Release History =============== This is an overview of the changes that were incorporated into past releases. openMSX 0.13.0 (2016-07-31) --------------------------- This again was meant to be (mostly) a bug fix release, but again it also has some nice additions and improvements to enjoy. Important improvements are much better support for VDP I/O delay in turbo machines (fixing graphics issues due to too fast VDP access there), more accurate MSX1 color palette, progress reporting for long operations and ALSA MIDI-out support for Linux. This is also one of the first releases that drops support for older platforms: Windows XP, Dingoo A320 (but introducing support for GCW Zero) and non-64-bit MacOSX. If you still want to run openMSX on these, you'll be stuck on using a previous release or start maintaining these platforms yourself. Here's the list with all highlights and details: MSX device support: - fixed bug in ASCII-8 mapper of MegaFlashROM SCC+ (SD) - fixed bug in border drawing in text mode with YJK/YAE bits - fixed bug in LMMC VDP command that appeared in Baltak Rampage greetings part - fixed bug in YMF278 (OPL4 wave part) preventing samples to be played sometimes - improved R800 timing for the CALL instruction - added missing hardware VDP delay in turbo mode of MSX2+ machines - improved accuracy and completeness of the Matsushita switched I/O ports device: - added bits on turbo status and presence - added the device to the Sanyo MSX2+ machines (without SRAM and turbo) - removed fixed VDP I/O delay (because it is linked to the T9769 engine) - added support for the different fixed VDP I/O delays of the different T9769 engines and added these to the configuration files of the machine that have these (as far as that is known) - added support for Epson Chakkari Copy, thanks to Rudolf Lechleitner and Enrico Barbisan - added 2MB MegaRAM extension (thanks to Mauricio Braga) - added MIDI Interface 3 extension (cart that implements turboR GT internal MIDI without BIOS ROM) - added support for mapper of Japanese MSX Write - added support for Spectravideo SVI-707 disk drive - added support for the V9990 POINT VDP command - added support for more realistic TMS VDP pallettes: it's now possible to specify the saturation for the Pb and Pr channel (this is dependent on the analog electronics in the MSX video circuit) which affects the palette. E.g. all machines with TMS9x2x have a brighter palette now, as they should. - added weird color palette of the Fujitsu FM-X RGB output (3 bit RGB) - added a high-resolution timer extension: a cartridge with a 32-bit counter that counts at 3.57 MHz. Useful for debugging and reverse engineering. Only one such real cartridge exists :) - added new machines: Aucnet NIA-2001 MSXturboR (thanks to PiterPunk/NYYRIKKI), Frael BRUC_100 version 1 and 2 (thanks to RJP, FRS, et al), Pioneer UC-V102 (thanks to PiterPunk), Victor HC-80 (thanks to Daniele), Toshiba HX-23F and HX-23 (thanks to FRS) - added new extension: Sanyo MRS-001 RS-232C cartridge (thanks to mtn) New or improved emulator features: - fixed bug in parsing remote command XML (causing e.g. ROM names with special characters not to get communicated to openMSX correctly from Catapult) - fixed crash in 'reverse goback' - fixed inserting a slotexpander in a specific slot - fixed slowness issue when taking screenshots frame by frame - fixed support of files larger than 2GB (e.g. hard disk images) on Windows - fixed VDP status flag when using cmdtiming broking (infinitely fast VDP commands) - fixed excessive delay on 'reverse goto' with ram watch enabled - OSD menu: - fixed (un)plugging (connectors)/pluggables with spaces in their name - fixed loading savestate with more than one . in its filename - support up to 2 hard disk images (just like ROMs and disk drives) - fixed bug that cassette image was removed when doing reverse goto 0 - fixed save_msx_screen for 2nd page of screen 7-12 (thanks to FRS) - improved robustness of DirAsDisk - added progress update reporting when doing operations that take a lot of time (like calculating a hash of a large file or doing a large step in a replay) - fixed unintended extra calculation of hash for hard disk images when reversing - made joystickN_deadzone setting's numbering consistent with joystickN_config; both are now 0-based - added debuggable for printer port, containing strobe and data byte - added experimental support for ALSA MIDI out (Linux): now it's much easier to connect MSX MIDI out devices to a soft synth or other application on Linux - improved support for UNC paths on Windows (network drives) - added a script to speed up the type command: type_via_keybuf (thanks to NYYRIKKI for the initial version). Default type implementation can now be tuned with the new default_type_proc setting. Build system, packaging, documentation: - to compile with gcc you now need gcc 4.8 or higher - updated Visual Studio projects to Visual Studio 2015 - dropped support for Windows XP, because it seems Visual Studio 2015 has bugs in supporting it - dropped support for Dingoo A320, because its toolchain is now so outdated that it can't compile the openMSX source code any longer - added build, packaging and documentation support for GCW Zero - dropped support for universal binaries on Mac OS X, as all supported Mac OS X versions require x86-64 CPU's - updated Tcl to 8.5.18 - updated libpng to 1.6.20 - now optionally link to libasound on Linux (for the ALSA MIDI support) - added debug flag to build system that shows which commands are executed: make V=1 - improved description on how to use MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD openMSX 0.12.0 (2015-09-12) --------------------------- This was going to be (mostly) a bug fix release. But at the end we also got inspired by Grauw to add a lot of MIDI devices. And, reviewing what we changed the last 10 months, we saw that we also got loads of help from several people to add many new machine configurations and added some fun stuff like Sensor Kid and (experimental) Beer IDE emulation. On the emulator features category we give you stuff like triplesize video recording, some TAS enhancements and a callback for too fast VRAM access. So, enjoy this 'various features and bug fixes' release! Here's the list with all highlights and details: MSX device support: - fixed (S)RAM writing on turboR - fixed border color in screen 11/12 - fixed some details of SD card emulation (found with FUZIX) - fixed clipping bug in sprite-mode-1 drawing - fixed crash in openMSX when using the AVT DPF-550 extension - fixed support of 8kB RS-232C ROMs (which is the only correct size!) - fixed emulation of joystick mode of the mouse - fixed broken MegaFlashROM SCC+ (introduced with openMSX 0.11.0) - improved trackball movement emulation so that JoyTest can also detect it like on real hardware - fixed touchpad joystick pins (fixing detection in JoyTest) - tweaked volumes of SFG-01/05 against the PSG - added Panasonic FS-A1WSX/WX variant ot the MSX-MUSIC mapper - added proper YM2148 emulation (MIDI in/out for Yamaha SFG modules) - added proper MC6850 emulation (MIDI in/out for Philips Music Module) - added emulation of FAC MIDI Interface - added emulation of Sensor Kid, ported from yayaMSX2SK, which is based on Mr. Takeda's Common Source Code Project - added emulation of BeerIDE (experimental) - added many new machines: Canon V-25 (thanks to Rudi Westerhof), Canon V-8, Fenner/Samsung SPC-800, Hitachi MB-H1, Toshiba HX-10D (thanks to Ricardo Jurcyk Pinheiro), Canon V-10, Canon V-20 (JP), Spectravideo SVI-728 (ES), Mitsubishi ML-TS2 (partly, it's still work-in-progress), Sony HB-101 (JP), Sony HB-201 (JP), Sanyo MPC-6, Mitsubishi ML-F120 and ML-F110 and Hitachi MB-H3 (thanks to Werner Kai) and Yamaha AX350IIF (thanks to Rudolf Gutlich) New or improved emulator features: - added "too_fast_vram_access_callback": you can now run a Tcl script when the running MSX software accesses VRAM too fast, e.g. break to debug - added display of 'movie length' in TAS mode. This is the length of your 'movie' if you upload it to tasvideos.org - added -triplesize to video recorder: allows creation of video files in 960x720 pixels, for which YouTube renders videos at 60 fps. - some fixes in keyboard mappings - fixed slow console when emulation speed is very low - add a snapshot 'near the end' to the OMR when saving it, allowing quicker continuation of the replay after loading it - similarly, add snapshots when fast-forwarding to the target time, so they can be used to jump back more quickly - show reverse bar in green when replaying in viewonly mode - added a converter from/to OMR to/from text, which allows you to more easily edit the OMR outside of openMSX - improved implementation of 'auto-save' feature of replays: the setting will now persist over openMSX sessions - added an OSD overlay for Metal Gear Build system, packaging, documentation: - replace mingw32 build support with MinGW-w64 build support on Windows - updated our website and other URL's to point to http://openmsx.org/ or GitHub openMSX 0.11.0 (2014-11-08) --------------------------- This release brings you the following important new features: VDP access timing now also for MSX1 modes (corruption with too fast VRAM access will be visible now), implementation of most defailed differences between all used VDP chips and emulation of MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD. On top of that, there are some important (long standing) bug fixes, like the proper implementation of envelopes for MSX-AUDIO, fixing for example "Copy is Crime" by Impact. And last but not least, a lot of work was done under the bonnet, giving you even better performance and preparations for the future. Here's the list with all highlights: MSX device support: - VDP: - implemented access timing also for character and text modes (both for MSX1 VDP's and V99x8): too fast VDP access will now cause corruption on openMSX too - added support for specific MSX1 VDP's (mostly thanks to hap for all the research): - the exact VDP type can now be specified in the config file - differences between Toshiba T6950/T7937A, TMS99xx and TMS91xx MSX1 VDP's are now emulated (except sprite cloning) - updated many machine configs with the proper MSX1 VDP type (where known, additions/corrections are welcome!) - implemented that V99x8 does not support undocumented mixed modes - fixed bug in 5/9th sprite detection status register - added I/O port mirroring to machines of which we are certain it exists - MSX-AUDIO (Y8950) and related: - fixed envelope for MSX-AUDIO (Y8950), the infamous legato-envelope bug is now finally fixed! - fixed handling of key-off for percussive tones - fixed detection of Philips Music Module in Tetris II Special Edition - added emulation of MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD. Note: the implementation is such that existing software works on it, but do not fully rely on it when developing for this cartridge! - improved Sony HBI-55 emulation - fixed some details in several machine configurations - fixed KANA/CODE key not working in CHARACTER input mode - added the following machines: Daewoo CPC-51 Zemmix V, Daewoo CPC-300E, Toshiba HX-51I, Yamaha YIS-503IIR, Toshiba FS-TM1, Sanyo MPC-10 (Wavy 10), Yamaha CX5MII, Fujitsu FM-X (thanks to NYYRIKKI, Werner Kai, Maxim Vlasov and Alex Krasivsky) - added the Casio KB-7 and KB-10 docking stations (note: these extensions only work with the Casio PV-7 and MX-10 respectively; do not be worried when they appear to be not working according to Catapult!) - added the MSX Acid Test machines, contributed by FRS - added the Gradiente CT-80E 80 column card extension, thanks to Maurício Braga New or improved emulator features: - added de-flicker video filter via new 'deflicker' setting. Use this to remove flickering in cases like the dvik demos where 105 colors are simulated on MSX1 by alternating different native colors. It's disabled by default. - performance improvements: - speed up execution of Tcl scripts - many various other optimizations - fixed auto_enable_reverse (set/unset auto enabling reverse at startup) - rewrote most OpenGL 2 code to be more compatible with OpenGL ES - improved guessing of mapper type for 64kB ROMs - fixed a bug with watch_points affecting the execution flow - fixed corruption in XSA disk images - added NYYRIKKI's fast CAS loading/saving script, enable with setting the 'fast_cas_load_hack_enabled' setting to on - joysticks/controllers: - added setting to configure dead zone for joysticks - added support for joystick hats (can be used just like buttons) - improved support in OSD menu (take deadzone into account) - added dir-as-disk support for the OSD menu - removed experimental libao sound driver - added support for R-ALT on Korean keyboard (thanks to Miso Kim) - TAS: added possibility to query the length of the current replay (defined as the time stamp of the last input) Build system, packaging, documentation: - even more use of C++11 features, when using gcc use 4.7 or higher - removed build dependency on libxml2 - removed many/all unused features/libs from the build system - added support to cross compile with MinGW-w64 for (at least) 32 bit Windows using Linux - cleaned up the stuff in the doc directory - you now get what we really wanted you to get :) - changed packaging method to include stuff by default instead of exclude stuff by default - fixed native compilation on mipsel - upgraded C-BIOS to release 0.27 openMSX 0.10.1 (2014-05-01) --------------------------- This release fixes mostly bugs we introduced with 0.10.0 or were already present for a bit longer... sorry for those, but most should be fixed now :) There are also some small but nice additions... Here's the list with all highlights: MSX device support: - fixed bug in YM2413 (FMPAC), that was audible in BPS Tetris - added Sharp/Epcom HB-4000 80 column cartridge extension New or improved emulator features: - extended save_msx_screen script to take VDP(24) into acount - fixed crash on Visual Studio build when using wav files (e.g. in the cassetteplayer) - fixed crash on 32-bit Visual Studio build when recording videos without the -doublesize option - fixed crash on 32-bit Visual Studio build when using scale_factor 3 and SDL renderer - fixed waves shown upside-down in the SCC Viewer OSD widget - fixed crash when loading a savestate that has JoyTap plugged in - performance improvements: - several improvements that result in shorter start up time - fixed reverse-performance when using hard disks - fixed handling of corrupt hardware configuration XML file - fixed crash when MSX with TC8566AF FDC (e.g. turboR) crashed - fixed possible hang up when reversing with harddisks - fixed Tcl error when changing horizontal stretch in OSD menu - fixed displaying of error messages on OSD - Mac OS X MIDI support: - fixed MIDI output on Mac OS X (was not working for some applications) - added support for running status - added support for system realtime messages - added support for MIDI in - fixed issues with on-screen-keyboard on Android 4.4 - added default keybindings for controllers targeted at gaming - added mapping of B-control button to press CTRL or SHIFT in OSD keyboard - added fine grained control in which slots carts and extensions will end up - added support for single sided disk drives for dir-as-disk - added support for hard disk images to the OSD menu - added warning if ROM images with larger size than supported on real Konami and Konami SCC mappers are used Build system, packaging, documentation: - updated Windows build to Visual Studio 2013 - made compilation faster by removing more than 250 unnecessary includes - even more use of C++11 features - upgraded Tcl to 8.5.15 - added build support for 64-bit ARM - added 256x256 pixel openMSX logo image and use it e.g. for Mac OS X icon - fixed staticbindist build with more recent clang releases and for Mac OS 10.9 SDK - do not link against libraries in /usr/lib anymore on Mac OS X, only link against frameworks. This enables to compile against the default SDK. openMSX 0.10.0 (2014-01-05) --------------------------- This release adds many larger and smaller features, but most outstanding are: cycle accurate VDP command engine timing, an Android port, subdirectory support for dir-as-disk and Neos MA-20 support. These features meant a lot of work was done in practically all parts of the code (of which you can read the results in the complete list below), but at the same time we also freshened up much of the code using many of the new C++11 language features. All in all, it was time to release this stuff officially... Here's the list with all highlights: MSX device support: - accuracy improvements: - improved TMS99X8/TMS9929 color palette - improved V9990/GFX9000: - VRAM reads go via 1-byte buffer - VRAM read/write pointers only get updated when R#2 and R#5 get written - fixed initial content of VRAM of GFX9000 - V9990 P1/P2 sprites that are disabled still count for the 16 sprite limit - fixed roll behaviour of layer B in P1 mode - turboR TC8566AF has other register memory mapping than other machines - use correct Kanji font ROM for Victor HC-95A and removed S1985 - added cycle accurate VDP command engine timing (can be disabled with the new too_fast_vram_access setting) - fixes in YM2413 emulation (FMPAC) - added mapper support: - MSXtra cartridge (a debugging tool released by PTC which has its own RAM) - MultiROM Collection, designed by Manuel Pazos in 2006 - ASCII8 mapper with 2kB SRAM - ASCII16 mapper with 8kB SRAM - Super Swangi (a.k.a. Super Altered Beast) - added support for MSX touch pad - added mu-PACK extension, a MIDI module to upgrade a turboR ST to GT - added support for large hard disk images and LaserDisc images (>4GB) - added initial RAM patterns for Sony HB-F1XDJ and Sanyo PHC-23J - added support for Neos MA-20 Version Up Adapter (MSX1 to MSX2 converter), insert both Neos_MA-20R and Neos_MA-20V extensions for this - fixed Toshiba MSX-AUDIO with no sample RAM - fixes in joystick, mouse and track ball emulation - minor fixes in Y8950 (MSX-AUDIO) and YMF262 (MoonSound) - added OPL3Cartridge2_mono and OPL3Cartridge2_stereo extensions - added Yamaha SFG-01 extension and replaced the SFG-05 with the SFG-01 in the CX5M machine - added an experimental Boosted_MSXturboR with IDE machine config - added Casio PV-16, Casio P-7, Casio MX-10, Goldstar FC-80U and Sony HB-F1XV machines and an experimental Zemmix Super V (Daewoo CPC-61) machine config New or improved emulator features: - added subdirectory support for dir-as-disk - added configurable host to MSX joystick mapping, e.g. useful to bind the crawl command (button A+B) in Metal Gear 2 to a single PC joystick button - added support for bash completion (useful for using openMSX on the bash command line) - performance improvements: - improved start-up performance (on Dingoo openMSX starts over 20% faster) - reduced CPU overhead when enabling reverse - further optimized CPU emulation - sped up CAS loading (use 3744 baud instead of 2760 baud) - reduce input latency (poll host events more often and remove delays) - speed up reverse in combination with harddisk by using incremental hashing - reverse/TAS: - added reverse subcommand to truncate the current replay - show two decimals in the reverse bar time - added setting to prevent the reversebar from fading out and made that the behaviour in TAS mode - added bookmarks feature to reverse bar - added possibility to customize TAS key bindings in an external script - added setting to auto save replays at intervals - added command to reset the lag counter - added commands to go to frame boundaries and advance/reverse to frame boundaries - show values of TAS widgets also in the middle of a frame - several improvements on the OSD menu: - several improvements on the file browser - better error handling - only show media menu options that are relevant for the current machine (e.g. do not show disk drives when the machine has none) - added support for LaserDisc - added a quit menu with confirmation - added limitsprites setting - added basic mouse/touch support, including: - right click to close current menu - support for scrollwheel of mouse to scroll in lists - only show video options if they actually make sense - added option to make current machine default (started when launching openMSX) - added resampler setting (for performance tuning) - added detailed sound chip control (balance, volume, per channel mute) - added possibility to browse to other drives on Windows - added possibility to insert a new tape in the cassette player and made it easy to browse to your newly created tapes - added short cuts to browse to your file pools (if they contain stuff) - added confirmation dialog before overwriting existing save states - added feedback when executing actions like inserting disk, saving state - remove SSE and MMX assembly routines, only keep rewritten SSE2 routines - added interleaving with black frame for monitors with LightBoost support - added OSD widget that displays how busy the VDP is - enable grab on fullscreen (workaround for Mac issue) - added Cmd+I hotkey to press Insert key on Mac Build system, packaging, documentation: - created Android port (available via Google Play) - migrated to git - updated Windows build to Visual Studio 2012 update 3 - prepare for Visual Studio 2013 (next release will be built with it) - now a compiler which supports C++11 is required to compile openMSX, like g++ 4.6, clang 3.0 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 - integrated Dingoo packaging in the build system - better support for 64 bit systems (sizes, memory, etc.) - added document about details on VDP command engine timing - changed machine configurations from specific directories to just an XML file - removed the GP2X port - Mac support is now limited to Mac OS X 10.7 (so 64-bit only) and higher openMSX 0.9.1 (2012-09-30) -------------------------- This release mostly fixes a bug in dir-as-disk that was introduced in openMSX 0.9.0, when adding support for the DMK format and low level disk emulation. We not only fixed that bug, we rewrote dir-as-disk almost completely, making it a lot more robust. Here's the list with all highlights: MSX device support: - Accuracy improvements: - improved some details on the laserdisc emulation - improved timing of the VDP LINE command (thanks to NYYRIKKI for the ideas) - added Toshiba HX-21, Toshiba HX-22 and Toshiba HX-22I. The latter two have a switchable RS-232C interface (use the new toshiba_rs232c_switch setting) New or improved emulator features: - fixed crash with fast resampler and 8192 samples - dir-As-Disk: - dir-as-disk works properly again and is now a lot more robust - improve error reporting when something goes wrong - console support/scripts: - added script to save current screen to file in MSX loadable format, thanks to NYYRIKKI - performance improvements: - improved console rendering speed (uses less CPU) - improved Tcl integration - speed up low level disk emulation - optimized rendering of superimposed modes (Video9000, laserdisc) - several other performance improvements Build system, packaging, documentation: - Added build support for DragonFly BSD, thanks to John Marino openMSX 0.9.0 (2012-08-12) -------------------------- This release improves a lot on accuracy of floppy support, especially by the introduction of support for the DMK format. This means it should be possible to run all MSX disk software without patching it. Furthermore, our efforts to improve performance has some results: start up time has almost halved on a Dingoo A320! Here's the list with all highlights: MSX device support: - Bug fixes: - overscan: 512x512 demo by NYYRIKKI and Don't Cock It Up by Matra now work - cursor order in B-modes of GFX9000 - several small issues in existing MSX machine configurations - broken border rendering on ARM CPU's - 2nd drive detection on National machines - detail in MSX-AUDIO that prevented proper detection in MSX-AUDIO BIOS 1.3 - Accuracy improvements: - much improved accuracy for Floppy Drive Controllers (mostly WD2793 and alike) - added support for delayed motor off for disk drives, as in real machines implemented by the CXD1032 chip - disk drive rotation is now correct - added support for persistency of S1985 back-up RAM - added support for specifying the initial content of RAM and VRAM. Fixing this for the Philips MSX2's shows why Cas Cremers never noticed a bug in Akin, causing white pixels on the screen - Added initial support for Video9000: - new extension, which gives a new Video9000 videosource - the Video9000 can display the GFX9000 output superimposed over the normal VDP. Software which writes to I/O port 0x6F when a Video9000 is connected will make sure the right video signal is displayed. This is now emulated. So, use the video9000 extension instead of the gfx9000 extension to benefit from Video 9000 aware MSX software! - added video recording for Video9000 videosource - Added support for the FDC connection style of the Victor HC-9x - Added support for several floppy drive extensions: Sanyo MFD-001, Mitsubishi ML-30DC/ML-30FD, Talent DPF-550, AVT DPF-550, Philips NMS 1200 - Added Spanish Mitsubishi ML-G1, Spanish Mitsubishi ML-G3, Japanese Sony HB-10 and Talent TPC-310 machines New or improved emulator features: - MSX developer features: - more mappers now have a romblocks debuggable - added several new procs for break point conditions: address_in_slot, watch_in_slot - you can now have breakpoints and watchpoints anywhere in a MegaROM - previously hardcoded warnings for invalid PSG directions and di;halt detection are now a Tcl callback, which means you can e.g. let openMSX go into a break point when they occur, or disable them altogether - save_debuggable can now also save part of a debuggable - Console support/scripts: - added type command that can type from file and a special version with offset to type passwords) - added syntax highlighting for Tcl in the console - show errors in the console in red - implemented tab-completion for nested Tcl commands - OSD menu improvements: - list of machines and extensions are now sorted alphabetically - file lists are now filtered on extension case insensitively - Performance improvements: - OSD - start-up time - several scripts (reverse bar a.o.) - Miscellaneous: - guess_title script is now a lot better and is used to generate file names if no file name was given (e.g. to screenshots) - reverse bar has now even clearer colors to reflect recording (red) and replaying state - don't print an error when an initial CMOS/SRAM file isn't found - enable auto-run for cassettes by default - show an error message when using harddisk images larger than 2GB, because that is currently not properly supported - show progress on calculating SHA1 sum of large harddisk images - additional files for ROMs (like samples for Playball) can now also be in the same directory as the ROM file Build system, packaging, documentation: - Upgraded 3rd party libraries - Removed support for PPC on Mac and added build support for clang, which is also our new default compiler for Mac OS X - Added several utilities for DMK support: dumping tool, analyzing tool, creation tool and conversion tools - First step in phasing out the roms/ directories: removed them (including SHA1SUMS file which was redundant with the hardwareconfig.xml files) and new configs do not use the path with roms/ anymore; use the systemroms pool instead openMSX 0.8.2 (2012-01-25) -------------------------- This is mostly a bug fix release with some small improvements. Here's the list with all highlights: MSX device support: - Bug fixes: - (regression) sprite colors in screen 7/8 (visible in Ikari for instance) - VDP emulation bug, which was visible in Psycho World's 3x3 power up matrix - Y8950 (MSX-AUDIO) when using NOP Real Motion - MoonSound FM 4op mode - crash in YM2151 (in Yamaha CX5M) - sample playing in Nettou Yakyuu - several small issues in existing MSX machine configurations - Accuracy improvements: - MSX-MUSIC (YM2413 (Okazaki)): implemented SETTLE (or DUMP) phase - MoonSound (YMF278): fixed x-tal frequency and some other details - GFX9000: added basic support for set adjust registers - Added support for several laserdisc features to be able to run the Lascommate Junior High School Mathematics LD's, including a dummy Lascom Kanji cartridge implementation - Added emulation of the following mapper types: - Baby Dinosaur Dooly - Manbow 2 2nd release - Best of Hamaraja Night - Added emulation of memory based I/O for MSX RS-232C, making emulation of Sony HBI-232 possible - Added Sony HB-F9S and Sony HB-G900P machine - Added support for JoyMega: Mega Drive joy pad with 6 buttons New or improved emulator features: - Video output: - Faster laserdisc rendering - Added horizontal stretch for SDL renderer (useful for Dingoo for instance). As horizontal stretching is enabled by default, the CPU usage of openMSX when using the SDL renderer will now be higher than before. Set horizontal_stretch to 320 to disable it and gain some performance (but have a less accurate aspect ratio of the screen). - Sound generation: - Sync sound to EmuTime (greatly improves sample playback in e.g. Real Motion and TRAX Player - Added new sound driver based on libao - Fixed sound quality of blip resampler - MSX developer features: - Added vdpcmdinprogress_callback setting, which can be used to trigger a script when a write to the VDP command engine registers is detected while there is still a VDP command in progress. - Fixed memory usage issue when using step_back (e.g. via debugger) - Greatly improved performance for step_back - Fixed bug with watchpoints that triggered too late sometimes - Command line options/support: - Added recognition of .tcl extension as extra start up scripts - Fixed recognition of OMR/OMS files which were re-gzipped - Added command line option -replay to load and view a replay and also support dropping replays (OMR files) on openMSX to view them - Added command line option -savestate to load a savestate and also support dropping savestates (OMS files) on openMSX to view them - OSD menu improvements (mostly useful for hand held users): - added connector submenu - added support for running tapes - added support for horizontal stretch setting - Joystick support: - Allow joystick axis motion events to be bound, as the manual promises - Made real joystick support a bit more flexible: read all axes - Channel recorder: - Fixed record_channels command to record to the soundlogs directory - Added option to record all channels of all sound chips with record_channels - Platform specific improvements: - Fix Caps lock behaviour on Mac OS X - Add support for MIDI output to a virtual endpoint for Mac OS X - Comfortable machine configurations: - Added new fantasy machine: Boosted MSX2+ JP, based on Panasonic FS-A1WSX - Added basic compiler to Boosted MSX2 EN - Miscellaneous: - Updated all scripts to make full use of Tcl 8.5 (and clean them up in the process) to improve performance - Support in the hardware config XML format for using a single ROM image (i.e. a physical (EP)ROM dump) which is used by several devices - Make PgUp/PgDn reverse step depend on the speed setting - Reverse bar now indicates recording (red) and replaying state - The 'about' console command can now also be used to find settings - Fixed 64k ROM mapper detection Build system, packaging, documentation: - Upgraded Tcl dependency to Tcl 8.5 - Upgraded 3rd party libs - Optional additional dependency on libao - Added support for the Clang compiler - Make our ARM inline asm routines compile in Thumb2 mode - Moved Dingux port to OpenDingux: openMSX now only compiles for OpenDingux - Added lto flavour to enable Link-Time Optimization openMSX 0.8.1 (2011-03-12) -------------------------- This release builds on the previous one, in the sense that we worked out the features a little more. We added a lot of scripts to help you with Tool Assisted Speedruns (TAS), one of the reasons openMSX got officially approved as a TAS capable emulator on TASvideos.org. The reverse feature also got some updates while doing this. For the rest, this release does a lot of smaller fixes and additions, see the list below. Here's the list with all highlights: New or improved emulator features: - Quite complete support for TAS (see http://www.tasvideos.org/) - TAS mode with many TAS widgets activated automatically - extended tools: keyboard view per frame, frame reverse/advance, robust frame counter, save slot mechanism, RAM watch, etc. - Updates on reverse (and related features): - enabled by default now (except on Dingoo) - changed (default) extensions of replays and savestates to OMR and OMS respectively - added a view only mode to the reverse feature (watch replays without interrupting them) - replays now usually contain multiple snapshots, so you can quickly jump around in a just loaded replay (e.g. to the end!) - huge performance improvements when loading replays/savestates - added filepools to put your software files in; when loading a replay with a file which is not available, openMSX will scan the filepools: default location is share/software - added hover with time indicator on reverse bar - fixed bug when using DirAsDisk in combination with reverse - added step_back function: while debugging step back one instruction - Added info topic to query VDP timing information - Fixed saving of replays, screenshots, etc., when the directory wasn't available yet - Fixed bug in per-soundchip-channel audio recording - Fixed auto stereo recording for mbstereo-like configurations (was done in mono) - OSD: - Show warning/error messages that were previously only shown on standard-output in an OSD text box - Added gradients for rectangles to make the OSD look more polished - Added border property to OSD rectangle - Added script to find cases of too fast VDP access (of which the consequences are not emulated) - Added setting to disable sprites and option to make screenshot without sprites (especially useful for map makers!) - Added script to record movies in multiple files, especially useful for YouTube (record_chunks) - Replaced automatic printing of ROM info (from the software database) with a command to get the info on demand (rom_info) - Automatically plug in real joysticks into the MSX - Several performance improvements to several toys scripts MSX device support: - Fixed accuracy of mouse emulation - Fixed bug in sprite collision detection (sprites can't collide in the border) - Better support for keyboard of Brazilian MSX machines - Don't emulate Yes/No keys on machines that don't have them - Accuracy improvements: - (minor) fixes in MSX-AUDIO, YM2413 (Okazaki) and R800 emulation - Added emulation of the Mega Flash ROM SCC+ and ASCII Japanese MSX-DOS2 - Added emulation of seek delay, head-load and rotational delay on TC8566AF based disk drives - Added Sony HB-F5 and CIEL Expert Turbo machine Build system, packaging, documentation: - Updates of libraries used in the static builds - Windows binary built with Visual Studio 2010 - Basic (experimental) support for cross compilation of Windows 32 bit binaries from Linux (using MinGW) - Updated C-BIOS to 0.25, with support for various localized machines openMSX 0.8.0 (2010-06-02) -------------------------- This release brings you two major new features: reverse and Laserdisc. Reverse is similar to what you can do in meisei: you can 'rewind' time with your finger tip, to correct game playing mistakes or inspect what caused a crash. Laserdisc is the Palcom system introduced by Pioneer in 1984: now you can play all the Palcom MSX Laserdisc games in openMSX! For the rest we have mostly fixed smaller issues and added smaller features (see below). Here's the list with all highlights: New or improved emulator features: - Added reverse: go back in time to correct mistakes or replay your actions (use PgUp and PgDn to control, enable visualization of this feature with this console command: set auto_enable_reverse gui). For more information on usage, please see the (links in the) FAQ of the manual. - Debugging: - added information on last address/value written which triggered watch point - added several new debuggables: keymatrix, joystick ports, romblock - Windows unicode fixes - Added possibility to link to Generation MSX from within scripts - Various internal code cleanups - Better SDLGL-PP TV scaler, sensitive to scanline setting - Many speed and code size optimizations, developed in the context for the Dingoo port - Renamed "update" command to "openmsx_update" to avoid conflicts with the native Tcl command - Various tweaks to OSD menu: new colors (thanks Wolf), save states show date, toys menu, ... - Added new icon skin especially made for handhelds - Added OSD virtual keyboard (only international QWERTY layout for now) for devices without keyboard - Added OSD mouse support, you can now easily create drag and drop of MSX objects, for instance - New scripts that demonstrate the OSD framework: - experimental OSD script for tabbed MSXing (controllable from OSD menu) - music keyboard (visualize notes of sound chips) - SCC editor (edit SCC wave forms) - Experimental (still primitive) support for TAS (http://tasvideos.org/) MSX device support: - Added emulation of Palcom Laserdisc games on the Pioneer PX-7/PX-V60 (note: not visible in screenshots and video recording yet) - Added support for balance per channel, including support for the "stereo" effect of the FM Stereo PAK and the stereo PSG of the Pioneer PX-7 - Added new mapper: Arc - Accuracy improvements: - minor fixes in V99x8, V9990, YM2413 and YMF278 emulation - Added emulation of the trackball (thanks n_n) Build system, packaging, documentation: - Added platform/CPU support for: PA-RISC, Dingoo, SuperH, Nokia N900/Maemo, MacOSX 10.6 / 64-bit, GNU/kFreeBSD, Atmel AVR32 - For Laserdisc support (which is optional), added dependency on libogg, libvorbis and libtheora - Removed dependency on SDL_image openMSX 0.7.2 (2009-06-30) -------------------------- This is a quick fix for the 0.7.1 release. Due to a small bug in a Tcl script, openMSX wasn't able to load savestates with paths that contain spaces, which is the most common case on standard Windows installations. 0.7.2 fixes that. openMSX 0.7.1 (2009-06-28) -------------------------- This release comes mostly with good news for Windows users: we have a brand new installer with binaries which have been created in a brand new way, using Microsoft Visual C++ 2008. This means smaller binaries and also support for 64-bit Windows operating systems. Also, several long standing problems have been fixed in the Windows release of openMSX. E.g., it now includes full support for unicode! For the rest we have mostly fixed smaller issues (see below) and added some cool demonstrations of what one can do with the combination of (Tcl) scripting, the debug command and the OSD. New or improved emulator features: - Removed buggy SDLGL renderer (instead use SDLGL-PP) - Debugging: - implemented step_out - implemented skip_instruction - implemented general debug conditions (not bound to addresses anymore, but note: this is very CPU intensive!) - Speed optimizations in the CPU emulation - Console now uses TrueType fonts, and can display localized text now (as long as the characters are in the used font), in other words: it supports unicode - Optimizations in ZMBV encoding cause openMSX video recordings to become smaller and the encoding to be faster - As is default in fMSX, it is now possible to automatically pause openMSX when the mouse pointer leaves the openMSX window (not enabled by default) - Added icons in the OSD for 'pause', 'full throttle', 'debug break' and 'mute' status - Added several improvements on the OSD, regarding features, bug fixes and speed - Fixed some long standing bugs on Windows: - ALT-SPACE no longer pops up a context window - Unicode is now fully supported (e.g, no more problems with localized versions of Windows). Note: this means openMSX requires Windows 2000 or higher as of this release. - socket communication (e.g. with the openMSX debugger) is secure now. This does mean that older builds of the openMSX debugger will not work anymore with this openMSX release, you need an updated build! - Added the possibility to include OSD elements in screenshots, which are now no longer included by default (e.g. typing screenshot in the console no longer shows the console in the screenshot) - Added some scripts that demonstrate the OSD framework: - vu_meters: shows graphical VU meters for each channel of each sound chip in the currently emulated MSX - scc_viewer: shows current waveform and volume of the SCC channels - mog_overlay: help and extra information when playing The Maze of Galious - info_panel: a general information panel, similar to the DIGIblue v2 theme of blueMSX MSX device support: - Several new machines were added, e.g. Sony HB-F700P, Panasonic CF-2700 (German), Talent DPC-200 (Argentinian), Yamaha CX5M, Sanyo PHC-28L, Sanyo PHC-28S, Yamaha YIS-503F, Sanyo MPC-25FD (thanks jltursan) - Added Sharp HB-3600 dual disk drive - Accuracy improvements: - Added difference between AY8910 and YM2149 PSG's when reading registers - Z80: added 'ld a,i' quirk - V99x8: - implemented sprite collision coordinate status registers - fixed detail of LINE command (fixing one problem in Syntax Infinity) - implemented VR bit (fixing another problem in Syntax Infinity) - Added a memory mirror device to properly emulate the Sony HB-10P - Fixed sound quality regression in YM2413 emulation - Fixed very long standing bug in vblank interrupt timing, resolving many problems like the Zanac title screen, Adonis music speed, Galaga slowdowns, Penguin Adventure start up, ... - Added emulation of Nowind (mostly useful for Nowind firmware developers) - Added emulation of the Arkanoid pad, using the mouse Build system, packaging, documentation: - Build support for Microsoft Visual C++ on Windows. As a result, we have smaller binaries for Win32 and we now also have support for 64-bit Windows. - New installer based on WiX on Windows - Added a super-opt flavour which does the most aggressive optimizations. This includes using "computed gotos" in the CPU code (which speeds it up by roughly 10%), but may need 1GB of RAM at compile time. - Added support for Hurd operating systems (tested on Debian GNU/Hurd) - Converted (most of) the build system to Python, so that it is a lot better maintainable and the Visual C++ build can also make use of it. Python (> 2.4 but < 3.0) is now required to compile openMSX. openMSX 0.7.0 (2009-01-07) -------------------------- This release contains several exciting new features, clearing some long standing feature requests! The most important one of all is that we have implemented save states! It took us a while to think of a way to implement it without having some disadvantages you could have with some other emulators. The biggest one is backwards compatibility. Our system is designed in such way that it is able to cope with older save states in future releases. So, you don't have to be afraid to upgrade to a new version of openMSX: your save states will remain usable! Another big feature is the heavily improved keyboard support. In previous releases it was always a bit of an annoyance to work with emulated MSX machines which have a different keyboard layout than your host computer. E.g. using an MSX turboR, which has a Japanese keyboard, on a PC with a US-English keyboard was very annoying, as the characters that appear on the screen do not match the ones you typed on your PC keyboard. This problem has now been solved and you can use any combination of host computer keyboard and emulated MSX machine, without getting the wrong characters on the MSX screen. Full transparent dir-as-disk support has also been a long standing feature request. Well, it's here! Dir-as-disk now behaves as you might expect: any change on either the host or the MSX side is reflected on the other side immediately. This could help a lot for cross-platform development. Before we give you the list with details, we want to thank hap, the author of meisei, for helping us out with some of the features below; you might recognize them from his recent meisei releases. New or improved emulator features: - Save states (keyboard short cuts: ALT-F7 or Cmd+R to quick-load and ALT-F8 or Cmd-S to quick-save your state): - Exchangeable between different host machines, OSes, platforms - Designed to be forwards-compatible, i.e. they will work with future openMSX releases - As a side effect it is now possible to have multiple emulated MSX machines in memory (comparable with tabbed browsing) - Fully automatic host-MSX keyboard mapping (enabled by default), support for MSX keyboards of type: de, es, fr, gb, int, jp_ansi, jp_jis, kr, proto_fr (e.g. French Philips VG 8010), proto_int (Philips VG 8010), ru - Fully transparent dir as disk (by default) - Debugging: - It's now possible to break on changes of the IRQ lines: the global Z80 IRQ input but also specific per-device IRQ outputs ("debug probe" command) - Made more devices 'debuggable' - Simplified usage of the 'debug device' - Recording movies in higher resolution: 640x480 using the "-doublesize" option - Major speed optimizations: - Z80 and R800 emulation - V99x8: command-engine, bitmap and sprite rendering - SCC, YM2413, AY8910 and sound mixing in general - rewrote some critical routines in x86 or ARM assembly As a result most MSX1 and MSX2 software now runs realtime on a ARM9 200MHz CPU, which you can find e.g. in a GP2X handheld console. - Screenshots can now be made of the MSX screen only (using the "-msxonly" option) - Added an On-Screen-Display (OSD) framework, which will be useful to control openMSX in full screen mode and especially on hand held machines like the GP2X. There is already a proof-of-concept OSD available, which can be accessed by pressing the MENU (or Cmd+O) key. Note that this is still an experimental feature! Feedback is most welcome, of course. - Amount of horizontal stretch can be tweaked by the user (horizontal_stretch setting) MSX device support: - Support for new mapper types: Nettou Yakyuu (with sample ROM, for Moero!! Nettou Yakyuu '88), MatraInk (for Ink), Manbow2 (for Manbow 2), MegaFlashRomScc (for new MegaFlashROM SCC extension) - Several new machines were added, e.g. Philips VG 8000, Philips VG 8010 (also French version), Philips VG 8020/19, Sony HB-10P, Sony HB-20P, Sony HB-55P - Added Brazilian OPL3 Cartridge - Major accuracy improvements: - turboR: extra wait cycle when accessing VDP - Z80: - more accurate IRQ timing - fixed some undocumented flag behaviour (not caught by zexall) - implemented differences between turboR-Z80 and normal Z80 (SCF and CCF) - R800: - more accurate timing (correct page break behaviour) - more accurate flags (rexall passes now) - SCC: - fixes in rotation mode - corrected power-on state - V99x8: - implemented VRAM remapping (register R#1, bit7) - implemented blink in bitmap mode - V9990: - much improved command timing - bug fixes in command handling - fixed vertical scroll details (in combination with screen splits) - MSX-AUDIO: various fixes for the different MSX-AUDIO variants - PSG: emulate joystick input pin 6/7 mask quirk - more accurate 'HarryFox' and 'CrossBlaim' mapper types Build system, packaging, documentation: - Mostly updated support for building a statically linked executable on Windows. openMSX 0.6.3 (2007-12-09) -------------------------- This release contains several new features and improvements related to sound. All sound chips are emulated at their native frequency and resampled using advanced resampling techniques to the desired output frequency (typically 44.1 kHz). The advanced resamplers improve the sound quality a lot, because they are free of aliasing distortions. There are three resamplers you can choose from: "fast", which produces approximately the same results as previous openMSX releases, "blip", which produces better sound and is still quite fast and "hq", which produces the best sound but takes a lot of CPU power. Since the quality difference between "blip" and "hq" is very small and the speed difference quite large, "blip" is the recommended resampler and the new default. Many thanks to Blargg, the author of Blip_Buffer, not only for the code but also for explaining the principles behind it. More sound related improvements include stereo balance settings for each sound chip and the ability to record individual channels of sound chips. For PSG we even introduced some sound effects: vibrato and detune can be enabled to get a fatter sound. Try this in Penguin Adventure! Thanks to the blueMSX Team, we were able to quickly bring some new features: emulation of the VLM5030, the sample chip used in the unreleased Konami game Keyboard Master and emulation of the synthesis part of the Yamaha SFG-05 sound module (keyboard and MIDI support is still missing). Also on the non-sound department, the code of the blueMSX Team enabled us to add some new features: Gouda SCSI, MEGA-SCSI, ESE RAM, ESE SCC and WAVE SCSI. Note that the SCSI emulation is still experimental, so make sure you don't use it to store data of which you don't have recent backups. Last but not least: a lock-up bug was removed from the Windows version, which could occur on dual core and hyperthreading CPU's. New or improved emulator features: - SDLGL-PP renderer (OpenGL 2.0) can now do RGBTriplet scaling in hardware. - Several resampling algorithms now available: hq, blip and fast; the first two eliminate aliasing. - Channels of sound chips can be individually recorded and muted. - Sound chips now have a stereo balance setting instead of a mode (left, right, mono). Because of this, the _mode settings have been replaced by _balance settings. - PSG sound effects: vibrato and detune. You can use the new "psg_profile" command to select known good combinations, or experiment wiht the PSG_vibrato_percent, PSG_vibrato_frequency, PSG_detune_percent and PSG_detune_frequency settings directly. Thanks to Wolf for the idea and his feedback on experiments. - Several small optimizations, mostly in SDLGL-PP renderer and CPU emulation. MSX device support: - Partial support for Yamaha SFG-05 (only the YM2151, no keyboard and MIDI). - Support for the VLM5030 in Konami's Keyboard Master. - Improved accuracy in SCC emulation. - Support for ESE devices: MEGA SCSI, ESE RAM, ESE SCC, WAVE-SCSI. - Support for Gouda/Novaxis SCSI. - Support for password cartridge. - Support for the Super Lode Runner mapper. - Real support for the Halnote mapper. Thanks to the blueMSX team. Build system, packaging, documentation: - Added support for building a statically linked executable on Windows. - Added support for building a backwards compatible executable on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Thanks to BouKiCHi. - Added support for DESTDIR, which should help packagers. openMSX 0.6.2 (2007-04-15) -------------------------- This release contains several new features and many bug fixes and optimizations. The main new feature is the addition of the video recorder. It enables you to record videos, including sound, of what you are doing with your emulated MSX. Thanks to the DosBox Team for their great ZMBV lossless video codec. The most noticeable speed optimizations are in the rendering: the SDLGL-PP renderer can be up to 50% faster and the SDL renderer is about 6% faster. If you were having problems with speed, give this release a try. The trainers that are shipped with openMSX are now a lot more user friendly. It is possible to enable or disable individual cheats of a trained game. Bug fixes in the PSG and SCC, as well as a new way of sample rate conversion, result in the PSG and SCC sounding very much like the real MSX now. New or improved emulator features: - Video recording and improved sound recording (stutterless). - SDLGL-PP renderer (OpenGL 2.0) can do hq and hqlite scaling in hardware. - More usable trainers. - Extended hot keys: you can now bind any host event to a TCL command, which means you can e.g. let openMSX push the MSX F1 key if you press a certain button on your PC game pad. - Event recording and replaying (experimental for now: only available at command line, recorded session starts when openMSX starts). - Debugger now supports watchpoint regions. MSX device support: - V9990 enhancements: deinterlace, cursor Y position in overscan mode, huge speed optimizations for P modes. - SCC sound quality improvements (no more aliasing). - Support for the Playball mapper (and samples). - Fixed mirroring of some FDC registers and diskROMs. - Dot matrix graphical printer emulation added (thanks to the blueMSX Team). - Cassetteplayer recognizes end of tape and stops. - Small bug fixes in various devices: MSX-Audio, V9990, VDP, SCC, PSG, TC8566AF. - Various speed optimizations: VDP command engine, Z80, video rendering, V9990, debugger response time in break mode. - Added a few Arabic MSX machines, but note that they have not been verified to be correct. Build system, packaging, documentation: - Added support for building an application folder on Mac OS X. - Added support for building a universal binary for Mac OS X. - HTML-ized the Console Command Reference and the diskmanipulator documentation. There is now also linking to these new manuals, which improved the usefulness of them a lot. - Added a text document about how developers can control openMSX from their own application: doc/openmsx-control-xml.txt. openMSX 0.6.1 (2006-07-30) -------------------------- This release includes major internal changes, although many are not visible from the outside. It is now possible to switch from one MSX machine to another while openMSX is running. This will reset the MSX of course. Also, it is possible to insert or remove cartridges (extensions or game ROMs) while openMSX is running. This does not reset the MSX, but the MSX system was not designed to support insertion or removal of cartridges while the machine is on. Although doing so will not damage openMSX (unlike a real MSX), it is possible the MSX will hang if hardware is removed that was being used, or that newly inserted hardware will not function properly until you reset the MSX. A new advanced video renderer was added: SDLGL-PP. This renderer requires OpenGL 2.0 and uses pixel shaders to postprocess the image. For new video cards, this is a very efficient way of scaling the image. For old video cards, please stick to the SDL or SDLGL renderer. Not all scalers are implemented yet: "simple" and "ScaleNx" work, as well as the new "TV" scaler, which is exclusive to SDLGL-PP. New or improved emulator features: - Run-time switching of machines: change: set machine query: set machine - Run-time switching of extensions: insert: ext remove: remove_extension query: list_extensions - Run-time switching of ROMs: insert/change: carta remove: carta -eject query: carta - New command "hda" to change the IDE harddisk ("hdb" for second drive etc). This is allowed only when the power is off, for the safety of your data. - SDLGL-PP renderer (OpenGL-2.0), with the following exclusive features: * scale factor 4 * TV scaler: brighter pixels are drawn bigger * 3D monitor effect: (arcade look) set display_deform 3D * horizontal stretch: (MSX aspect ratio) set display_deform horizontal_stretch - Monochrome monitor effect: monitor_type - Video noise effect: set noise Low amounts of noise (for example 2.5) can make the video look better, high amounts are just a gimmick. - Brightness and contrast control: "set brightness " and "set contrast ", where 0 is neutral. A small decrease in contrast will make the noise look better. - Preload disk image: avoids repeated spin-ups when loading from PC CD-ROM. - TCL procedures can now have a help text and TAB completion. We also added help and completion to the TCL scripts that ship with openMSX. - New console command "about" which searches for commands (built-in or TCL scripts) that seem to be about the given keyword. Useful if you forgot the exact name of a command. - Watchpoints for I/O port and memory access: debug set_watchpoint
[] [] debug remove_watchpoint debug list_watchpoints Where type is one of "read_io", "write_io", "read_mem" or "write_mem". Address is in range 0..255 for I/O ports and 0..65535 for memory. Condition and command are the similar to the "set_bp" command. - Detection of DI/HALT (hanging MSX). - Detection of Undefined Memory Reads (UMRs). When memory is read that was never written to, a TCL procedure is called. You can make your own, or use the included procedure named "umrcallback": set umr_callback umrcallback This is "valgrind" for MSX ;) MSX device support: - IDE CD-ROM support: the "ide" extension now contains a CD-ROM drive in addition to a harddisk. You can insert ISO images with the "cda" command, or "cdb" for the second CD-ROM etc. There is no support yet for audio tracks. Note that you have to run IDECDEX in the emulated MSX before you can use CD-ROMs; you can download it from Sunrise (http://www.msx.ch/sunformsx/). - Support for V9938 with only 16 kB VRAM, as used in the SVI-738. - Major V9990 improvements. - Minor sound differences between two different PSG types (AY8910 and YM2149). - Added Ninja-tap, a joystick port expander. - Added DDX-3.0, a port-based external floppy interface. - Small bugfixes in various devices: VDP, RTC, FMPAC, MegaRAM, IDE. Build system, packaging, documentation: - OpenGL support now depends on GLEW (http://glew.sourceforge.net/). GLEW is a library which allows us to conveniently use of GL extensions. - Build fixes for Intel Macs. openMSX 0.6.0 (2006-01-21) -------------------------- After a long time, a fresh release which brings a lot of internal improvements and some long standing new features as well. The biggest change for the user is the fact that we removed the SDLLo renderer and that we split the scalers into a separate "scale_factor" (controls the zoom) and "scale_algorithm" (controls the look) setting. A factor of 1 replaces the SDLLo render and as a bonus we also added a factor of 3! The latter also makes more exotic scalers possible, like the new RGBTriplet one, which tries to emulate a low res Trinitron (Aperture Grille) monitor. Also, the existing scaler algorithms have been implemented for scale_factor 3. Note that currently the GL renderer only supports scale_factor 2; if you want the new scale factors, use the SDL renderer. Mac OS X Tiger users will be happy to know that this release will compile cleanly on their systems, because openMSX can be compiled with GCC 4.x now. Also some problems specific to big endian CPU's (like the Power PC in most Macs) were fixed. In the sound department we made big quality improvement for DAC devices, like the turboR PCM and the Konami DAC which can be found in the Hai no Majutsushi and Synthesizer products. Note that in this release several incompatible changes to openMSX commands were made. First of all, the cassetteplayer subcommands have changed, because we added the possibility to save to cassette now as well. To learn the new subcommands, use "help cassetteplayer". Also the keyjoystick settings are incompatibly changed, which means your old bindings will be lost. Finally the already mentioned renderer and scaler settings have changed, so you will have to re-select your favourite scaler. New or improved emulator features: - Printer logger and SRAM are flushed at regular intervals now, so if openMSX or your PC crashes, it is less likely you will lose data. - Settings that have their default value are not saved anymore, which will make future upgrades easier (new defaults are automatically picked up). - Added support for a second keyjoystick. - More extensive debugging, including conditional break points. - Apart from communication via stdio, communication via sockets is now enabled. This means you can connect to openMSX at run time! This will be used by a debugger that is in development. - V9990: speed improvements, enabled scalers, scanline and blur. - Reorganisation of renderers and scalers (including new ones), see above. - Screenshot command has a -prefix option, useful in combination with the new "guess_title" script: give meaningful names to your screenshot. - New "fullspeedwhenloading" setting. When enabled, openMSX automatically switches to maximum speed when the MSX is loading from disk or tape. - New "autoruncassettes" setting. When enabled and you specify a CAS image on the command line or in Catapult, openMSX will automatically type the required loading instruction in MSX-BASIC. - Finally implemented a work around for the CAPS LOCK problem. MSX device support: - Internal CAS to WAV conversion produces now 5520 baud WAVs, for faster loading. - Implemented saving to cassette (see above). - Implementation of SCREEN6 border and background stripes. - Implemented support for 192 kB VRAM (now default in the Boosted_MSX2_EN machine). - Implemented support for ADVRAM: use extension "advram-p" for machines in which slot 0 is not expanded (most MSXes) and use extension "advram-s" for machines in which slot 0 is expanded (such as turbo Rs). - Sound quality improvement of DAC devices (see above). - Implemented TurboR hardware pause and hardware PCM mute. - Implemented "magic key" joystickport dongle. Build system, packaging, documentation: - Compile fixes for GCC 4.x. - Support for FreeBSD 6. openMSX 0.5.2 (2005-06-09) -------------------------- This release is mainly a bug fix release with only a few new features, but a lot of quality improvements, mainly related to audio. We reworked the YM2413 engine by Okazaki, bringing the openMSX fork up to date with the latest release of MSXplug. We also fixed an bug in the SCC emulation, which screwed up some sound effects. Other fixes include MSX-AUDIO sample RAM access and the timer accuracy of OPL4 and MSX-AUDIO. Finally, we also added a DirectSound driver for Windows. A new sound related feature is the sound logger. It writes the sound played by openMSX to an uncompressed WAV file. The current version logs exactly what is sent to the sound driver, including any inaccuracies caused by realtime synchronization. We are planning a logger that is not timing sensitive to appear in a future openMSX release. For usage instructions, see section 7.3 of the openMSX User's Manual. A last new (but still a bit experimental) feature is the disk manipulator. This is a new built in toolkit to transfer files from the host OS to the MSX disks (disk images and hard disk images with partitions are all supported) and vice versa. You can also use it to create new (hard) disk images and format them. A complete description is in doc/using-diskmanipulator.txt. New or improved emulator features: - New scaler: HQ2xLite. This is a scaler that is almost as good as HQ2x, but uses a lot less CPU. - Added DirectSound driver for Windows, which solves the problems some people had with SDL on Windows. It also runs at a lower latency than the SDL driver. Many thanks to Daniel Vik for helping with DirectSound. To switch between the DirectSound and SDL sound drivers, use the new "sound_driver" setting. - Improved debugger, with some new (TCL based) commands like disasm, step_in, step_over and run_to. - Extended IPS patch support, it should now support all IPS files. - Updated ROM database. - Added trainers.tcl: hundreds of game trainers. Use trainer_[TAB] in the console to switch on the trainer for the game you want. - Added a cheat finder script: create your own game trainers. For an explanation how to use it, see this openMSX forum post: http://forum.openmsx.org/viewtopic.php?t=34 - Use revamped console background and font as default. If you're upgrading from an older openMSX version and want to use this new background and font, you can either remove your settings.xml file or type the following lines in the openMSX console: set consolebackground skins/ConsoleBackgroundGrey.png set consolefont skins/ConsoleFontRaveLShaded.png - New icon, made by Eric Boon. MSX device support: - Updated Okazaki YM2413 core (now the default). - Added pixel accurate rendering to V9990 emulation. Note that the timing may still be quite incorrect. - Improved timing on turbo R machines. For example, speed difference between R800-ROM and R800-DRAM mode is now emulated. - Various IDE fixes from Adriano Camargo Rodrigues da Cunha. Build system, packaging, documentation: - Compile fixes for GCC 4.x. - Added experimental build support for Sparc, DEC Alpha, ARM, HP PA-RISC, IA-64, Motorola 680x0, MIPS and IBM S/390. Except for Sparc these are all untested. - openMSX is now relocatable on Mac OS X, which means you can move the installation directory around. - Our Debian packages are now uploaded to the Debian archive, soon after release. - Updated C-BIOS to 0.21. openMSX 0.5.1 (2005-03-05) -------------------------- This release includes a redesign of the ROM database XML file. This new format is supported by both blueMSX and openMSX; other emulators are welcome to adopt it as well. The old "romdb.xml" file is still supported, but will disappear in the future. The new "softwaredb.xml" file is generated from a central SQL database, using information from the old blueMSX and openMSX ROM databases. The new database design is prepared to support disks in addition to ROMs. Another major new feature is emulation of the Sunrise GFX9000. We have been working on this for quite some time already, but in this release you can see the first usable results. Do note that the emulation is still far from complete, fast or bug free. But we thought you might appreciate it already in its current shape. To use it, start openMSX with the "gfx9000" extension selected. You can switch between the MSX VDP and the GFX9000 picture with the "videosource" setting. Note that right now, only the SDLHi and SDLLo renderers are able to render the GFX9000 picture. Also new are the OSD (on-screen display) LEDs. Catapult users have had LEDs for some time, but now if you use openMSX from the console or full screen you can also see the status of the LEDs. OSD LEDs are configurable via TCL scripts. New or improved emulator features: - A new mixer implementation improves the sound quality of PCM and PSG samples a lot. - The "samples" and "frequency" settings can now be changed at run time. - Various speed ups, especially for low end machines due to better frame skip. - You can now use IPS patches to modify disk and ROM images as openMSX loads them into memory, without changing the images files. - Extensions inside ZIP files are now used to guess the right file type. - Many improvements for Mac OS X, including bug fixes and more Mac-like key bindings. When upgrading from openMSX 0.5.0, you can remove your ~/.openMSX/share/settings.xml to get new the key bindings. - New "escape_grab" command: escapes from "grabinput" once. - Debugging: enabled "cputrace" setting for normal builds as well. MSX device support: - Fixed turboR DRAM support. Programs that use this, like TRCAS, work now. - Fixed booting of SVI-738 CP/M disks. - Timing improvements of the WD2793 FDC. Fixes a few games that rely on it. - The 13 bit MSX-AUDIO DAC actually works now (used in modplayer). - Added MegaRAM Disk, thanks to Adriano da Cunha. - Improved Sony HBI-55, thanks to Daniel Vik. - Fixes in Tetris II Special Edition dongle. - Added separate machine configuration for Philips VG 8020/20. - Added MSX-AUDIO 2 extension. This is an Y8910 on alternative I/O ports. - Added FM Stereo PAK extension. Build system, packaging, documentation: - We now provide Debian packages, shortly after the source release. - Added build support for OpenBSD and NetBSD. - Updated C-BIOS to 0.20. openMSX 0.5.0 (2004-10-18) -------------------------- This release includes a complete redesign of the hardware configuration XML files. Also many devices were renamed. I/O ports are now specified in the hardware configuration instead of hardcoded. Configurations in the old format are no longer supported. If you copied the configurations that came with openMSX 0.4.0 to a different location (for example, ~/.openMSX/share), replace them by the configurations shipped with 0.5.0. The Python script share/scripts/convert_hardwareconfig.py can be used to convert your custom-made configurations. It may not convert every detail correctly, but it will save you a lot of time compared to manually converting configurations. The new ROM pools feature makes installing system ROMs easier. A ROM pool is a directory where openMSX looks for system ROMs. The new hardware configuration XML files contain the SHA1 sums of the required system ROMs, so openMSX can find the right ROMs in the ROM pool automatically. The default ROM pool is the directory share/systemroms. Settings, including key bindings and user directories, can now be saved. By default, settings are automatically saved when openMSX exits. If you don't want that, do "set save_settings_on_exit false" and save manually with the new "save_settings" console command. It is also possible to save settings to separate files, so you can keep multiple, independent configurations. Old configuration options were converted to settings: - machine: the default machine (needs openMSX restart) - frequency: the sound mixer frequency (needs openMSX restart) - samples: the size of the sound mixing buffer (needs openMSX restart) - user_directories: directories that are searched for data files The new setting "save_settings_on_exit" controls auto-saving of settings. Finally, we renamed "frontswitch" to "firmwareswitch". Changes in the video system: - Use of MMX to speed up video scaling considerably (mainly simple scaler). - Big speed up of scanline effect. - Enabled blur effect in the SDLHi renderer (simple scaler). - Scale2x and hq2x scalers now also work in hi-res modes (screen 6 and 7). - Made pixel accuracy the default. - Removed 8bpp support (which never worked before). - Fixed crash when making screenshot in 16bpp. New or improved emulator features: - Added channel mode 'off' to mute individual sound devices. - Added meta data of machines in config files. Some of this information is shown in the window title bar. - New "iomap" command lists the I/O ports and the devices connected to them. - Added a debugger interface to all (S)RAM. - Improvements in the 'type' command, thanks to Albert Beevendorp and Arnold Metselaar (welcome to the club, Arnold!). - Release key presses when the console becomes active. - Improved geometry detection of disk images; MSX1Mania disks work now. - Fixed crash in Win32 when dir-as-disk is used with files with weird dates. MSX device support: - MoonSound fixes. - Added slotexpander extension: use it to change one primary slot into four secondary slots. - 8 kB BASIC ROMs now work correctly and are auto detected as well. - Added simple DC filter for cassette images. .wav files created by MicroWAVer should work now. - Fixes for TC8566AF FDC (used in turbo R), thanks to Daniel Vik: improved timing (fixes Gazzel intro) and added format command. - Force PSG portA to be input port. This fixes joystick and mouse reading in games that write illegal values to the PSG (Match Maniac and others). - Emulation of the Tetris II Special Edition dongle (plugs into joystick port). - Fixed high-frequency reads of low-frequency clocks (such as RTC). Thanks to Daniel Vik for spotting this problem. - Many bugs were fixed, including long-standing bugs such as a VDP bug causing glitches in Andorogynus and CPU bugs causing glitches in Pennant Race and Fony Demo Disk 1. Build system, packaging, documentation: - Separated OS and CPU in the build system. - Build support for x86-64 (Athlon64). - Fixed bug: new TCL was not detected by running "make probe" again. - Added openMSX FAQ to documentation. openMSX 0.4.0 (2004-05-28) -------------------------- - Finalised the control protocol, making a fully-featured Catapult possible. - Implemented TCL as central scripting language (including console). Consequences: * AutoCommands in settings.xml have been replaced by init.tcl file * "restoredefault" command replaced by TCL's "unset" * "alias" is deprecated, use TCL's "proc" * "decr" is deprecated, use TCL's native "incr" with negative argument * "quit" is replaced by TCL's "exit" * old "info" is replaced by "openmsx_info"; "info" is a TCL command * Some cool TCL scripts added, e.g. multi-screenshot (make 'movies'), save_debuggable, vramdump (replacing old console command) - New build system which replaces the GNU auto* tools. It is more efficient, has cleaner output and is easier to maintain. You can still use the traditional "configure ; make ; make install" steps. For details, read doc/manual/compile.html. - Added support for compiling on FreeBSD 4 and 5. Thanks to ag0ny, Jorito and Reikan. Also updated support for Mac OS X, thanks to Jalu. - New frameskip/sync algorithm: tries to skip as little frames as possible to keep the right speed; maximum and minimum number of skipped frames can be set with the minframeskip and maxframeskip settings. The new algorithm can deal much better with the situation where another process or the OS claims the CPU for a while. As a result, animation and music play more fluent and openMSX feels faster. - Better CPU timing (Z80 and R800), and also for R800 specifically: * implemented CAS/RAS optimization * implemented refresh delay * IO operations take 3 cycles - CPU frequency is not fixed anymore: * frequency can be unlocked and modified from the console * "6MHz mode" of Panasonic MSX2+ machines is now supported - Fixes in TurboR FDC: FDD LED, disk change signal, drive detection, empty drive behaviour ("Disk offline"). Thanks to Tetsuo Honda. - Finalized internal mapper for Panasonic FS-A1FM and added support for its "frontswitch" for the firmware. - RS232 interface in Sony_HB-G900P has 2kb RAM. - Sony HBI-55 datacartridge now fully implemented. - Added proper support for Koei and Wizardry mappers (with SRAM). Thanks to dvik (blueMSX author) for the info. - Added about 14 new machines. - Volumes are all in a 0-100 range now. - Added master_volume setting. - Several optimisations in rendering. - Fixed sprites in overscan. - Added basic frames-per-second indicator. - Scaled up icon to 32x32; fixes icon on Win32. - Using SHIFT and PageUp/PageDown you can scroll whole pages in the console - New "type" command: use to enter text into the MSX keyboard buffer (not finalized yet) - Added a debugger interface to more devices: SCC, MSX AUDIO, MSX AUDIO sampleRAM, MoonSound, MSX MUSIC, memory mapper, PSG. Also extended CPU debuggable: IM can now be read at position 26, IFF1 and IFF2 can be read as bit 0 and 1 on position 27 - New debug interface commands: "read_block", "write_block", "after break" and "after frame". openMSX 0.3.4 (2004-01-16) -------------------------- This new release brings you the following improvements: - Several fixes in VDP emulation; more games and demos work correctly. - Added scalers for SDLHi. A scaler is an image filter which enlarges the MSX screen to PC resolution. The following scalers are implemented: * simple (original) * 2xSaI * Scale2x * hq2x Use "set scaler " to select a scaler. - Scanlines now work in SDLHi (previously, they only worked in SDLGL). - Per-pixel alpha blending for console on SDLHi/SDLLo. This makes anti-aliased console fonts look better. - Rendering fixes in Win32: * Fixed slowdowns in fullscreen mode. * Fixed console flickering. - Switched to Jarek Burczynski's YM2413 core (MSX-MUSIC). - Added high-pass IIR filter to mixer to avoid audio clipping. - Added I/O device multiplexing: you can now safely insert an FMPAC in an MSX turbo R, for example. - Added screenshot feature. Default key bindings changed to put this under PrtScr. F12 toggles full screen now, while Quit is not mapped anymore, by default. - Added Ren-Sha Turbo (autofire) emulation: "set renshaturbo ". - Added emulation of the MSX turbo R pause key. - Added LED status of disk drives. - Fixed harddisk image creation: automatically create or enlarge hd-image when the specified file doesn't exist or is too small. - New console commands: * after: execute command after a certain time * alias/unalias: put long commands under a named alias * incr and decr: increase or decrease integer settings (useful when bound to a key, see "bind" command) - Added a 'boosted' MSX2 configuration: a fantasy machine with lots of internal hardware. More of these will be added in future releases. The current configuration is still experimental; feedback is welcome. - Added alternative build system ("alternative.mk"), which is more flexible and easier to maintain than the old system which uses GNU's auto* tools ("configure" and friends). The alternative system will replace the auto* system in the future, so please test it on your machine and report any problems. You can use it with "make -f alternative.mk" to compile and "make -f alternative.mk install" to install. - Added support for Intel's ICC 8.0 compiler (only in alternative.mk). - Added experimental support for Mac OS X (only in alternative.mk). Thanks to Jan Lukens (Jalu) for testing/debugging this. - Dropped support for GCC 2.95 (please upgrade to GCC 3.x). - Added the ability to control openMSX from an external process (launcher, debugger) using an XML-based control protocol. This is an experimental feature; the control protocol will change incompatibly in the next release. For an example client implementation, see Contrib/openmsx-control.cc. We're working on a new openMSX Catapult which uses this protocol. - New features for external control clients: * renderer "none", which displays nothing. * "power" setting: enable or disable power to the MSX machine. * "restoredefault" command: restores a setting to the value specified in settings.xml. * "info" command: gets info such as lists of pluggables, renderers etc. * "keymatrixup"/"keymatrixdown" commands: manipulate the keyboard matrix. - Added a debugger interface, accessible through the "debug" command. The following devices currently support this interface: CPU, I/O ports, memory, VDP and VRAM. Also it is possible to set breakpoints. - Small improvements in debug device. The debug device is very useful for people developing MSX software in openMSX; read the manual for details. - Added "vdpcmdtrace" setting: enable or disable VDP command tracing. openMSX 0.3.3 (2003-09-26) -------------------------- This new release brings you the following improvements: - Windows specific code was merged into the main branch. We have an "official" Win32 port that is part of this release. - New HTML manuals replace the HOWTO. These manuals will make it easier for you to find the information you need. Also, the HTML layout looks better. Due to time pressure, the manuals are a bit rough at places, we'll improve them in the future. - New MSX devices: * MSX-MIDI interface (turbo R). * MSX-RS-232 support (8255 UART). * PCM input (sampling) for turbo R via a .wav file. - Added a debug device: write data to special I/O ports and its get logged to stdout or a file in a format you specify. Very useful if you develop MSX assembly programs in openMSX. - Several improvements and fixes in the VDPCmdEngine; VDP emulation is even more accurate now. - All read-only input files (ROM images, disk images, background pictures, XML) can now be gzipped or zipped and will be transparently decompressed by openMSX. Note that some games require write access to their disk in order to run (for example, Seed of Dragon). - New dir-as-disk feature: a directory can be specified instead of a disk image and the contents (up to 720K) will show up as files on the MSX. There is no support for subdirectories (as used by DOS2) yet. This feature is still experimental, so please report problems if you encounter them. - Several cassette emulation updates and new features: * Automatic .cas to .wav conversion in CassettePlayer. (no patched ROM needed anymore to run .cas files) * Cassette sounds are now audible. * Tapes can be rewinded. * Tapes can be forced to play. (like unplugging the 'remote control' plug on a real machine) - A different keymap (e.g. for Japanese PC keyboards or to use Russian MSX keyboards on a US English PC keyboard) can be used now, via settings.xml. - Keys for the key joystick are now configurable in settings.xml. - Added joystick emulation for mouse (a feature that the Philips SBC-3810 and Sony MOS-1 and similar mice have). - Various console updates: * Tab completion behaves much more like the UNIX Bash shell now. * Clearer error messages. * More than one command is possible, use ';' to separate them. Especially useful for binding several commands to a single keypress. - User-configurable channel settings for mono sound devices. You can set them to left, right or mono mode at run time. - Many things are now user configurable via the console: * .wav input file for PCM sampler * log file for the printer logger * output file for the MIDI out logger * input file for the MIDI in reader * input and output file for the RS232-tester - ROM database now uses SHA1 sums in stead of MD5 sums. - The MSX turbo R machine description uses a single 4MB ROM image, plus the Kanji ROM. This is closer to how the real machine works. - Several machine and extension configurations added. - Fixed compilation on GCC 3.4-pre development version. openMSX 0.3.2 (2003-06-09) -------------------------- - New feature: MoonSound support. Original implementation taken from MAME, thanks to Jarek Burczynski (FM code), R. Belmont and O. Galibert (wave code) for allowing us to use their code in openMSX. Improvements and bug fixes were done by Arjan Bakker and our team. - New MSX devices: * MegaRAM * PAC (Panasonic SW-M001) * Support for 8 kB ROMs - New feature: grab input (try "set grabinput on"). When enabled, the native mouse cursor cannot escape from the openMSX window anymore; makes using the mouse a lot easier in windowed mode. - New timer using the Linux Real Time Clock (RTC), which is more accurate than the SDL timer. SDL timer is still available as a fallback. Instructions to configure your system for using the RTC are in the HOWTO. - New effect in the SDLGL renderer: afterglow (try "set glow N"). - User-configurable gamma correction (try "set gamma X"). Also the default value is less bright than the previous hard-coded value. - Screen accuracy works now (try "set accuracy screen"). It is fast, but very inaccurate. - Volume of sound devices can be adjusted at run time. - Various console updates: * Commands can be on multiple lines. * Search in command history. * Command history is saved. * Support in SDLHi/Lo for console font PNG images in indexed mode. Previously, only images in RGB mode were supported. * Console remains usable when openMSX is paused. - Several machine configurations added (thanks to Albert Beevendorp). - Several extension configurations added. - Cache coherency problem in SDLGL renderer fixed. This bug caused garbled graphics in for example Ark-a-Noah and Dr Archie. - Fixed compilation on GCC 2.95. openMSX 0.3.1 (2003-05-18) -------------------------- - Fixed compilation on GCC 3.3. - Fixed SDLGL renderer on XFree86 4.3. - New feature: configurable file-extentions. - Improved layout of help text (try "openmsx -h"). - Many improvements to the console, including: * Extended the console editing keys (left, right, del, bs, home, end etc). * Added key repeat. * Reset the scrollback when any key other than page up/down is used. * Added resizing and moving to the console. * SDL console characters are no longer blended (improved readability). * SDL backgroundimage can be scaled and can have any pixel format. * Fixed color of font on GLConsole overlayed on Text1 mode. - Emulation and event handling are now done in a single thread. The previous multi-threaded solution was not very portable among platforms or even different versions of the same platform. As a bonus, the single thread model is simpler and more efficient. - Improved "make install". - Cleanups of the directory structure.