Q2 2021 Progress Report

Q2 2021 Progress Report

Core Improvements

DEV9

DEV9: Do not apply byteswapping to TX/RX FIFO writes/reads

4381

• Remove the byte swapping done to TX/RX FIFO writes/reads performed via registers.
• Fixes Twisted Metal: Black Online Public Beta v. 1.0 unable to initialize network adapter.

Add ATA Idle Immediate (E1) stub

4364

• Fixes HDD support for Street Fighter Alpha Anthology.

Consistently prefix all console output with DEV9

4403

Update ATA code for wchar GHC

4429

PCAP, check size of read packet

4496

• In PCAP, check size of read packet. If the size exceeds the buffer we are using, drop the packet.

Always use binary mode for HDD file

4448

• Opening the file in binary mode is the intended behaviour (and was done in the most common situation),

Fix potential out of bounds access when manual DNS1 & automatic DNS2 are used together

4449

• If DNS1 was manually specified, but DNS2 set to be automatically assigned, an off by one error could result in an out of bounds access to an array of adapter DNS addresses.

Increase min HDD size to 40GiB

4442

• Most games expect a HDD of 40GiB in size, and may fail to install as a result (and display a confusing error message).

Internal DHCP support

4304

• Adds an internal DHCP similar to what CLR\DEV9 offers for PCAP & TAP.

Correctly populate DNS2 field with DNS2 IP

4433

• Correctly populate DNS2 field with DNS2 IP in the DHCP section of the network ui.

Sleep instead of yield in RxThread

4435

• Yield might not leave the thread asleep long enough to prevent it from causing excessive CPU load.
• This also brings PCSX2 inline with CLR_DEV9 (which also sleeps for 1ms).

Memory Cards

Folder memcards: Add an index file to track order of files

3941

Adds an index file for folder memory cards in order to track timestamps and order of files in the FAT partition properly. This normally shouldn't matter, but there are at least a few games (ie. GTA games) which rely on the order of files on the memory card. Previously, folder memcards would not care about the order and populate the partition in whatever order the host filesystem provided the files (so, in the case of NTFS partitions, alphabetically). In reality, FAT partitions don't specify the order of files, which means in practice they are sorted to the order of creation.

• Fixes saving in GTA games with folder memory cards.

microVU

Fix mistake when setting Status Flag bits for Signed/Zero

6f7890

Change default of latency slider

3825

GIF

Remove MTVU spam that isn't required

b60765

Solves stuttering in MTVU mode in some games, and gets rid of some annoying asserts which mean nothing.

SPU2

Change default of latency slider

3825

Fix hi def audio streaming

17519c

Remove cycleptr, grab current cycles directly

4474

• This just changes the SPU2 to get the current IOP cycle directly instead of through a pointer. The non-pointer path seems to have been given up on anyway and there seems to be little reason for hiding it behind a pointer.
• This removes the path where SPU2 runs off the provided cycle argument to SPU2Async, but that was unused anyway.

Make SPU use theDMA registers from iopHw.

4437

The SPU was managing its own DMA Addresses, this makes it use the iopHw functionality for this instead.

PAD

Just enablepressure on CMD 0x4F

4331

Fixes Warriors of Might and Magic GamePad not functioning properly.

Fix gamepad choice not affecting rumble test on Linux

4466

This change causes the currently selected GamePad to rumble instead of the first one.

Eyetoy

Motion buttonsupport.

4415

Debuggers

Bios threadview support.

4345

Misc core

Core / VU: Disable MTVU when VU1 Interpreter is selected.

4399

Remove FPUCompare Hack

3860

The hack is no longer needed as full Clamping mode can be used instead.

DifferentiateImpossible block clearing message from IOP & EE

4461

Prefix the "Impossible block clearing failure" with "[IOP]" or "[EE]" depending on the recompiler.

Fix Emulated PSXGPU Version.

4425

Previously it was thought that the PS2 would emulate the v2 GPU, but hardware tests show that it emulates the V0 GPU.

Make DMA's instant during the BIOS

4460

This hackfixes the BIOS to avoid a Data Cache bug caused a DMA buffer being overwritten during a transfer without waiting, which messes up the fonts in the BIOS. Fixing this correctly would require implementing the Data Cache, which is something which would make the emulator basically unusable, so this is a reasonable solution, it is only enabled during the BIOS screen.

• Fixes certain bios revisions rendering text incorrectly.

MoverecConstBuf memory near recompiler memory

4498

• Fixes an issue where recConstBuf was too far away from the main recompiler to LEA in 64-bit builds.

Fix disc drivepath issues on Windows.

4482

• Fixes #3910 - CDVD Regression: Booting a physical disc inserted after opening PCSX2 doesn't work. (Regression only affects Windows).
• Fixes an issue where the drive choice is cleared if there is no disc in the selected drive when PCSX2 is first opened (Should only affect Windows, but non-Windows only code is touched too).

GSdx Improvements

Misc GSdx

Removepartial and full crc hack levels on release builds

4350

• Normal users shouldn't really need to choose partial or full since automatic already does that.

Some minorcleanups.

4383

TAS (Tool Assisted Speedrun) Utility Improvements

Resolve crash when closing emulator involving GUI elements

4382

Add close box to New Input Recording

e50a44

Allow configuration of the frame advance amount

4393

• Adds a GUI configurable setting to control how many frames the frame-advance feature should advance.

Add warning when creating a save-state recording

4392

• Adds a brief warning explaining why you may want to avoid save-state recordings, and what would have to be done if a bad state is achieved.

IPC (Interprocess Communication) Improvements

Remove possiblememory corruption due to strcat on provided pointer

4337

GameDB Improvements

Add patches for Elemental Gerad and K-1 Grand Prix 2006

467659

Adds fixesfor Energy Airforce - Aim Strike , K-1 World Grand Prix 2006

4388

add NearestEErounding to SSX and SSX tricky

4405

Add Kickstartfor Rayman Raving Rabbids.

4462

Adds VUclamping mode extra to Enthusia Professional Racing

4478

Remove nolonger needed 'OPHFLagHack' for Naruto - Uzumaki Chronicles 2

4488

Misc Improvements

Grayout InstantVU1 when MTVU is enabled.

4278

Revise consolewith newline on compile + title

4377

Swap buttonsBrowse... and Ask when booting and default to unchecked state

4416

change window todebug in the menu and move blockdump to the debug menu

4378

update the 2smaller app icons.

4431

change 'Consoleto Stdio' to 'Program Log to Stdio' in UI

4438

Rename PSXreferences to PS1 distinguish between PS1 and DVR

4454

RemoveSSE2/SSE3 support

4329

Moving forward with our goal to clean up and modernize the code we are removing SSE2/3 support.

Save ELF lastpath when auto-running an elf

4444

Enable GSdebugger on CI artifacts

4343

Adds an CI environment variable to enable GS debugger on CI artifacts. This can also be enabled locally to enable the GS debugger.

Validate GameDBchanges in GitHub Actions.

4418

Currently, the emulator will fully validate the GameDB, which is how we've been catching these recent mistakes. But this adds a CI check to validate the file in a very similar manner at build time.

CI: Add an explicit flag to retain debugging artifacts (.pdb, .exp, .lib, etc) in Windows builds.

4180

Conclusion

And that's all from us, see you next time in our 2021 Q3 Report!

Metadata

Q2 2021: (dev1164 to dev1299) (2020-04-01 - 2020-06-30)