DS2x86 0.10 released!

June 6th, 2011, 02:34 Posted By: wraggster

News via http://dsx86.patrickaalto.com/DSblog.html

This version does not bring many improvements. It is mainly just a small maintenance update, for the Homebrew Bounty competition. I fixed a potential memory alignment problem in the EMS emulation, which could cause a BSOD exception. This happened in Colonization, at least. I also implemented several previously unsupported INT calls.


For the whole of this weekend I worked on a completely rewritten audio handling for DS2x86. Sadly, I was not able to make it work reliably yet, so I could not include that in this version. It has gotten quite frustrating, as the new code is much cleaner and faster than the current audio code, and it should work much better, but it just doesn't! I have been debugging it for several hours now, and everything seems to work as it should, but still the audio sounds very bad! Very frustrating!

Looks like I will need more time to thoroughly debug this problem, and compare the behaviour of the new code to that of the original audio code. The reason I want to rewrite the audio code is that it is nearly impossible to add other emulated audio sources (besides the SB digital audio) to the current code. I want to start working on the AdLib audio code soon, so I needed to rewrite the audio code so that it can be extended with other audio sources. But, the first step is obviously to make it run the plain SB digitized audio at least as well as the current code.

The Homebrew Bounty 2011 competition will close after tomorrow, so I believe DSx86 0.34 and DS2x86 0.10 are the final versions that I participate in the competition with. Any last minute changes have a high risk of breaking some previously working code, and I try to avoid releasing versions I haven't tested properly. Since both my emulators are still in a continuous "work-in-progress" state, the competition versions will in any case be kind of snapshots of the evolution of x86 emulation on the Nintendo DS. Now I'll just wait and see what happens, whether the judges feel my entries are worthy of some prizes. So, good luck, me! :-)

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