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Amiberry v4.2 updates (again)
Published on February 5, 2022 by Dimitris Panokostas

Hi everyone!
It's been a while since the last news update, so I wanted to give you a little insight on what has been going on. Here's a list of improvements and changes since the last news post:
  • Fixed potential crashes when trying to open some Xz archives
  • Updated WHDLoad binary to latest version (18.7)
  • Synced all Makefiles (Makefile, CMakeLists, Android) with the latest changes
  • Fixed virtual mouse driver option should not be enabled when the emulator is running. This is an option that can only be changed when the emulation is stopped, not on the fly. The GUI didn't reflect that always, but that is fixed now.
  • Improved Command Line help text, with more examples and a full coverage of available options.
  • Fixed a bug in the GUI, where editing a hardfile entry would change the Device name (e.g. DH0->DH1).
  • Fixed some overflows in hsync handler, which caused Amiberry to freeze occasionally in some situations.
  • GUI: Fixed focus bug in modal windows which didn't have mouse focus, until a click event was triggered.
  • Audio: Fixed AHI not playing anything back. This still needs some improvement, but at least it works now.
  • Audio: Cleaned up code
  • Audio: Implemented sampler support.
  • Audio: Implemented support for multiple sound cards.
  • GUI: Added missing UAE ROM options, from WinUAE.
  • GUI: Fixed CD Eject button from HD Panel, would also toggle the CD checkbox.
  • Experimental port to OSX for M1 Macs (thanks to Sigurbjorn B. Larusson). You can find the new target in the Makefile as "osx". Please note that some things (like JIT) do not work at all (yet).
  • Switched back to RGBA32 pixel format, for improved performance. After several benchmarks I did, I noticed that there's a significant speed improvement with this pixel format vs all the other 32-bit ones, so we're switching to this from now on. In real-life scenarios, this gave an extra 5 FPS on 1080p 32-bit P96 modes. It does mean however, that you might need to change your ScreenMode preferences in Workbench, if you used a 32-bit mode before.
  • Synced all items from the dev branch, except blitter, custom and drawing. Those parts are still significantly slower (they are synced with the latest WinUAE on the dev branch), so until we can see about optimizing the speed there, they will not be merged.
  • GUI: Added adjusting container widget - unused for now, but might come in handy in future improvements.
  • GUI: Changed ShowMessage function to support multi-line messages. For example, errors coming from FloppyBridge would include several lines of text that was not shown correctly until now.
  • Fixed mouse counter overflow, which caused the mouse movement to become very erratic after leaving the emulation running for ~10 hours.
  • Moved FloppyBridge code inside Amiberry, no longer needed as an external library.
  • Updated FloppyBridge code to the latest version, fixed GreaseWeazle not working under 64-bit environments.
  • Brought back Vertical Offset setting, to help with custom screen height sizes when Centering is not good enough.
  • Implemented Horizontal Offset setting.
  • Added Caps Lock to the LED options that can be used in the Misc panel.
  • GUI: Improved positioning of the LED dropdowns, since space is rather limited in that area.
Additionally, the "dev" branch version has an experimental OpenGL target, which is still Work In Progress (seriously, expect bugs if you try that). This is a first step towards using GLSL shaders, which require OpenGL to work. The performance seems good so far, but we'll have to see how much we might lose when using shaders on top.

Currently, we're undergoing some deep troubleshooting with Rob Smith, regarding the FloppyBridge implementation, which seems to cause crashes from time to time. Once we fix those, I think we're ready to release 4.2.0 officially as a binary as well.

Until the next time, stay safe and enjoy!