... hahahah. Yeah, just kidding. But seriously, I did recently install OS X 10.5.2. I wrote up an article on it, which contains a nifty restart patch, for those interested. You can check it out here.
New release posted. Perhaps the most important change was fixing a bug in the Windows port when the keyboard was used for input. For some reason, the IsDialogMessage() function I use for tab key support was causing the main window to emit the Windows error beep every time a key was pressed after a few minutes of use. I do not know why this is, so I have simply disabled the tab key support to prevent this from happening.
Other than that, lots of polishing went into this release. UPS soft-patching will work with the recently released Der Langrisser v1.02 translation, for those curious. You can also store the UPS patches in GZ/ZIP/JMA support, and bsnes will detect this and decompress the patches first. Use the same ".ups" file extension for this, as it detects via file header.
If you wish to try out the newly added OpenGL support: start bsnes, go to Settings->Configuration->Advanced and set system.video to "wgl" (or "glx" for Linux users), and then restart the emulator. Please bear in mind that ATI's OpenGL drivers are an industry-wide joke, so I'd only recommend trying this on an nVidia or Intel video card.
Changelog:Okay, I've rewritten my UPS patcher and library. I've fixed a few bugs, improved usability by an order of magnitude, and completely rewrote the file handling. It will now use file-based memory mapping, rather than the old file buffering trick. This should help speed out a lot. I also changed the name, as the patcher is not the specification. The name is an adage to one of the most well known and polished IPS patchers around.
The only small concern right now is that applying a patch requires allocating memory the size of the destination file. This means patching a 64MB image will require 64MB of memory. This will be addressed in a future release, but it shouldn't present a real problem, given the amount of memory available on today's computers.
Also, this release works on Linux/GTK+ and Windows 2000+ only. It will not run on Windows 9x, sorry. I'll have a command-line parser available shortly, and others should have Win9x UI patchers in the future.
• Tsukuyomi v0.01 binariesI've cleaned up the CSS code a bit, should be a bit nicer now. The font is a compromise -- I honestly would like it smaller, myself; but for readability I'll leave it as it is.
I'm also working on reducing the number of subsections on the site. I've inlined the bsnes screenshots, and moved bsnes WIP discussion to the message board. It's much easier for me to post there than to update this site, and I can also get feedback there.
Lastly, I'm trying to remove all of the custom HTML commands I've used in the past, in favor of using more CSS. This should help reduce the amount of broken pages and work needed each time I redesign the site.
FitzRoy recently sent me a site redesign package. I liked quite a bit of it, and I've actually been meaning to try out a white background for a long time now, so I figured what the hell. Hopefully everyone likes it.
First up, I'm posting a WIP of xkas. This version adds GBA THUMB support. As it is still a work in progress, don't expect it to be perfect. Feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, I'm posting ups v0.03. The UPS patching format has been finalized for over a year now. I've held off releasing it sooner because of a lack of a GUI. So I sat down tonight and finished up the GUI. I also rewrote the library to be a bit cleaner. Please don't be discouraged by the version number ... the UPS file spec is finalized. Any patch created with ups v0.03 will work on all future versions of the tool. The binary release runs either in command-line mode ("ups --create/--apply fileX fileY patch"), or with a graphical user interface (by running the executable directly.) It works on both Windows and Linux. Other platforms would be trivial to add, but would have to sacrifice the user interface. The code itself is all public domain, 100%. The only catch is that I'm declaring the spec completely finalized, and holding copyright on the actual file format. You can use the code however you want, but if you change the file format, you must rename it to something other than UPS. Any patchers that attempt to change / extend this format will be considered illegal derivations of the UPS spec. The reason for this is basically to uphold the integrity of the format. IPS fractured a bit when various patchers continued to add extensions. This won't legally happen with UPS.
That said, you can try out the new xkas here, and ups here.
(EDIT: link removed, see above post.)
I didn't want to release a new version so soon, however there is a rather serious bug in bsnes v029 where the path information for the save RAM files is discarded when one has not selected a default save RAM / cheat path from the path settings tab in the configuration settings window. Because of this, it gets stored to the base directory. For Windows users, this is c:\, and for Linux users, this is /
This bug forced my hand, so I'm releasing v030 to correct this issue. I also cleaned up the S-DSP emulation code to be more consistent with my programming style -- it gets bit-perfect matches to v029's wave output, so I don't foresee there being any problems.
No, not the emulator itself, but the message board. Thanks to pagefault, I now have a dedicated forum, rather than a single thread, for discussion of bsnes. So, this will pretty much be the official message board now, and the preferred way to contact me. You can access the new forum here.
Topic is self-explanatory. See the articles page at the top if you're interested. It's probably a good read if you have been planning to try out Linux, and you have non-mainstream hardware (a tablet, a six-button mouse, a special keyboard, a TV tuner card, etc etc), just to see approximately what you're in store for.
A new version of bsnes has been released. It contains a few minor emulation fixes, as well as user interface improvements. See the bsnes WIP news page for the complete changelog.
Also released today is a new version of the cross-assembler xkas. While this version only supports the SNES CPU, it has been designed from the ground up to be modular and allow for additional processors to be added with ease in the future. It can be downloaded from the programming page.
Richard Bannister has very generously ported the latest version of bsnes to the Mac OS X platform. The delay from the previous ports was entirely my own fault for adding cooperative multithreading before accounting for the PowerPC architecture. But thanks to the efforts of Vas Crabb, Lucas Newman and Shay Green, libco now works on OS X, and consequently, a new version of bsnes for OS X has been made possible. Thank you very much, everyone!
You can download the OS X version from Richard's homepage, here.
I've updated the bsnes source code v0.028.01, to fix support for Linux/OpenGL on ATI video cards. Thanks to everyone on the ZSNES board who helped with this matter. If you were having problems with Linux/OpenGL, please grab the new source release and try again. Please note that you will need an OpenGL accelerated X driver to use this driver. Otherwise, you can stick with v0.028. I have not updated the Windows binary, as nothing has changed in the Windows port since the last release. Very sorry for the inconvenience.
bsnes v0.028 has been released. The major focus of this release was cleaning up the code even more, and greatly enhancing the Linux port to be an equal with the Windows port. Please see the bsnes news page for the complete changelog.