ares v142 released

疾风之狼

ares v142 has now been released.

Since v141, 18 contributors have created 107 commits to the ares codebase.

Along with various improvements to emulator cores and the ares application itself, v142 adds support for a new system: The SETA Aleck64 Arcade board.

v142 also introduces a new CMake-based build system that improves compatibility with modern toolchains and IDEs, and simplifies the ares build process for new developers.

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)

IRQ timing improvements
Lock bus during SWP instruction
Implemented an undocumented encoding for bx instructions
Write back upper 32 bits of product after lower 32 bits during multiply long instructions
Add instruction test harness

Hitachi SH7604 (32X CPU)

Improve performance by refactoring timer implementations to be loopless
Fix an issue where instruction tracing would not work when using the recompiler

Motorola 68000 (Mega Drive CPU, Neo Geo)

Add instruction test harness
Fix program counter in privilege violation exception stack frame
Fix CHK instruction timing and flags

Yamaha YM2612 (Mega Drive FM Synthesis)

Improve cycle update order, fixing issues with feedback
Fixed an issue where envelope update would erroneously happen twice in some situations
Fixed LFO behavior to apply proper attenuation when disabled
Improved accuracy of rate scaling calculations
These updates have fixed all currently known audio issues with Mega Drive games.

Arcade

Introduced support for the SETA Aleck64 arcade board, supporting all Aleck64 titles from the mame0273 romset, except for Magical Tetris Challenge, as this game uses an undocumented additional video chip for the playfield layer.
Update rom database to match MAME 0.273 (also impacts Neo Geo AES)

NEC - PC Engine / TurboGrafx / SuperGrafx / CD

Improvements to performance with no impact on accuracy/compatibility.

Nintendo - NES / Famicom / Famicom Disk System

Implement PPU rendering glitches caused by open bus behaviour (PPU scroll glitch)
Fix an issue where writes to FDS disks would not always be persisted.

Nintendo - Game Boy Advance

Halt prefetcher when full
Improved open bus emulation
Improved timings for pixel blending and background rendering
Stall CPU when accessing memory regions that are being concurrently accessed by PPU

Nintendo - Nintendo 64 / 64DD

Fix a typo in ISViewer debug emulation that prevented roms sized between 0x3f0’0000 and 0x3ff’0000 from working properly.
Fix an issue where attaching GDB to debug a Nintendo 64 ROM could trigger a MIPS CPU exception.
Improve VI timing to properly handle non-standard display modes, including PAL60.
Fix VI interrupts in interlaced mode to happen on the exact same scanline as real hardware, including with known hardware bugs.
Advance RSP DMA during RSP execution, preventing DMA races in long-running code blocks. (Fixes Tarzan)
Correctly implement invalid SPECIAL opcodes in the RSP so that they match hardware behaviour.
Fix signed integer multiplication and division when the input operands are not sign-extended 32-bit values.

Sega - Mega Drive / CD / 32X

32X: Make PWM timer interrupt interval read-only from the MD side
32X: Improve support for PWM at non-standard sample rates
32X: Add a DC filter to PW to reduce clicks/pops
32X: Improve accesses to 32X IO from the MD side (Fixes missing music in Brutal + stuttering in Night Trap)
32X: Force PAL region when (PAL) or (Europe) is in a rom filename, a fallback to fix games with invalid headers.
32X: Fix a typo preventing the right PWM audio channel from playing.
Implement CRAM bus contention (CRAM dots).
Improve FIFO emulation allowing VDPFIFOTesting rom to pass.
Fix remaining (minor) issues running both Titan Overdrive demos.
Fix an issue where an edge case in window behavior in H32 mode was handled incorrectly (fixes flickering line in International Superstar Soccer Deluxe).
Fix an issue causing a flickering line in Sonic 2’s VS Mode.
Various fixes to DMA timing, fixing test cases in the dma_speed_test rom.
Add support for the unusual rom mapping used by QuackShot Starring Donald Duck (World) (Rev A)

Other

Build System

Add support for building with CMake. The legacy makefile build system will be removed before v143. Distributors should update their workflow accordingly.

User Interface

Add support for searching the game list for Arcade cores.
Fix an issue that would cause improper framebuffer scaling in rendering for the Super Famicom and Mega Drive cores.
Adjust the “overscan” option to crop strictly to the “active frame” area that the emulated system renders game content onto, rather than the area one might see using typical contemporary hardware (Famicom, Super Famicom, SG-1000, Master System, ColecoVision, My Vision, MSX).
Fix an issue that could cause stuttering with default SDL audio settings.
Improve error messages when loading games and systems.
Make “Type” column visible by default in firmware window
Fix an issue with repeated key inputs in the memory editor on Windows.
Add an interface for DIP switches for cores that support them.
(macOS) Update minimum system requirement to 10.13.
(macOS) Use Metal as the default video driver.
(macOS) Fix an issue causing ares to not remember the user’s “Force sRGB” setting.
(macOS) Add support for the memory editor
Various changes to more reliably locate database files and shaders on Linux.

Dependencies

Update SDL to version 2.30.8
Update librashader to version 0.5.1
Update MoltenVK to version 1.2.11
Update paraLLEl-RDP to revision 1cecd04
Update slang-shaders 7e2975e to revision 7e2975e

https://ares-emu.net/download