byuu says:
These WIPs-within-WIPs are getting more and more broken ... this isn't
going the way I wanted.
But ... this time around, I've revamped the entire ruby API again, to
solve a bunch of tough problems that have always made using ruby really
clunky.
But there are *so many* ruby drivers that it's going to take a long
time to work through them all. This WIP is only going to run bsnes, and
only on FreeBSD, and only with some drivers.
hiro's Application::initialize() now calls hiro::initialize(), which you
define inside of your hiro apps. This lets you call
Application::setName(...) before anything else in hiro runs. This is
essential on Xorg to set program icons, for instance.
With the ruby rewrite and the change to hiro, I can get away from the
need to make everything in bsnes/higan pointers to objects, and can now
just declare them as regular objects.
byuu wrote:
Sigh ...
asio.hpp needs #include <nall/windows/registry.hpp>
[Since the last WIP, byuu also posted the following message. -Ed.]
ruby drivers have all been updated (but not tested outside of BSD), and
I redesigned the settings window. The driver functionality all exists on
a new "Drivers" panel, the emulator/hack settings go to a
"Configuration" panel, and the video/audio panels lose driver settings.
As does the settings menu and its synchronize options.
I want to start pushing toward a v107 release. Critically, I will need
DirectSound and ALSA to support dynamic rate control. I'd also like to
eliminate the other system manifest.bml files. I need to update the
cheat code database format, and bundle at least a few quark shaders --
although I still need to default to Direct3D on Windows.
Turbo keys would be nice, if it's not too much effort. Aside from
netplay, it's the last significant feature I'm missing.
I think for v107, higan is going to be a bit rough around the edges
compared to bsnes. And I don't think it's practical to finish the bsnes
localization support.
I'm thinking we probably want another WIP to iron out any critical
issues, but this time there should be a feature freeze with the next
WIP.
byuu says:
Sigh, I seem to be spiraling a bit here ... but the work is very
important. Hopefully I can get a solid WIP together soon. But for now...
I've integrated dynamic rate control into ruby::Audio via
setDynamic(bool) for now. It's very demanding, as you would expect. When
it's not in use, I realized the OSS driver's performance was pretty bad
due to calling write() for every sample for every channel. I implemented
a tiny 256-sample buffer and bsnes went from 290fps to 330fps on my
FreeBSD desktop. It may be possible to do the same buffering with DRC,
but for now, I'm not doing so, and adjusting the audio input frequency
on every sample.
I also added ruby::Video::setFlush(bool), which is available only in the
OpenGL drivers, and this causes glFinish() to be called after swapping
display buffers. I really couldn't think of a good name for this, "hard
GPU sync" sounds kind of silly. In my view, flush is what commits queued
events. Eg fflush(). OpenGL of course treats glFlush differently (I
really don't even know what the point of it is even after reading the
manual ...), and then has glFinish ... meh, whatever. It's
setFlush(bool) until I come up with something better. Also as expected,
this one's a big hit to performance.
To implement the DRC, I started putting helper functions into the ruby
video/audio/input core classes. And then the XVideo driver started
crashing. It took hours and hours and hours to track down the problem:
you have to clear XSetWindowAttributes to zero before calling
XCreateWindow. No amount of `--sync`, `gdb break gdk_x_error`, `-Og`,
etc will make Xlib be even remotely helpful in debugging errors like
this.
The GLX, GLX2, and XVideo drivers basically worked by chance before. If
the stack frame had the right memory cleared, it worked. Otherwise it'd
crash with BadValue, and my changing things broke that condition on the
XVideo driver. So this has been fixed in all three now.
Once XVideo was running again, I realized that non-power of two video
sizes were completely broken for the YUV formats. It took a while, but I
managed to fix all of that as well.
At this point, most of ruby is going to be broken outside of FreeBSD, as
I still need to finish updating all the drivers.
byuu says:
Changelog:
- emulator/video,audio: various cleanups
- emulator/audio: removed reverb effect (it breaks very badly on
high-frequency systems)
- emulator/audio: the Nyquist anti-aliasing lowpass filter is now
generated automatically instead of set per-core
- at 44.1KHz output, it's set to 22KHz; at 48KHz, it's set to
22KHz; at 96KHz, it's set to 25KHz
- this filter now takes the bsnes emulation speed setting into
account
- all system/video.cpp files removed; inlined in System::power() and
Interface::set() instead
- sfc/cpu: pre-compute `HTIME` as `HTIME+1<<2` for faster comparisons of
HIRQs
- sfc/cpu: re-add check to block IRQs on the last dot of each frame
(minor speed hit)
- hiro/gtk3: fixed headers for Linux compilation finally
- hiro/gtk,qt: fixed settings.cpp logic so initial values are used
when no settings.bml file exists
- hiro/gtk: started a minor experiment to specify theming information
in settings.bml files
- nall/dsp: allow the precision type (double) to be overridden (to
float)
- nall: add some helpers for generating pre-compiled headers
- it was a failure to try using them for higan, however ...
- nall: add some helpers for reading fallback values from empty
`Markup::Node[search]` statements
Todo:
- CRITICAL: a lot of my IRQ/NMI/HDMA timing tests are failing with the
fast PPU ... need to figure out why
- space between Emulator::video functions and Emulator::audio
functions in gb/system/system.cpp
- remove Audio/Reverb/Enable from settings.bml in target-bsnes
byuu says:
Changelog:
- nall/dsp returns with new iir/biquad.hpp and resampler/cubic.hpp files
- nall/queue.hpp added (simple ring buffer ... nall/vector wouldn't
cause too many moves with FIFO)
- audio streams now only buffer 20ms; so even if multiple audio streams
desync, latency can never exceed 20ms
- replaced blackman windwed sinc FIR hermite audio filter with transposed
direct form II biquadratic sixth-order IIR butterworth filter (better
attenuation of frequencies above 20KHz, faster, no need for decimation,
less code)
- put in experimental eight-tap echo filter (a lot better than what I
had before, but still rather weak)
- substantial cleanups to the SuperFX GSU processor core (slightly
faster, 479KB->100KB object file, 42.7KB->33.4KB source code size,
way less code duplication)
We'll definitely want to test the whole SuperFX library (not many games)
just to make sure there's no regressions caused by this one.
Not sure what I want to do with audio processing effects yet. I've always
really wanted lots of fun controls to customize audio, and now finally
with this new biquad filter, I can finally start implementing real
effects. For instance, an equalizer wouldn't be too complicated anymore.
The new reverb effect is still a poor man's version. I need to find human
readable source for implementing a comb-filter properly. I'm pretty sure
I can already treat nall::queue as an all-pass filter since all that
does is phase shift (fancy audio term for "delay audio"). What's really
going to be hard is figuring out how to expose user-friendly settings for
controlling it. It looks like you need a bunch of coprime coefficients,
and I don't think casual users are going to be able to hand-enter coprime
values to get the echo effect they want. I uh ... don't even know how
to calculate coprime values dynamically right now >_> But we're going
to have to, as they are correlated to the output sampling rate.
We'll definitely want to make some audio profiles so that users can
quickly select pre-configured themes that sound nice, but expose the
underlying coefficients so that they can tweak stuff to their liking. This
isn't just about higan, this is about me trying to learn digital signal
processing, so please don't be too upset about feature creep or anything
on this.
Anyway ... I'm having some difficulties with my audio right now. When
the reverb effect is enabled, there's a bunch of static on system
reset for just a moment. But this should not be possible. nall::queue
is initializing all previous reverb sample elements to 0.0. I don't
understand where static is coming in from. Further, we have the same
issue with both the windowed sinc and the biquad filters ... a bit of
a popping sound when starting a game. Any help tracking this down would
be appreciated.
There's also one really annoying issue ... I can't seem to do reverb
or volume adjustments with normalized samples. If I say "volume *= 0.5"
in higan/audio/audio.cpp line 68, it doesn't just halve the volume, it
adds a whole bunch of distortion. This makes absolutely zero sense to
me. The sample values are between 0.0 (mute) and 1.0 (full volume) here,
so multiplying a double by 0.5 shouldn't cause distortion. So right now,
I'm doing these adjustments with less precision after denormalizing back
to int16. Anyone ever see something like that? :/
