Richard Bannister

BSNES, Emulator Enhancer, Oswan, and SMS Plus have all been updated. Here are the changes:

• (BSNES) Fixed an unfortunate bug in the previous release that caused sound to go badly off kilter after about fifteen minutes of play.
• (Enhancer) Tweaked the behaviour of the Prioritise speed over smoothness option to improve sound quality when VBL sync is on.
• (Oswan) Massively improved compatibility and sound brought on by synchronising elements of a number of different forks of the original Oswan project.
• (Shell) Changed the default preferences to turn brushed metal off by default, since it looks pretty hideous under 10.5 or later.
• (Shell) Made some slight adjustments to the behaviour of the "Prioritise speed over smoothness" option.
• (SMS Plus) Fixed issue where region setting in preferences was always ignored.
• (SMS Plus) YM2413 sound core preference was reversed. Fixed.
• (SMS Plus) YM2413 sound now works again. Note that you must have Domestic (Japanese) hardware enabled for this to work. Thanks to ZShock for the bug report.

These will probably be the last updates for a little while, as I'm off to Australia for a two week holiday next weekend, and after my return I'm going to do the next few Microsoft exams. Still, no worries, eh?

 

BSNES has been updated to v0.2.8, bringing it in sync with the core version for the first time in a little over two years. This brings many improvements to emulation, albeit with a performance penalty. I've gained most of the lost performance back due to aggressive optimization of the Mac code, but it's still very marginally slower than the previous release. Enjoy!

 

The last couple of weeks have been fairly hectic for me, as I'm attempting to gain a MCSE qualification for work. The usual joke is something along the lines of Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert, though this is frankly unfair. The exams are challenging and require a significant amount of study even for someone who spends most of their working day dealing with Windows Server.

At any rate, I'm currently working on a long-overdue update for my Mac port of BSNES, which is currently about ten releases behind the original version. The latest code is fully up and running at this point, albeit with a strange bug that causes it to crash on Intel Macs. Hopefully I'll get to the bottom of that one shortly.

 

Happy new year!

I've just uploaded my latest web site redesign. This has finally spelt the end for quite a lot of older content from these pages. The only casualty from the software section is Modeler, which was never updated to be a Universal Binary and has long since been superceded by MAME.

Some of the pages, particularly in the coaster section, have yet to be updated to the new style, but that will be resolved over the next few weeks. In the mean while, however, if you come across any obviously broken links I'd be grateful if you let me know.

 

Audio Overload has been updated to v2.0b9.

• New .SSF Sega Saturn/ST-V format supported
• New .WSR WonderSwan format supported
• Fixed issues with some SNDH/SC68 files
• Automatically advances to next song when end detected
• Experimental Win64 version for 64-bit XP and Vista
• Completely new .S98 engine with much better compatibility
• New .SPU (Sony Playstation logs from the Eternal SPU plugin) support
• 7zip container support
• Shift-JIS Japanese characters are now converted for proper display.
• New AHX / HVL support
• Greatly expanded .SC68 support - now over 50 subformats work including Future Composer and SIDMON
• Rewrote timing emulation for PSF/PSF2 files

 

Emulator Enhancer has been updated to v2.2.1. This is a maintenance release which should hopefully solve issues with entering serial numbers under Leopard. Additionally, TEO has been updated to v1.8.2, bringing it in sync with the latest code for PC. I've also added support for high resolution rendering, which makes titles using eighty column graphics mode usable.