Gens/GS Release 7

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: <a href="http://gs_server.gerbilsoft.ddns.info/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gens.git;a=blob;f=NEWS.txt;hb=release-7" target="_blank">http://gs_server.gerbilsoft.ddns.info/cgi-...xt;hb=release-7</a>

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

 

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.

 

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. <a href="http://gs_server.gerbilsoft.ddns.info/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gens.git;a=commitdiff;h=8d02f280c5607cba80e05b3a5e6d1d0356a11c91;hp=9490a30cbfc4f4b959d2dc01f5f6fb723d6eec96" target="_blank">Here's the fix. (source code patch)</a>

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Technically no, since UnRAR.dll could be replaced with an open-source version that uses the same interface. (It's runtime linked, not compile-time linked.) Using the rar binary on Linux is also okay, since that doesn't link anything at all. :P

With regards to Starscream, it will be replaced in an upcoming version.

For the PulseAudio issues, I'm going to set up an Ubuntu 9.10 installation on another system I have to try and debug it. PulseAudio in general is annoying, but Gens/GS shouldn't lock up the whole system if there's a problem.

In other news, Unicode support for Win32 is essentially done. I've merged the win32-unicode branch to master.