugs have been fixed, there's a new aica plugin & some other minor fixes.
Changes Since 1.0.0 BETA 1.5:
Old chanka aica code restored
Elsemi code moved to ElsemiAICA,replaced all chanka code with nullAICA parts & fixed the timing bugs.
nullPVR requires sm2.0 or fallbacks Fixed Function
Relaxed the debug check on invalid loops (fixes nullAICA crashes on DOA2LE, possibly elsewere too)
nullExtDev no longer requires winpcap when not emulating anything :)
Version changed to 1.0.0 beta 1.6
PowerVR AA mode now works properly (omikron half screen problems, possibly others)
Notes:
- You'll need the latest directX redistributable to run nullDC as well as the latest VisualC++ runtimes. You can find DirectX here (Web Installer) or here (Offline Installer), the VisualC++ runtimes HERE, and winpcap HERE (if you want to try the bba emulation code ;) )
- Before running the emulator make sure that you have the necessary Dreamcast BIOS and Flash files dumped from your Dreamcast. The BIOS must be named "dc_boot.bin" and the Flash must be named "dc_flash.bin". Both files must be placed in the "Data" directory which is in the location where you installed the emulator.
- also look ReadMe_beta1.txt and ReadMe_beta1_5.txt
- the _mmu version has mmu emulation when used in intepreter mode
- Before running the emulator make sure that you have the necessary Dreamcast BIOS and Flash files dumped from your Dreamcast. The BIOS must be named "dc_boot.bin" and the Flash must be named "dc_flash.bin". Both files must be placed in the "Data" directory which is in the location where you installed the emulator.
- Sound Is Broken
- We don't know if something else apart from sound is broken in this version.
- Gamepads are (supposedly) supported. Note: Only tested on XBOX/XBOX360 controllers and the Dreamcast<->PC adapter that lev| donated ( http://www.ztnetstore.com/index.php?ref=51 if you want to get one :) ).
- Joystick/n works ONLY with joysticks, use old [winhook] for keyboard
- null
- also look ReadMe_old.txt
- the _mmu version has mmu emulation when used in intepreter mode
Thanks to cyclonmaster for reporting this on our forums. lxdream is a new Sega Dreamcast emulator for Linux. Here's what the author, nkeynes, had to say about this first major release:
With the work done in the last month both for performance and usability, it seems worthwhile to release a new version. And since this version is actually (hopefully) useable by people who aren’t me, lxdream now has a real version number rather than a milestone. W00t!
Download it and enjoy. And of course, let me know how it goes.
Note: Please do not report rendering problems at this stage - there are many known bugs and unimplemented features, and it’s looking like the whole rendering stage may need to be rewritten for the next version.
Changes
Implement more user-friendly GD-Rom changer (closes off #31)
Add recent GD-Rom image tracking
Fix for CDI images with more than 1 track per session
Save render buffers as part of the save state (issue #34)
Show preview screenshot in save state open dialog
Remove gnome dependency (now just depends on GTK 2.0+)
Since the NG emulation scene is a bit slow on news right now, I bugged drk||Razi to find out some new details on one of the hottest dreamcast emulator out there right now, nullDC. A new version with some nice changes is on it's way, so we'll take a quick preview on the things to come.
First off, let's take a quick look at some of the features and fixes included in this upcoming version:
Hz Selection Support for PAL Games Added. (nullPVR/Chanka PVR)
Mouse & Keyboard emulation added.
Image Reader can patch GD-Rom region at runtime, to allow .gdi images from all regions to boot.
Image Reader can swap CD/GD-ROMs.
nullDC can now set the DC's region (JAP/EUR/USA), broadcast type (NTSC/PAL/PAL_M/PAL_N) and cable type (VGA/TV(RGB)/TV(VBS)).
Speed optimizations.
New Maple (Input) plugin with Gamepad support.
Fixes for the following games: Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Dino Crisis, Timestalkers, Dead or Alive 2 (LE), Virtua Fighter 3, Fighting Vipers, Sonic Adventure, Sonic Shuffle and many others ...
As you can see, the developers have spent quite some time into developing some cool things - you can find a full list with all changes over in this thread over at Emuforums. Here are some screenshots (thanks CK) which show the great progress:
Now the usual question is - when can you expect a new release? The good news is that, even though no date has been set yet, the release is pretty close (we're talking about weeks, not months any more) - we'll of course keep you updated here on NGEmu should there be any news on this!
For those that have been following this thread know about this new Dreamcast emulator. It has been in development for quite some time now but finally made a first public release.
Unfortunatly, i'm not fluent in whatever language the website is in so I do not have a changelog at this time.
Over in the nullDC (DreamCast Emulator) forums, ZeZu has made a request for help towards the nullDC project:
If any wish to help out the nullDC project, by any means, we will keep a list of things we could use / use help with here.
Skill sets:
Translators, Japanese to English, more later
Developers, Anyone with a lot of knowledge of PIC16x
Donations:
Hardware:
Any hardware related to Dreamcast/Atomiswave/Naomi/Naomi2/HIKARU
Arcade Motherboards, Game Carts/GDROMS, IO Boards, Jamma Harnesses, Control Panels, Lightguns, compatible EPROMs. Just about anything will help us here.
Monetary:
Anyone wishing to donate cash:
All funds will be used accordingly for the project only, to buy hardware we will need to reverse unknown aspects of it. (Compatible EPROMs for Naomi bootrom is one example).
Please contact ZeZu or drkIIRaziel via a PM on this board for paypal informations or physical mailing address.
ZeZu has stated the following is currently very high on their list of priorities, and if anyone can help, please contact them immediately!
The PDF Files on this page: index Could use a proper translation. The file JVST_VER3R.pdf is the best starting point, It contains the most technical data on the JVS Specification.
We can provide FTP space for the file to be uploaded, or an email address for upload.
drkIIRaziel has announced the nullDC v1.0.0 Public Beta 1 release over in this thread! nullDC is a brand new DreamCast emulator that has been in development for some time, offering great speed and compatibility!
The official site and forums are not currently online, but drkIIRaziel notes that they will be online within the week, so stay tuned for further news.
As an additional note, READ the included readme file, BEFORE asking any questions!
» Grab the setup file: here (Recommended, includes all required runtimes)
