Wow! After 18 months of development the new 1.50 release is available! On first inspection, the graphics look better, the sound is fuller, and even more games have been fixed.
However, it's not all good news. To enable all the new features also means more grunt power required, which sadly, the good old GameCube has issues with - but hey - lots of games still play fullspeed!
Now on to the port. A lot of things have changes since 1.43, so much so, that 1.50 contains very little code from it's predecessor. This is good news in that I can incorporate a lot of new methods I've come across while doing other ports. For example, the rendering comes straight from Genesis Plus Project, so you may well be familiar with it already :)
This is a collection of development notes, which may help you out in some way
As usual, this is developed with devkitPPC and libOGC. You'll need the LWP patches, which are included in the latest CVS of libOGC. To maximise flexibility with the on screen fonts, I've used libfreetype 2.2.1 as the renderer. You can pretty much use any TrueType, Mac, PostScript or BDF font, in any size or orientation. WARNING The fonts in your Windows directory are copyright protected, so don't use them! Go to typenow for patent free public domain fonts.
I'll post a pre-compiled version of libfreetype for libOGC on tehskeen to get you up and compiling.
You will need zlib 1.2.3 to get zip file support
Ok, now on to the compilation ...
In short, no. For whatever reason, DevkitPPC likes to munch on this file for a while. Leave it compiling and all will be well.
Starting with this port, I've settled on a single interface for loading ROMs. Snes9x will expect any ROM to be found in ARAM:AR_SNESROM. This makes it much simpler to add file system support. The only downside is that we will only be able to 'append' ROMs up to 4 Mbytes in size, for those who don't use SD, DVD or Network ROM loading. The huge benefit is that the GC main RAM remains free for our use, and the intial 'non-appended' dol remains small enough to be used as is from a gc-linux boot disc
An appended ROM is simply copied from it's load point into ARAM when InitGCVideo is called.
For now, you can use the utility provided in source/pcutil.
As there only two supported SDD1 games, Star Ocean and Street Fighter Alpha, these are considered low priority. That doesn't mean that they won't be back in a future WIP.
Not with this WIP! - It is a high-priority for WIP2.
Not with this WIP! - It is a high-priority for WIP2.
Again not with this WIP! - It is a high-priority for WIP2.
If you wish to help getting a function included, please mail me softdev[at]tehskeen.com. Any assistance with SDCard, SMB etc would be appreciated.
If you are not a developer, but can help us with graphics, icons etc, again, mail me.
The format for controls has changed quite dramatically in Snes9x 1.50. You should be aware that Snes9x-GX 2.0 will NOT be backwards compatible.