Lxdream 0.9.1 “Turtle” released
Posted in Releases

As promised, the 0.9.1 release is now out. It is somewhat faster than 0.9, the core is around 30-40% faster, and MMU performance is nearly an order of magnitude better, but rendering performance is still holding things back overall. There’s also (finally) preliminary VMU support for anyone who cares about that - you can attach them in the controller settings panel.

As always, it’s available from the download page, release notes are here. And to make things even easier for Debian users, there’s now an apt repository available - just add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.lxdream.org/debian unstable main
deb-src http://www.lxdream.org/debian unstable main

and do apt-get update, apt-get install lxdream.

Next version we’ll try and attack the rendering performance problem…

What’s New

* Lots of core performance improvements, especially in the MMU
* VMU support (memory card only)
* GDB remote debugging support
* Quick-save states
* LIRC driver
* Now uses the ~/.lxdream directory (by default) to store runtime data
* Audio + input drivers are now built as plugins



Release Notes

Lxdream 0.9.1 is mostly a performance release (core emulation is a good 33-50% faster, although rendering performance is still bad), with a few new features like VMU and LIRC support. As for 0.9, the majority of software can be expected to "just work" with minimal problems.

Nevertheless this should still be considered an alpha release, with many unimplemented features remaining. You´re unlikely to see ´perfect´ emulation, and we´re nowhere near being bug-compatible (in other words, don´t expect your code to work on the real hardware just because it runs correctly in lxdream).
Changes since 0.9

* Lots of core performance improvements, especially with the MMU turned on
* VMU support (memory card only)
* GDB remote debugging support
* Quick-save states
* LIRC driver
* Now uses the ~/.lxdream directory (by default) to store runtime data
* Audio + input drivers are now built as plugins
* OSX: fullscreen support, minor UI improvements

Known issues

The following are known problems in 0.9 that will be fixed in the next major release - in other words, you don´t need to report them - we already know :)

* Graphic artifacts related to translucent triangle intersections, sorting errors and/of lack of depth precision.
* MMU address translation (eg linux, wince, etc) is painfully slow to the point of unusability.
* Rendering performance ranges from barely acceptable to abominable.
* The SH4 emulation is not cycle accurate, and (by default) usually runs slower than the real one. This cause some programs to have timing problems or to break completely. In some cases this can be worked around by adjusting the CPU scaling factor (-m command line option)
* Audio quality generally ranges from poor to horrible, interrupted by the occasional bit of fair-to-middling sound.

System requirements
Linux:

* GTK 2.6+
* Current (2008 or later) ATI or NVidia binary OpenGL drivers
o If anyone wants to fix the free drivers, lxdream specifically requires a working implementation of either the EXT_framebuffer_object or GLX_SGIX_pbuffer extensions.

OS X:

* System 10.4 or later

GCC, Make, etc.

The current version has only been tested under Linux and OS X, but it should be able to be built without too much trouble on any reasonably modern BSD as well. However non-x86 platforms are not supported at this point (there are known endianness issues).
Building
From the base directory

~$ ./configure
~$ make
~$ make install (optional)