De MSX is een homecomputer uit vroegere tijden, echter er zijn gelukkig nog steeds een aantal personen die zich vol op bezighouden met de ontwikkeling van de MSX en ook met de verschillende emulators voor dit platform. De emulator openMSX draait op verschillende besturingssystemen, onder andere Linux, Mac OS X en Windows, en richt zich volgens de ontwikkelaars op de perfectie van spelervaring. Versie 0.7.0 met "Lazarus" als codenaam is alweer enkele dagen met de volgende aankondiging beschikbaar:
Version 0.7.0:
This release contains several exciting new features, clearing some long standing feature requests! The most important one of all is that we have implemented save states! It took us a while to think of a way to implement it without having some disadvantages you could have with some other emulators. The biggest one is backwards compatibility. Our system is designed in such way that it is able to cope with older save states in future releases. So, you don't have to be afraid to upgrade to a new version of openMSX: your save states will remain usable!
Another big feature is the heavily improved keyboard support. In previous releases it was always a bit of an annoyance to work with emulated MSX machines which have a different keyboard layout than your host computer. E.g. using an MSX turboR, which has a Japanese keyboard, on a PC with a US-English keyboard was very annoying, as the characters that appear on the screen do not match the ones you typed on your PC keyboard. This problem has now been solved and you can use any combination of host computer keyboard and emulated MSX machine, without getting the wrong characters on the MSX screen.
Full transparent dir-as-disk support has also been a long standing feature request. Well, it's here! Dir-as-disk now behaves as you might expect: any change on either the host or the MSX side is reflected on the other side immediately. This could help a lot for cross-platform development.
Before we give you the list with details, we want to thank hap, the author of meisei, for helping us out with some of the features below; you might recognize them from his recent meisei releases.
New or improved emulator features:MSX device support:
- Save states (keyboard short cuts: ALT-F7 or Cmd+R to quick-load and ALT-F8 or Cmd-S to quick-save your state):
- Exchangeable between different host machines, OSes, platforms
- Designed to be forwards-compatible, i.e. they will work with future openMSX releases
- As a side effect it is now possible to have multiple emulated MSX machines in memory (comparable with tabbed browsing)
- Fully automatic host-MSX keyboard mapping (enabled by default), support for MSX keyboards of type: de, es, fr, gb, int, jp_ansi, jp_jis, kr, proto_fr (e.g. French Philips VG 8010), proto_int (Philips VG 8010), ru
- Fully transparent dir as disk (by default)
- Debugging:
- It's now possible to break on changes of the IRQ lines: the global Z80 IRQ input but also specific per-device IRQ outputs ("debug probe" command)
- Made more devices 'debuggable'
- Simplified usage of the 'debug device'
- Recording movies in higher resolution: 640x480 using the "-doublesize" option
- Major speed optimizations:
- Z80 and R800 emulation
- V99x8: command-engine, bitmap and sprite rendering
- SCC, YM2413, AY8910 and sound mixing in general
- rewrote some critical routines in x86 or ARM assembly. As a result most MSX1 and MSX2 software now runs realtime on a ARM9 200MHz CPU, which you can find e.g. in a GP2X handheld console.
- Screenshots can now be made of the MSX screen only (using the "-msxonly" option)
- Added an On-Screen-Display (OSD) framework, which will be useful to control openMSX in full screen mode and especially on hand held machines like the GP2X. There is already a proof-of-concept OSD available, which can be accessed by pressing the MENU (or Cmd+O) key. Note that this is still an experimental feature! Feedback is most welcome, of course.
- Amount of horizontal stretch can be tweaked by the user (horizontal_stretch setting)
Build system, packaging, documentation:
- Support for new mapper types: Nettou Yakyuu (with sample ROM, for Moero!! Nettou Yakyuu '88), MatraInk (for Ink), Manbow2 (for Manbow 2), MegaFlashRomScc (for new MegaFlashROM SCC extension)
- Several new machines were added, e.g. Philips VG 8000, Philips VG 8010 (also French version), Philips VG 8020/19, Sony HB-10P, Sony HB-20P, Sony HB-55P
- Added Brazilian OPL3 Cartridge
- Major accuracy improvements:
- turboR: extra wait cycle when accessing VDP
- Z80: more accurate IRQ timing
- Z80: fixed some undocumented flag behaviour (not caught by zexall)
- Z80: implemented differences between turboR-Z80 and normal Z80 (SCF and CCF)
- R800: more accurate timing (correct page break behaviour)
- R800: more accurate flags (rexall passes now)
- SCC: fixes in rotation mode
- SCC: corrected power-on state
- V99x8: implemented VRAM remapping (register R#1, bit7)
- V99x8: implemented blink in bitmap mode
- V9990: much improved command timing
- V9990: bug fixes in command handling
- V9990: fixed vertical scroll details (in combination with screen splits)
- MSX-AUDIO: various fixes for the different MSX-AUDIO variants
- PSG: emulate joystick input pin 6/7 mask quirk
- more accurate 'HarryFox' and 'CrossBlaim' mapper types
- Mostly updated support for building a statically linked executable on Windows.
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