I'm excited to launch ares v118 today, the first release featuring playable,
full-speed Nintendo 64 emulation!
The new Nintendo 64 emulation is made possible thanks to [Themaister] very
graciously porting his Vulkan-based ParaLLEl-RDP graphics renderer to ares. With
its default settings, it is nearly pixel-perfect to real hardware, and it
optionally supports upscaling to 2x or 4x the original Nintendo 64 resolution,
plus optional supersampling back down to the original resolution (for enhanced
anti-aliasing) if desired. The Vulkan support requires an appropriate graphics
card, and either Windows or Linux. At this time, Vulkan is not available for
macOS nor the BSDs.
Also new for the Nintendo 64 core in this release is Rumble Pak, Cartridge Pak,
SRAM, EEPROM, and Flash save support. Note that for right now, the Rumble Pak
will only be enabled for games which use internal saves (SRAM, EEPROM, and
Flash.) That does not cover all Rumble Pak-capable games. The option to choose
between Rumble Paks and Cartridge Paks will be added to a future release.
For the PlayStation core, [Luke Usher] provided two rendering fixes that allow
Final Fantasy VII and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater to be fully playable!
Right now, approximately 33% of the Nintendo 64 library is fully playable, and
about 67% of the PlayStation library is fully playable. Each core has only been
under active development for about one month each, so they both have a long way
to go. Please treat these early releases as tech samples, rather than finished
emulation cores.
Further, note that the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation cores employ cached
interpreters. This is a middle-ground between the accuracy of interpreters and
the performance of dynamic recompilers. As such, ares' system requirements will
be a bit higher than traditional emulators for these systems. Presuming no
background task interference or CPU throttling, generally speaking, a Ryzen 5
2600 or better CPU should get you to around ~120fps in the average case, and
~60fps in the worst case.
The source code has also been released under the terms of the Creative Commons
BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
[Themaister]: http://github.com/Themaister/
[Luke Usher]: https://twitter.com/LukeUsher1
- nall/vfs/cdrom: build image in-memory (required to support the below
features more easily)
- nall/vfs/cdrom: support multiple files per CUE sheet
- nall/vfs/cdrom: support WAV audio files
byuu says:
lots of cleanups to the subcode generation/parsing. Also emulated sega cd's cdc
dma, though it doesn't seem to get popful mail ingame, and sonic cd is pretty
weird with the audio on the title screen.
Oh wow I stand corrected, it's really just like that. The title screen plays
Sonic Boom much louder than the FMV that starts a few seconds later.
byuu says:
a quick regression slipped in trying to do a dma.io.length-- in the VDP DMA from
MCD WRAM, but with that reverted, Lunar: The Silver Star is now fully playable.
Only the "Game Arts" intro screen runs a bit too fast, but otherwise there's no
observable issues.
byuu says:
adds CD-DA audio and multi-track support + CUE parsing to Mega CD. Posted it
just a bit too soon before a freeze fix for Lunar: Silver Star, but that game
will be playable (with some glitches in FMV sequences) in the next release.
byuu says:
not dead yet. full reed solomon implementation courtesy of merrymage's help
(still no C1/C2 CIRC, but P/Q RSPC is completed). implemented more CDD commands,
far enough along now to get the drive to seek to the start of the data track and
then .............. nothing. But ... progress?
invertego