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• This release features improvements to all emulation cores, but most substantially for the Game Boy core. All of blargg's test ROMs that pass in gambatte now either pass in higan, or are off by 1-2 clocks (the actual behaviors are fully emulated.) I consider the Game Boy core to now be fairly accurate, but there's still more improvements to be had.
• Also, what's sure to be a major feature for some: higan now has full support for loading and playing ordinary ROM files, whether they have copier headers, weird extensions, or are inside compressed archives. You can load these games from the command-line, from the main Library menu (via Load ROM Image), or via drag-and-drop on the main higan window. Of course, fans of game folders and the library need not worry: that's still there as well.
• Also new, you can drop the (uncompressed) Game Boy Advance BIOS onto the higan main window to install it into the correct location with the correct file name.
• Lastly, this release technically restores Mac OS X support. However, it's still not very stable, so I have decided against releasing binaries at this time. I'd rather not rush this and leave a bad first impression for OS X users.

 Changelog:

• higan: project source code hierarchy restructured; icarus directly integrated
• higan: added software emulation of color-bleed, LCD-refresh, scanlines, interlacing
• icarus: you can now load and import ROM files/archives from the main higan menu
• NES: fixed manifest parsing for board mirroring and VRC pinouts
• SNES: fixed manifest for Star Ocean
• SNES: fixed manifest for Rockman X2,X3
• GB: enabling LCD restarts frame
• GB: emulated extra OAM STAT IRQ quirk required for GBVideoPlayer (Shonumi)
• GB: VBK, BGPI, OBPI are readable
• GB: OAM DMA happens inside PPU core instead of CPU core
• GB: fixed APU length and sweep operations
• GB: emulated wave RAM quirks when accessing while channel is enabled
• GB: improved timings of several CPU opcodes (gekkio)
• GB: improved timings of OAM DMA refresh (gekkio)
• GB: CPU uses open collector logic; return 0xFF for unmapped memory (gekkio)
• GBA: fixed sequencer enable flags; fixes audio in Zelda - Minish Cap (Jonas Quinn)
• GBA: fixed disassembler masking error (Lioncash)
• hiro: Cocoa support added; higan can now be compiled on Mac OS X 10.7+
• nall: improved program path detection on Windows
• higan/Windows: moved configuration data from %appdata% to %localappdata%
• higan/Linux,BSD: moved configuration data from ~/.config/higan to ~/.local/higan

Also, what's sure to be a major feature for some: higan now has full support for loading and playing ordinary ROM files, whether they have copier headers, weird extensions, or are inside compressed archives. You can load these games from the command-line, from the main Library menu (via Load ROM Image), or via drag-and-drop on the main higan window.

Post-Release Notes

1. Again I forgot to set the default SNES controller. You guys might as well get used to doing this yourselves with my memory ... but the first time you play an SNES game, go to Menu -> Super Famicom -> Controller Port 1 and choose Gamepad. Otherwise, it won't respond to input.

higan v098 released 2016-04-06

This release adds WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color and SwanCrystal emulation. Note that the SwanCrystal is 99.9% identical to the WonderSwan Color sans the LCD panel type; thus going forward I won't be including it in the list of emulated systems.

Please note that this will be the final higan release to include the balanced and performance cores. The accuracy core has now become the only core used by higan.

Furthermore, to simplify naming, the internal emulation cores are now nameless. This means bnes, bsnes, bgb, bgba and bws are now all just part of higan. loki is thus both a subset (the SNES core alone) and superset (with added debugging capabilities) of higan. The internal names were meaningless anyway, as they were never exposed anywhere except one line in each core's source code.

The State of Emulation, Part IV 2016-04-03

It's been nearly six years since the last article in this series. Since then, bsnes has evolved into the multi-system emulator, higan.
...

Unfortunately, gamepaks were a major departure from the way traditional emulators worked. And indeed, no other emulators were eager to implement this new system. Not the least of which because they all lacked the new features of bsnes, and would thus have no use for them.

This change also created severe backlash amongst bsnes users; literally decimating the userbase from ~100,000 downloads a release to around ~10,000 per release. It alienated many long-time supporters, turned some into foes of the project, and resulted in roughly a dozen forks of bsnes.

The Future

Perhaps the worst of this, is that all of the future complexity and performance penalties are going to be for hardware features and support of things that virtually nobody cares about.

Emulation is always a system of increasing costs and decreasing rewards. And as I've explained in the past, both are exponential, rather than linear.

Overall, this paints a fairly bleak picture of the future. But that's the reality of where we're at.

If my goal were simply to create the most well-loved emulator by the largest amount of people possible, I would have had to have ceased development around bsnes v073. If my goal were to create the ideal "accurate but still usable" emulator, I'd have to stop development today.

But that's a sad end. There is so much more to do ... and there always will be. The lack of popularity of something shouldn't mean that it never gets preserved. You and I may not have much interest in the Voicer-Kun, but I've had Japanese people reach out to me and ask me about it. And I do want to emulate it, as well as everything else I've talked about.

And so, going forward, my intention is to drop the balanced and performance SNES cores from higan entirely. They are a dead end representing the past. The old versions will remain available, and hopefully we can keep them in a maintenance mode as a separate project to keep them alive. But that'll be highly dependent upon my free time and energy levels, which have been steadily dropping over the past few years.

Most of the value of these cores have been eroded anyway through the countless forks of bsnes that have sought to stall bsnes at past points that were more favorable to end users by being faster and easier to use.

Thus, the future of higan looks bleak. The project is likely to become increasingly unpopular, slower, and more difficult to use in the name of progress.

I don't expect others to understand why I'd choose to go this route, nor do I expect people to stay on board and continue using higan going forward, but I do hope that at least people will respect that my ultimate goal is preservation; not making the most popular emulator.