Amiberry v4.2 February updates
Published on February 24, 2022 by Dimitris Panokostas
Hi everyone!
There's been a lot of work happening since the last update, so I wanted to give you a summary here. Things are looking good for the upcoming release, but I want to be sure that it's as polished as possible, so I'm carefully going over various areas to test things out, make sure that they are as good as they can be. And taking care of as many of the open Github Issues as possible, as well. I hope people will be happy with the new release, when it comes!
Here's a summary of the changes since the previous update, in older to newer sort order:
There's been a lot of work happening since the last update, so I wanted to give you a summary here. Things are looking good for the upcoming release, but I want to be sure that it's as polished as possible, so I'm carefully going over various areas to test things out, make sure that they are as good as they can be. And taking care of as many of the open Github Issues as possible, as well. I hope people will be happy with the new release, when it comes!
Here's a summary of the changes since the previous update, in older to newer sort order:
- Implemented Toggle JIT and JIT FPU custom events, which can now be mapped to controller buttons and triggered on demand.
- Big improvements in the FloppyBridge library. This is no longer an external library, but included as part of the Amiberry binary now.
- Upgraded to use C++17 standard
- GUI: Fixed scrollbar color in Config Panel
- GUI: Improved RAM Panel options
- GUI: Added all A1000 config options in Quickstart
- GUI: Fixed bug where some dropdowns in the Sound Panel had their contents cut-off, when opened.
- Fixed OSX build, since some files were missing
- P96: Frameskip was always enabled when using p96, this has been going on for quite a while also (since v4.x release).
- Fixed guisan library failed to build on systems that didn't have <GL/gl.h>
- P96: Speed up screen updates as much as possible.
- GUI: Renamed Frameskip to Refresh, to match WinUAE's naming.
- Dispmanx: always disable Virtual Mouse mode on Dispmanx, as it didn't work as expected and it's not relevant there anyway.
- GUI: Slightly increased vertical size, so that all the selections fit inside it (Savestates was a bit cut-off)
- P96: Don't change chipset refresh rate when opening P96 modes. This fixes a weird audio sync issue, when the framerate was changed from 50->60 whenever a P96 screen opened, even though we weren't using NTSC.
- GUI: Fixed bug where the selected Sound Card wasn't shown when refreshing the GUI.
- Internal refactoring, to move custom control arrays to amiberry_input, where they are more relevant.
- GUI: Do not show default mapping in Custom Controls if Retroarch is used. This showed incorrect actions in the GUI, because of the difference in the default buttons coming from Retroarch.
- Fixed Makefile: options that changed CFLAGS needed to be below the line where CFLAGS were exported
- Fixed #896: The A500 model would default to 1.2 Kickstart, if run from the command line with --model A500
- Sound improvements: Check if the stream is initialized or muted and zero out buffer accordingly. Only copy data if the stream is not muted. Detect silence in stream.
- Sound: Always show the sound buffer usage in the Status line LED. Only really useful if using Pull mode, as with push this will always show 0.
- Implemented Temperature monitoring on Status Line LED, to the right of the 4 floppy drives. This is getting information from the board directly, if it can access /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp - it might not work with all systems.
- WHDBooter: added FAILAT to top of startup-sequence, to allow script to continue in case of errors
- Quickstart: Added 8MB Fast RAM options for A600 and A1200 configs
- Filesys: Implemented my_existslink and copyfile functions
- WHDBooter: Implemented support for VFAT filesystems (e.g. a USB stick)
- WHDBooter: Added AmiQuit tool, to quit emulator after a game exits. Also added relevant config option to enable this behavior if desired (defaults to disabled).
- WHDBooter: Use 8MB Fast RAM configs, to allow WHDLoad to cache everything in RAM if possible. Reduces any disk access.
- WHDBooter: Implemented config option to enable writecache (defaults to disabled).
- Ensure Quit emulator can only be requested once, ignore it if it's requested multiple times before the emulator had completed the process.
- Implemented x86-64 experimental platform. You can now run Amiberry on x86-64 Linux platforms, but JIT is not enabled/supported on it yet.
- Updated CPU emulation files, to produce more accurate cycle calculations, based on the latest sources.
- GUI: Fixed FPS capping to 50 or 60, which fixes cases where a monitor refresh rate was higher or lower than that, and that caused the GUI updates to go nuts.
- Fixed #900: Command line option -W did not work, even on WinUAE. It will now function as expected, by accepting parameters in the format <DEVNAME:path_to_hdf>. For example: -W DH0:/home/pi/amiberry/hdf/Workbench.hdf (this only works if combined with -G to skip the GUI)
- Updated usage text to mirror the changes for -W
- Fixed Quit Emulator hotkey would not respect any key qualifiers (e.g. Ctrl/Alt/Shift). Vastly improved handling of hotkeys and made it faster.
- Fixed bug where Amiberry would compile, but not start under OSX.
- Implemented new target: OSX-x86, for OSX x86-64 targets. Yes, that means you can now run Amiberry on your intel Mac, but again - no JIT support for it, at least not yet. And this is also experimental, so I'm sure there will be bugs. :)
- Allow High-DPI mode if available for all platforms (previously it was only for OSX)
I'm still looking into some weird reported issues, to see if I can fix those. If you get a chance to test things and find anything unexpected, please let me know so we can resolve it before the release!
Until the next update, have fun!
Dimitris
Until the next update, have fun!
Dimitris