May 16, 2006 - Mednafen 0.6.0 Released
Mednafen 0.6.0 is out. It may be a little buggy, so please report any bugs or problems on the forum, especially if they weren´t in previous versions.

Notable changes include:

Reduced input latency for GBA and PCE emulation.

Implemented blargg´s NTSC blitter, an an option.

Added support for MusePack playback with PC Engine CD emulation.

PC Engine CD-DA playback from Ogg Vorbis files should be much faster now.

Added a debugger, currently only implemented for NES and PC Engine. It is still a work-in-progress, however.

Added a cheat searching and manaagement interface, as well as a new shiny(and ugly) cheat file format, with one cheat file per system. An "official" cheats file for PC Engine games will be released in the future.

NES emulation should run faster now on cache-starved systems.

Attempted to add PC-FX emulation, but it is in a state of...nonworkingness. At least the PC-FX BIOS´ intro sound plays(provided your BIOS dump is good).

changelog:

- The internal sound format has been changed to 16-bit from floating-point to improve performance, especially on processors without FPUs. There should be no perceptual nor measurable loss in sound quality.
- Removed fidlib from the source code tree, as it is no longer used.
- Lynx: Switched over to Blip_Buffer´s lowpass("treble") capabilities from fidlib.
- PCE, NES: Added a debugger of DOOOOOM.
- PCE: Altered timer emulation slightly.
- PCE: It is now possible to load CDs simply by specifying the CUE file, or device, as you would with a ROM image, like so:
mednafen /dev/cdrom
mednafen /home/sauron/games/Ys/Ys.cue
- Added MusePack CD-DA playback(IE audio tracks encoded as MPC data) support.
- Added legal information to the end of the documentation, though it´s likely incomplete.
- Switched over to using an internal copy of the "Tremor" decoder, and dropped dependencies on the ogg and vorbis external libraries.
- The CD-DA reading function now provides sound data as 16-bit signed samples in the endian format native to the host platform.
- PCE: Changed two often-used CDROM timing variables from int64 to int32 to try to improve performance slightly on non-64-bit platforms.
- PCE: Added a hack that changes subtle CDROM unit behaviour when the game "Sherlock Holmes" is loaded, so that the aforementioned game will work. In general, I really, really
dislike hacks of this nature, but I think it´s justified until I have a better understanding of the (complex) PCE CD functioning.
- PCE: Lowered CDROM data transfer rate, and removed the kludgey one-time delay in the sector reading function.
- PCE: Altered ADPCM write delay to be inversely proportional to the playback frequency selected.
- GB, GBA and Lynx save-state previews are now saved at native resolution, instead of scaling down to 1/4 of the native resolution.
- NES: Fixed a mapper 96 initialization problem.
- NES: Implemented blargg´s NTSC graphics filtering code(version 0.2.0).
The setting "sounddevice" will now select which filesystem entry(like "/dev/dsp" or "/dev/adsp") to open when using the OSS output driver.
- NES: Changed the internal sound channels high-frequency mixing buffer to 16-bit, from 32-bit, to try to increase performance on cache-starved processors.
- Added a simple, non-ideal(it increases CPU usage measureably because it dirties the OSD surface and causes it to be redrawn)
- FPS display, toggled with SHIFT+F1.
- PCE: Added "hes" and "pce" to the file extensions looked for in ZIP archives in the file loader.
- NES: Added support for iNES mapper 38.
- Lynx: The lowpass filter can now be optionally disabled by modifying the "lynx.lowpass" setting.
- ROM sizes, MD5 hashes, and CRC32 checksums are now printed out for all systems emulated by Mednafen.
- Rearranged the file loader detector to attempt to load the file as a GBA game last, since the GBA cart-detection code *could* give false positives if the game isn´t a GBA game.
- PCE: The 2KiB of BRAM is no longer mirrored across the 8KiB segment 0xF7, fixing "RAM is full" problems with Exile 2.
- PCE: Fixed MD5 hash calculation for CD data tracks.
- Added settings "gb.forcemono" and "gba.forcemono".
- Lynx: Cleaned up the code.
- The MD5 hash is now calculated for GBA and Lynx games, and the correct MD5 hash is now used in filenames (the nibbles in each byte were swapped previously).
***NOTE***
Save states and save games created in previous versions of Mednafen will have different filenames than the current version.
To do a quick-and-dirty fix, simply remove the MD5 hash component from the filename as such:
- rename somegame.7e74d04f2d147f03061d447310b109ec.sav somegame.sav
- Changed autofire behavior to have the button set on half the frames in the autofire period, rather than just one frame.
- NES: Changed the background clear color to light blue(from black) when the background is disabled by the user, and fixed background and sprite disabling by the user to not lock up some games that depend on sprite hits.
- GBA: Updates from VBA´s CVS:
- bios.cpp : corrected a bug in registerRamReset.
- gba.cpp/gbainline.h : corrected the mirroring of Vram.
- gba.cpp : changed slightly the emulation of gbasavetype.
- RTC.cpp : vba now ignores rtc command 0x64.
- GBA: Reduced input latency by one frame.
- PCE: Reworked the frame/scanline counter loop to run NMI first, and then draw the active frame area, to reduce input latency by one frame. Most games keep the vblank starting line outside of the TV´s visible display area, but a few(like Dracula X) have vblank occurring on a scanline that the VDC is still outputting a signal to the TV for. If a game alters its overscan color regularly, and vblank is set to occur rather early, there might be a slight tearing effect at the bottom of the screen. Note that this is a very minor problem, and is more than offset by the reduced input latency, though I thought I should mention it so I won´t go crazy in the future trying to debug the oddball game.
Note that this change may cause compatibility problems with PCE save states created in older versions of Mednafen.
- NES: Fixed several PPU sprite RAM and VRAM read and write operations to pass blargg´s tests.
- NES: Altered how the color to be blitted is decided when screen rendering is disabled to fix blargg´s 410 color demo.
- Fixed scanlines to be aligned correctly(scanline darkening over the pixels that are interpolated between rows) when bilinear interpolation is used, at least on my nvidia card.
- Floating-point/real number settings are now validated and checked to be in range.
- PCE: Rewrote SuperGrafx VPC priority evaluation code to work correctly with http://pcedev.net/demos/Sgx3b.zip which was tested on real hardware.
- Simplified the OpenGL blitting code.