virtualjaguar-libretro/docs/RELEASE_NOTES_v3.2.0.md

Virtual Jaguar libretro v3.2.0

Enhancement-suite release: the first two visible pieces of the modern-emulation track (#338) — full-precision gouraud rendering and 2x internal resolution — plus a cluster of game-fix work: Raiden's two bugs, Power Drive Rally's mid-game sound freeze, and damaged CDI V2 rips now booting.

Highlights

• True Color gouraud rendering (#341). New core option virtualjaguar_true_color renders gouraud-shaded pixels at full precision (chroma × 24-bit intensity) through a shadow framebuffer, removing shading banding in 3D titles. The game-visible 16-bit framebuffer is unchanged — savestates, achievements, and emulation behaviour are bit-identical. CRY 16bpp video modes only. Default off.
• 2x internal resolution (#351, #353, #359). New core option virtualjaguar_internal_resolution (1x/2x, restart required) renders internally at a multiple of native resolution — and qualifying blits are supersampled with real sub-pixel content (fractional-walk source sampling, the "Stage 2" of the design), so 3D titles gain genuine detail; anything that doesn't qualify falls back to exact 2×2 box replication. The emulated machine cannot observe the option: a corpus-wide census (#351), a per-frame hash gate, and savestate digests prove the 1x path is bit-identical. Combines with True Color. (Correction 2026-08-09: this file originally described the release as box-replication-only with supersampling "in progress"; the supersampling path in fact shipped in this tag — it landed on develop in 104ee5d when #359 was squash-merged on top of the Stage 2 branch. The GitHub release body carries the same correction.)
• OP shadow-resolve hit/miss counters (#362) make the supersampled path's silent-fallback failure mode diagnosable at a glance (verbose crash-detect heartbeat), with misses split by cause.

Bug fixes

• Power Drive Rally: sound froze on a constant tone mid-game (#355, #363, #365). GPU/DSP local RAM is a 16-bit port that hardware commits as ordered longword pairs (JTRM TR p.44/p.101); we committed each half-write immediately, so a lone 68K half-write corrupted a DSP voice-state longword and sent the mixer off a null dispatch pointer. Writes now latch and commit on the partner half, matching the documented port semantics (and the documented clr.l/move.l <ea>,-(An) erratum that latch implies).
• Raiden: saved-options corruption killed the music (#344). EEPROM data-out was sampled destructively at $F14000, so ISR joystick polls mid-READ stole EEPROM bits and corrupted the settings the game then saved. Reads no longer shift the transaction; existing corrupted .srm files heal on the next in-game save.
• Raiden: black screen on HLE fast-boot (#20, #70, #339). The HLE path now programs the vertical-interrupt registers exactly like the real boot ROM, so titles that trust the boot-time VI state get the hardware values.
• Damaged CDI V2 rips boot (#342). Four known V2 rips are missing the boot header itself; a per-track repair reconstructs it at load time, and intact rips are untouched.
• Bus latencies are charged in wall time under clock scales (#318, #337). Overclocking the 68K or RISC domains no longer implicitly speeds up DRAM/bus costs — the cycle-domain contract from v3.1.0's clock-scale work is now enforced everywhere, with busArbiter exported to the test ABI.

Testing / diagnostics

• audio_timeline (#358) — unbounded per-window audio + DSP state timeline; existing harnesses stopped collecting at 20 s, exactly where the Power Drive Rally bug lived. This tool is what made #355 diagnosable.
• CD boot-mode gotcha documented in cd_visual_verify plus a real-BIOS FMV evidence table (#340).
• jlink/netlink CI flake fixed (#356) — tests hard-coded ports inside the ephemeral range and collided with the OS under load; suite-wide rule added.

Docs / site

• The project site now serves at jaguar.provenance-emu.com (#343, #348, #350, #352) with an evidence-linked showcase, and the README was rewritten as the project's primary showcase surface (#345).
• Hi-res design review, corpus census, and Stage 2 on-screen verification are recorded under docs/ (#347, #351, #359, #361, #364); GPU-compute offload exploration recorded in #349 (research only, no code).

Savestates

• Format unchanged (v8). States from v3.1.0 load as-is, and every older released format continues to load via the v3.1.0 compatibility loader.

Stats

• 75 files changed, ~9,785 insertions, ~278 deletions across 30 commits since v3.1.0 (git diff --shortstat v3.1.0..develop).

Known issues

• Battle Morph (CD) runs too fast (#331) — most likely the unmodelled GPU/DSP pipeline hazards (#313), next up on the timing-accuracy epic (#319).
• Val D'Isere Skiing and Snowboarding ground visuals render as a static image (#354) — under investigation.
• See docs/cd-known-issues.md for the CD backlog.

Downloads

Built for 16 platforms by CI on the v3.2.0 tag.