Release 7, Preview 3
Release 7 introduces the following new features:
*
Mega Drive Plugins v1.0.0. This major update to the plugins system adds support for external plugins (.dll on Windows, .so on Linux), as well as support for more than just rendering plugins.
* doc/mdp/ contains the MDP Interface Specifiction Version 1.0.0. This document is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License v1.3.
* A new manual for
Gens/GS has been created. It is available in doc/manual/.
* The Game Genie functionality has been moved to an MDP plugin. It now supports 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit patch codes, and uses a new patch code file format. Old patch code files are supported for loading; however, they will be written in the new format when saved. Later versions will add support for patching CPU address spaces other than the main MC68000.
* New MDP Plugin: VDP Layer Options. This lets you adjust the visible layers on screen, so e.g. you can hide sprites, swap scroll priorities, and lock the palette to prevent color changes.
* New MDP Plugin: Sonic
Gens. This lets you view various information in memory in several Sonic games. Sonic
Gens was originally written by LOst as a standalone version of
Gens.
* New renderers:
o EPX (ported from
Gens Rerecording)
o EPX Plus (ported from
Gens Rerecording)
o Super
2xSaI (ported from
Gens Plus)
o Super Eagle (ported from
Gens Plus)
o Blargg´s NTSC filter for MD
* [Win32] Ported the GDI video backend from
Gens Plus. It still has a few bugs, but it mostly works.
* Extended controller configuration format. The new configuration format allows for up to 128 axes, 256 buttons, and 64 POV hats, whereas the old configuration format only allowed for 6 axes [5 axes on Win32], 112 buttons, and 4 POV hats. This mainly affects the Linux version, since Linux usually reports all axes as axes instead of mapping some axes to POV hats, and some newer controllers (e.g. the Xbox 360 controller) have more than 6 axes. Older configurations are automatically updated to use the new controller configuration format.
* The reverse-engineered
32X firmware, written by DevSter, is now included in
Gens/GS. If you do not have the original Sega
32X firmware files, the reverse-engineered ones are used instead.
* Added SH2 DMA support for PWM audio. Thanks to Joseph Fenton for submitting a patch.
* [Win32] Joysticks connected after loading
Gens/GS will now be detected in the Controller Configuration dialog.
* WAV dumping has been reimplemented.
* ROM History now caches the ROM type (MD/MCD/
32X), so it doesn´t have to check the ROM type every time the ROM History menu is rebuilt. This improves performance significantly if some ROM images were loaded from network shares.
* ROM History now keeps track of compressed files inside of multi-file archives. For example, if you have a 7z archive containing several different versions of a game, selecting version 1 will result in a ROM History entry for that specific version, and selecting version 2 will result in another ROM History entry.
* Added initial support for the "Palette Select" bit in VDP register 0. If the "Palette Select" bit is cleared, only the LSBs of each color component in CRAM is used to determine the colors to display, resulting in a maximum of 8 colors onscreen. This isn´t very useful, but it´s more accurate.
* SRAM can now be disabled in the Options menu. This fixes Puggsy, which checks for the existance of SRAM and prevents the user from advancing past a certain point if it exists. (Puggsy uses a password system, not SRAM.)
* Improved PWM scaling algorithm, provided by Chilly Willy on the Sonic Retro forums.
* A new command line option, "--boot-cd", can be specified to tell
Gens/GS to boot from an actual SegaCD CD-ROM on startup.
* [Unix] Improved VSync support with the
OpenGL backend. Both the MESA and SGI swap control methods are now supported.
* The video subsystem now supports fallbacks. For example, on the Linux version, if
SDL+
OpenGL is selected but
OpenGL isn´t available, it will simply revert back to
SDL instead of crashing. As an added bonus, this allows for
Gens/GS to start up properly on Windows NT 4.0, since the default backend on Win32 is DirectDraw 4, but NT4 doesn´t support it. Instead of crashing, it will fall back to the GDI backend.
*
Gens/GS no longer changes non-alphanumeric characters in SegaCD game names to spaces. This may cause some games to have different names, which will prevent their BRAM files from being loaded properly. If you have any of these games, you will need to rename the BRAM files in order to get them to load correctly.
* [Unix] If a game has a Shift-JIS encoded title in the Japanese title field and the country code is set to Japan, the title will be converted to the system´s native locale, e.g. UTF-8. (Win32 support for this feature will be added once
Gens/GS fully supports Windows´ Unicode implementation.)