ares v145 released

疾风之狼

ares v145 has now been released.

This release contains hefty improvements to a number of ares components. Highlights include Real Time Clock support for the Game Boy Advance, improvements to the experimental PlayStation core, Sega SC-3000 support, important fixes to the Game Boy Color, as well as core improvements to the ares application itself that should improve performance and responsiveness.

Since v144, 8 contributors have created 90 commits to the ares codebase.

As always, if you wish to see the full changelog in a per-commit format along with their authors, you can do so on GitHub here.

ARM7TDMI (Game Boy Advance CPU, ST018 Super Famicom coprocessor)

Implemented many undocumented instruction encodings
Implemented invalid CPSR modes
Added support for MRC, MCR, and CDP coprocessor instructions
Allowed misalignment of the program counter in ARM mode

Nintendo - Game Boy Color

Improved HDMA and GDMA timings (fixes some major graphical bugs)

Nintendo - Game Boy Advance

Added support for the Real Time Clock
Re-introduced optional Game Boy Player support
Fixed a bug where EEPROM saves were initialized to all zeroes, rather than all ones
Improved handling of FIFO audio channels
Writes to APU registers and wave RAM while audio is disabled are now handled correctly
Prevented IRQs from advancing during DMA
Improvements to prefetcher timings
CPU is now stepped in single-cycle increments when halted

Nintendo - Famicom / NES

Fixed database to allow running PAL/NTSC games in both supported modes

Nintendo 64

Game Boy Color titles are now selectable for use with Transfer Pak
Renamed upscaling options from “SD/HD/UHD Quality” to “1x/2x/4x Native” to better describe the resolution increase

Sega - SG-1000 / SG-3000

Added support for the SC-3000
Improve IO port emulation (Port B bits 3-6 are active low, bit 7 is active high)
Fix an issue where games could incorrectly detect the SG-1000 as an SC-3000

Sega - Master System / Game Gear

Improved header validation; fixes many NTSC-J titles being detected as international

Sega - Mega Drive / Genesis / CD / 32X

Added CPU wait cycle for APU bus access

Sony - PlayStation

Fix incorrect handling of the CE bits in COP0.CAUSE
Fix boot of discs with non-standard license strings (Various unlicensed games)
Fix VRAM-to-CPU transfers
Fix issues with DMA interrupt flag calculation
Fix issues with virtual->physical address translation
Fix reads of DICR bit 15.
Fix an issue where the mute bit would not apply to reverb voices
Fix an issue where save states may not be re-usable between emulator launches
Fix an issue where SPU noise was not being correctly represented as a signed 16-bit quantity
(Temporarily) Remove the recompiler: one will be re-added once accuracy is more up to scratch

Application / Misc.

Core threading improvements have been made to ares, which should lead to increased UI responsiveness and potentially improved performance on some platforms.
Added a selector for region fallback preference when loading a title, to better account for cases where the ROM does not support the user’s primary region preference.
The status bar will now show the loaded system configuration and region.
Fixed an issue where nall::set::insert could fail silently
Resolved an invalid version issue when building ares from a source archive
Releases now contain platform-appropriate application version metadata
[Windows] Modified terminal output to be treated as UTF-8, and to allow the use of VT100 escape sequences when supported
[macOS] Enabled the system Edit menu, allowing copy/paste functionality inside the Tools window
[macOS] Fixed a possible startup crash on x86_64 systems
[macOS] Fixed issues when building ares on macOS 10.15

Dependencies

Updated SDL to version 3.2.14, containing miscellaneous bugfixes
Updated librashader to version 0.8.1, addressing a rare crash when loading shaders on Windows
Updated slang-shaders to ref 8c630d0d3
Updated Molten-VK to version 1.3.0

https://ares-emu.net/download