-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12. June, 2005 Version 1.76 - Ok, some of the new 1.76 plugin features I have described in the OGL2 version file (OGL2 V2.07): * floating point fps limit value * y sprite mirroring (thanx to smf) * fixed psx gpu blending mode (thanx to softm) * fast forward key So there's no point to repeat it all again :) A few extra things needed to get fixed/added in the standard OGL/D3D plugins, though: - I've added a "pause" key, if you have to do a break, and you don't want to quit the emu (my other gpu plugins already had this option) - I've noticed the "G4 polygon cache" special game fix (for FF9) was a bit overdone :) Should be better now. "All the seats are taken in the house that makes the rules. All the seats are taken in the Parliament of Fools." - "The Parliament of Fools" by Skyclad -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. November, 2003 Version 1.75 - Not much done in 1.75 (at least as far as I remember, ehe). The major change was some tweaking of the internal texture caching, which will sometimes cause better FPS, and sometimes (insignificant) less FPS, depending on the game engine. Anyway, the new caching is somewhat cleaner, and cards with little vram (32 MB or less) will like it better in certain games using many different texture palettes. Therefore: if 1.75 works better with your system/games, use it, if 1.74 works better, feel free to keep it, you will not miss any new feature by doing so. "images of sunshine lease, to make the words rhyme let me die in eight-time let me write a tale to no-one let me write a tale to make you think you're someone and 'Can you think of one good reason to remain?'" - "Death Trip" by Steve Harley -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 16. August, 2003 Version 1.74 - A few fixes from the OGL2 plugin also affected the standard OGL/D3D plugins, so I've decided to release them as well. Things fixed (shameless copy of my OGL2 version text): - Skullmonkeys... ah, yeah... sorry to say: the game didn't work perfectly with the last release (I was only able to check out one level... and of course other levels were still screwed). Well, Parotaku gave me another save state, and I think now everything is right... at least Parotaku was not able to find more issues, so blame him if still something is going wrong ;) - FrancoisC noticed a bad shading in the Breath Of Fire 4 camp fire on his R8500 with my OGL plugins. First I didn't believe that (I played BOF4 alot in the past), but then I took a closer look... and he was right. After a few investigations I've found out that nVidia cards and ATI cards are doing a different rendering of connected quad polygons. Seems like ATI cards are handling a single "quad_strip" polygon like a "standard quad" one, while nVidia cards are handling it like two connected triangles. Don't ask me what's the correct behaviour, and who is to blame, ehehe. Anyway, I've fixed that... now ATI and nVidia cards will work fine. - Ah, and related to the bad BOF4 shading: the car tires in "Driver" were also missing on ATI cards, tsts. Of course that's also fixed. "He disappeared In the early haze of morning And with him left his prophecies They didn't care..." - "Send Me A Sign" by Gamma Ray -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01. August, 2003 Version 1.73 - calb detected a gpu bug with the Skullmonkeys game (missing graphic layers), and gave me a save state. I was able to fix that bug without the need of a new 'game fix', and hey, maybe some other games will also be affected for good (but I don't want to know how many games will break because of it, ehehe... naah, none of the games I've tried had shown any bad side effects). - ePSXe 1.6.0 is offering multitap and gun support. Old plugins only could give infos if the emu was running in "A"nalog or "M"ouse mode (a symbol appeared in the gpu menu), now the menu can display the currently used "A"nalog, "M"ouse, "G"un or "D"igital pad mode, and also the pad/input device number (1-4). "Das ist die Zeit der Nebel, der Kraehen und der Raben. Die Schnitter muessen maehen, und keiner kommt zum saeen. Es geht ein duester Reigen" - "Herbstzeit" by Subway to Sally -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14. Juny, 2003 Version 1.72 - It's summertime :) That means that I don't spend much free time for emu coding right now, and since the hw/accel psx gpu plugins are kinda mature, there is no big need to do so as well. Nevertheless, since ATI cards get more and more common, I wasn't exactly happy that there were still some ATI issues reported with my plugins. But since I used only nVidia cards for the last years (I liked their driver stability), I never got a real chance to check out what was going wrong on ATI cards. Of course I had a lot of offers to do beta testing from ATI users (thanx to Laurent, Omegadrive, Tuan, Tarcel, and everybody else for the support), but I am not so a big fan of remote debugging (that's usually a tiresome, time-consuming business). Therefore I was nicely surprised when Alan, from Woodstock (USA), offered to send me a free Radeon 9700 Pro. So this gpu release is dedicated to Alan, it wouldn't been possible without his donation. - First some general words about the ATI card (you can skip this section, if you can't stand my engrish, long winded explanations, and you just want to know what's new in the plugins... you may want to read on if you are planning to upgrade your system to an ATI card as well, though). Before replacing my old trusty GeForce 3, I de-installed all nVidia drivers from my W98 and WinXP systems. After that I shut the PC down, put in the 9700 Pro, and bootet up again, WinXP first. I ignored all the blabla on startup, installed the 3.4 Catalyst drivers and the ATI control panel, rebootet again, and all was up and running. Well, running at 60 Hz, of course. First I adjusted the frequency in the monitor settings (like I used to do with my GF3 card), setting it to 85 Hz... and nothing happened... still 60 Hz. After some research I found out that I had to increase the frequency in the ATI panel as well, tsts. Finally 85 Hz :) At least on desktop... fullscreen games of course still were running at 60 Hz... the typical WinXP problem. So, running RefreshForce (which I also used for my GF3) fixed that issue, nice. Otherwise everything else was working without problems (ah, of course WinXP detected a 'major change in hardware', so I had to activate XP again). All PC games I started up were running fine, and because of the faster gfx card I was able to max out all the video settings (like in Morrowind, Gothic2, Aquanox2 and GTA Vice City), without performance problems. No stability issues as well. So I booted Win98, installed the Cat3.4/ATI panel as well, and... also 60 Hz. Well, no problem I thought, went to the ATI panel... and... no tab for adjusting the frequency there... eh? Changing the W98 monitor frequency without the ATI panel didn't work, and therefore I tried many things (like installing different monitor drivers, re- installing the ATI drivers, using a driver cleaner tool, etc). No success. After searching in various ATI forums I found a solution: create a new binary key called: "DALRULE_ALLOWNONDDCCRTALLMODESUPTO1600x1200" in the "HKLM/Software/ATI Technologies/Driver/0001/DAL" registry section, set it to "01 00 00 00", reboot, and yeepee... finally it was possible to change the monitor frequency to an higher value. Big flaw in the ATI drivers, imho... ok, prolly it's caused by my BNC monitor connection, but I think that an average user would have been lost. I also noted that the mouse cursor in W98 tends to get screwed (after leaving the ATI panels?), but I was able to fix that by adjusting my MS IntelliMouse settings. Anyway, it seems that's another W98 ATI bug lurking in the dark. - Ok, now on to the plugins: yeah, with the ATI driver the emu crashed on exit. Funny enough only with the psx gpu OpenGL plugin, not the Zinc one, or with any other of my other OGL projects. Wtf? It was getting worse: it didn't crash in the plugin, but in the main emu (prolly when it was trying to destroy the renderer window). Hard to debug... so I tried the good old 'trial and error' approach, and found out that if I don't delete the OGL rendering context, no more crashes. Well, anyway I didn't like this solution, very unprofessional. After some more research I found out the real problem: it seems that the ATI OGL driver is subclassing the renderer window when it creates the rendering context, and de-subclasses it again on context deletion. Dunny why it is doing that. But it conflicted with my own window subclassing. Aha. After swapping a few lines of code: tadaaa... no mor 'crash on exit' bug, and fullscreen <=> window toggling now also worked as expected. Ok, one issue solved :) - Now I started up several psx games which are known to use framebuffer textures/framebuffer access. Nice: in OpenGL the framebuffer texture option works very fast on ATI cards (at least on the R9700 Pro). But the framebuffer access (reading vram to system memory) has an horrible speed... a...
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