[GerbilSoft]

It's been almost a year since the last stable release of Gens/GS. (Milestone 6 was released December 7, 2008.) I was originally going to wait until the documentation for Release 7 was finished, but I decided that it was "good enough". So, here it is!

Notable changes from r7_pre5 to r7 include an additional color mapping mode, "Full with S/H" (see the Genesis colors? topic for more information), a bug fix for broken Saitek drivers (thanks to NeKit), and a bug fix related to starting in fullscreen mode (thanks to Zombie). Also, I added an option to enable a debug console on the Win32 release build. To get it, specify the "--debug" parameter on the command line.



Changes from m6 to r7: http://gs_server.gerbilsoft.ddns.info/cgi-...xt;hb=release-7

Downloads:

• Source Code: gens-gs-r7.tar.gz
• Ubuntu 8.04+ (i386): gens_2.16.7_i386.deb
• Win32 (i386): gens-gs-r7-win32-pkg1.zip

This post has been edited by GerbilSoft: 16 January 2010 - 05:55 PM
Reason for edit: Win32 packaging update.

[MainMemory]

Awesome! Finally an emulator that matches S&KC's color mapping. I'm glad I brought it up.

[Overlord]

Ta very much, just updated my eee. Finally got my fucking wifi access point to behave this afternoon =P

[Spanner]

Great work, GerbilSoft!
Also, regardless if the manual is finished or not I got this, which really should be fixed to point to the doc\manual folder.

[GerbilSoft]

Great work, GerbilSoft!
Also, regardless if the manual is finished or not I got this, which really should be fixed to point to the doc\manual folder.

Bah, I had it hard-coded to manual\index.html instead of doc\manual\index.html. For now, you can just move it out of the doc\ directory.

[GerbilSoft]

Here's a preview of one of the new features coming in Gens/GS r7.1.



The Windows version now supports Unicode. I'm implementing it using a custom translation layer that allows the same executable to be used on UTF-16 (Windows NT) and ANSI (Windows 9x) systems. Internally, the program keeps all strings in UTF-8. (The Linux version already supports Unicode, since Linux uses UTF-8.)

What has been ported to Unicode:
- Internal Windows: 90%. (9 out of 10 windows)
- Common dialogs: 100%. (Open, Save, etc.)
- fopen(): 100%. (This includes SegaCD firmware and ISO/MP3 support.)
- GZip decompressor: 100%
- LZMA SDK / 7z decompressor: 100%
- ZIP decompressor: Archive filenames cannot be Unicode; filenames inside archives can.
- RAR decompressor: Archive filenames cannot be Unicode; filenames inside archives have Unicode characters converted to "?", so there can be conflicts.
- Shift-JIS ROM title decoding: 100%

What hasn't been ported to Unicode yet:
- Controller Confiuration window.
- All plugins. (Only those with GUIs need to be ported.)
- gens_popen() (Used by the RAR decompressor.)

Incidentally, the Shift-JIS ROM title decoder is already available in the Linux version of Gens/GS, since the Linux version uses UTF-8; however, it has a bug that may result in the decoded title not being null-terminated, which can lead to garbage showing up in the title bar. Here's the fix. (source code patch)

EDIT: No, Gens/GS does not emulate the Mega Anser hardware. The ROM will show the title screen and run a demo if the extra hardware isn't detected. I used the Mega Anser ROM because it has a Shift-JIS ROM title.

This post has been edited by GerbilSoft: 27 November 2009 - 02:57 AM
Reason for edit: No Mega Anser hardware support for you.

[Overlord]

Nice stuff to see for those .jp titles.

[GerbilSoft]

I've finished adding Unicode support for RAR archives. Unfortunately, rar.exe doesn't support Unicode filenames properly, so I had to rewrite it to use UnRAR.dll instead. It's no big loss, though. I will include UnRAR.dll in future releases of Gens/GS.

The Linux version still uses the Linux `rar` program, since the Linux version supports UTF-8 correctly.

[Vague Rant]

Superficial though it may be (is), this colour scaling mode is the clincher for me, making Gens/GS my full-time Gen/MD emulator. It looks great, and feels to me the most accurate. Being quite lazy, I also appreciate the Debian packages.

Also, I'm aware that you have plans for SMS/GG emulation at some point, but was more curious about Pico support. Just out of interest I've tried booting a few Pico images and they seem to run pretty well (minus the stylus support); is this something deliberate on your part, or just the result of the similarity between Pico and Gen/MD allowing the games to run as Genesis images? Either way, do you have plans to further Pico support?

[GerbilSoft]

Also, I'm aware that you have plans for SMS/GG emulation at some point, but was more curious about Pico support. Just out of interest I've tried booting a few Pico images and they seem to run pretty well (minus the stylus support); is this something deliberate on your part, or just the result of the similarity between Pico and Gen/MD allowing the games to run as Genesis images? Either way, do you have plans to further Pico support?

The Pico is essentially a Genesis with custom input hardware. I may add more Pico support later on, but it isn't a high priority right now.

[SegaLoco]

Well, I noticed this a while back, but I think it has worsened. If you uncheck stereo on audio, on linux it locks up gnome altogether, and I haven't tried it on Windows.

[Tets]

I forgot to report something similar happened to me a few days ago. I don't remember exactly what I did, but I was fucking around with the sound settings and everything came to a stop. I was able to switch to another terminal but was unable to kill Gens from there. I wasn't sure what else I could do, so I just shut down from the terminal. At that point I decided I was done with my computer for the night and completely forgot about it until now.

I'll try to reproduce the bug later tonight, thought I'm not sure what more I can add.

[SegaLoco]

By another terminal, do you mean a window or one of the CTRL+ALT+Fx terminals. With me all of GNOME locked up, and I had to /etc/init.d/gdm restart to fix.

[GerbilSoft]

Mono audio is broken in Gens/GS Linux. I'm not sure why. I tried debugging it, but everything I did resulted in failure. Maybe I should just permanently enable Stereo on the Linux version. (The same thing happened in the old Gens/Linux.)

Tets: You probably unchecked the Stereo option, leading to the above shenanigans.

[Tweaker]

I forgot to report something similar happened to me a few days ago. I don't remember exactly what I did, but I was fucking around with the sound settings and everything came to a stop. I was able to switch to another terminal but was unable to kill Gens from there. I wasn't sure what else I could do, so I just shut down from the terminal. At that point I decided I was done with my computer for the night and completely forgot about it until now.

I'll try to reproduce the bug later tonight, thought I'm not sure what more I can add.

I just wanted to chime in—this just happened to me a few minutes ago as well. It sort of turns gray and then everything becomes unresponsive, right? Apparently it has something to do with PulseAudio, but I have no idea.