bsnes v063.10 Technical Preview Released

[Alastor]

With this release, the final last-generation holdout, the scanline-based PPU renderer, has been replaced with a true, accurate, cycle-level PPU that renders one dot at a time. Finally, this fulfills the greatest milestone remaining in the SNES emulation scene. With every processor emulated at the lowest possible level, SNES emulation finally rivals the accuracy levels that NES emulators have offered for years.

Now, please do understand that this release is not a beta, nor is it even an alpha. It is simply a preview of things to come, and as such you can consider it a pre-alpha. There are many caveats at this time.

First, it is very slow. More than twice as slow as v063 official. There have been absolutely no optimizations whatsoever to the new dot-based renderer. I do expect to be able to speed this up significantly in future releases.

Second, this may lock up on Windows Vista and later for unknown reasons. I haven't had a chance to look into it; so stick with Windows XP or Linux for now.

Third, save states are not supported yet. If you try and use them anyway, bad things will happen.

Fourth, and most importantly, this isn't 100% bit-perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Off the top of my head, memory is accessed far too often, the OAM and CGRAM address lines are not controlled by the S-PPU during active display, none of the various glitches are supported, and the OAM renderer does not pre-cache the next scanline's sprites, it happens on the same line for now.

I will obviously be doing my best to improve the accuracy of the aforementioned things. But even with those missing, this is still leaps and bounds above a pure scanline-based renderer. It essentially provides 682 times the parallelism. It is enough to finally properly emulate the shadow effect in Air Strike Patrol, and it finally eliminates the "PPU Hclock render position" hack once and for all.

Lastly, you'll need the DLLs from v063 official. I didn't bother to include them this time.

Enjoy!

http://byuu.org/