Makaron Test 12/5

August 21st, 2010, 20:12 Posted By: wraggster

News via http://www.aep-emu.de/PNphpBB2-file-...c-t-15480.html

A new test version of the Dreamcast emulator Makaron has been released.


Quote:
I changed a few things in T12 core and I´m finally quite happy with how it works so I´ll probably release another version soon. That would be the last of Test 12 series I suppose. The only thing preventing me from doing so is one last issue with the multithreaded renderer, it causes random crashes (though some systems seem more affected than others). It´s a pretty complicated issue though and cannot be fully fixed without major changes that would take considerable more time. For now I just added an option in the INI file to disable multithreading (not completly, just this part) and while it slows the emulator down it´s not as bad as the crashes.

Anyway, stay tuned. I want to make a release before I mess up the code again with my experiments, and I have quite a few ideas to try out.


UPDATE

Here it is, Test 12/5. There´s a small ReadMe included so be sure to read it. No Atomiswave yet since I didn´t think T12 core could be salvaged, so I didn´t bother with it. I wasn´t exactly wrong there, with all the changes I made this version could easily be called Test 13.

Anyway, other things of note (from the top of my head):

Current renderer needs to go. I have a replacement of sorts prepared, as a part of software renderer project. I´m pretty sure it will be a bit slower but that remains to be seen. I need the new framework anyway to support both D3D9 and D3D11 at the same time.

SH4 recompiler could use some sort of abstraction layer to handle the optimizations better. Again, it´d probably end up being marginally slower but more manageable and could in future be paired with x64 emitter.

I´m going to drop support for non-SSE2 CPUs soon, mostly because it´d be easier to code the new recompiler. Quite frankly any CPU without SSE2 is not going to be fast enough to handle Makaron anyway.

Windows XP and Direct3D 9 support is going to stay for now but once D3D11 renderer starts working properly I will focus mostly on that. While I realize that droping DX9 will upset XP users, I´d like to point out that Makaron always required a modern PC. I havent introduced any major changes lately but before that Makaron was the first Dreamcast emulator to require shaders, then it would work only with Shader Model 2 or higher. In return you got faster palletized texture support, shadows and fogging. Now it´s going to be DirectX 11.

UPDATE 2

That bug I wrote about? Now you´re seeing it´s effects first-hand. Oh well, guess I better fix that one since I didn´t add an option to skip DX11 init.

Redownload T12/5 from here, this time when Direct3D 11 is present on the system but actual device can´t be created it will just silently ignore the problem. This was the intention after all. And I also added workaround for the scaler issue.

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