Der frühe Vogel fängt den Wurm
http://notaz.gp2x.de/releases/PicoDrive/PicoDrive_130.zip
I am a bit tired right now so here is a list of major stuff:
All hardware is emulated now
I added emulation for scaling/rotation chip, slows down the BIOS screen to a crawl, but Sonic CD special state is playable. Disabled by default, because very few games use it.
new option: ReadAhead buffer
This is to deal with slow SD card access in GP2X. It just assumes that data is sequential and reads more than it really needs, and later uses already read data. Very useful for FMV games. Try various settings and see which suits you best (I use 2048K). The downside is longer load times.
wait loop detection
Gives nice speedup for some games, but has no effect on most others. Sonic CD can be run underclocked now (well except past stages with PCM sound special stages with gfx chip).
zipped ISOs
Saves a lot of space but causes insane (several minute long) load times.
detailed changelog
* ISO files now can be zipped. Note that this causes VERY long loading times.
* Added data pre-buffering support, this allows to reduce frequency of short pauses in FMV games (caused by SD access), but makes those pauses longer.
* Fixed PCM DMA transfers (intro FMV in Popful Mail).
* Properly implemented "decode" data transformation (Jaguar XJ220).
* Integrated "better sync" code into cyclone code, what made this mode much faster.
* Fixed a bug related to game specific config saving.
* Frameskipper was skipping sound processing, what caused some audio desyncs. Fixed.
* Fixed reset not working for some games.
* New assembly optimized memory handlers for CD (gives at least a few fps). Also re-enabled all optimizations from 0.964 release.
* New idle-loop detection code for sub-68k. Speeds up at least a few games.
final thoughts
Well this project matured pretty well and I feel pretty satisfied with it. It was my main project for some time now, eating most my free-time-for-deving. So I think I hand enough of this, this will be one of the last releases. It is still far from perfect, there are some compatibility issues, but it is not easy to finish these. I will still fix the obvious bugs, but not those which need all day of debugging, like the broken Batman games, for example. Hope all of you also had some fun with this thing. Thanks to all who donated (and to those who will), supported me and kept me motivated.
MfG
