DarcNES: Valiantly resisting the light.

Newer news...

1999 March 14:
A new release.
Changed 6280 block move instructions to save/restore X, Y, and A regs.
Fixed GameGear palette emulation (PS Gaiden looks much better).
Fixed missing include in ui_allegro.c.
Fixed PCE sprites to not dump core in certain cases.
Added PCE horizontal-reversed sprites.
Fixed PCE virtual background map.
Fixed PCE sprite display order.

1999 March 5:
A new release.
Fixed bug with debug command parsing (not that anyone will notice).
Added BSR instruction to 6280 disassembly tables.
Disabled WAI and STP in the 6280 core (they shouldn't be too important).
Fixed bug in pce_init_mmap() (now a lot more games fondly imagine that they work).
Added PCE horizontal resolution control.
Increased the XWindows default window size by a "whole bunch of lot" as a workaround for a problem with changing the game resolution on the fly.

1999 Feb 22:
A new release.
Fixed bug introduced in dn990110 involving SMS paging regs. Shinobi works again.
Fixed bug in m6502.c that prevented the battletoads games from working.

1999 Feb 21:
Added PCE fine horizontal scrolling (the starwave demo looks even better).
Added preliminary vertical scrolling (Double Dungeons intro looks better).
Moved blitters from machine code in a .c file to asm code in a .S file (don't ask).

1999 Feb 20:
A new release.
Worked on FDS emulation all week. It still doesn't work.
Doubled PCE CPU speed (I still don't have the correct speed).
Added preliminary PCE raster counter.
Fixed PCE background tile address mask.
Added preliminary PCE course horizontal scrolling (the starwave demo from the MagicKit assembler package looks better).
Added size checks to sms/gg detection (now small rom files don't crash the emulator as easily).
Added some hooks in the NES I/O emulation (this will allow emulation of mappers that use the $4018-$7fff range).
Stating what should be obvious: If you want email when a new version of DarcNES is released, send email to majordomo@dridus.com with the line "subsrcribe darcnes-announce <your email address>" in the body of the message.

1999 Feb 14:
A new release.
Moved NES memory and I/O emulation from asm to C.
Started looking at FDS emulation.
Squashed some warnings (thanks to Michael Vance).
Added XShm support to the XWindows driver (thanks to Michael Vance).
Added GTK UI for XWindows (thanks to Michael Vance) (I have been unable to test this).
DarcNES now has mailing lists! (darcnes-announce and darcnes-devel, both via majordomo@dridus.com. thanks to Dridus).

1999 Feb 13:
A new release.
Fixed XWindows version to accept a filename from the command line.
Documentation updated.
Added error checking to the nes battery file code (thanks to Michael Vance).
Added support for the keypad arrow keys in XWindows (thanks to Jussi Lindgren for pointing this out).
Moved news and version from before febuary to the <a href="oldnews.html">old news page</a>.

1999 Feb 7:
Started adding support for different game resolutions.
Moved control of keyboard update frequency from the game drivers to the video/ui code.
Fixed pce vdp virtual background size logic.
Cleaned up pce vram write address increment.
Started making pce sprites do spritely things.

1999 Feb 2:
A new release.
Fixed some more bugs in the 65c02 core.
Added emulation of the first pce joypad.
Fixed pce joypad direction controls.
Added emulation of pce vram reads.
Added emulation of pce background map size.
Double Dungeons is almost playable.

1999 Feb 1:
Turned up a couple bugs in the 65c02 core that were only doing damage when the 6280 was working right.

1999 Jan 31:
A new release.
Some of the demos from the MagicKit assembler package now do graphics-type stuff.
I found a couple of bugs in the 6280 core that prevent the joypads from working. however, fixing them breaks the video stuff. I will hopefully have this sorted out soon, but I didn't want to delay the release much longer.
I am not making new binaries for this release (not much point, not enough working stuff has changed).

1999 Jan 30:
Fixed up some stuff in pce.c and pce_vdp.c. I may or may not have some demos running in a few days.
Added a new nes palette by Magnus Oman. I may be adding a way of switching palettes at runtime.

1999 Jan 27:
Disabled display of current nes ppu mirroring mode.
Expanded "address bus" to 32 bits.
Added some instructions to the 6280 core.

1999 Jan 24:
A new release.
Fixed the SMB3 status bar (this is the first fix I have tried that passed my complete regression test suite).
Fixed a problem with the (previously unused) blit_4_8_czt family of blitters in blitters.c.
Fixed the right-side scrolling problem on the SMS/GG.
Changed the SMS/GG to use the newer blitters for the sprites.
Changed the documentation somewhat.
Changed the memory allocation in cal.c to use calloc() instead of malloc() (hopefully this fixed the DOS runtime problems).

1999 Jan 23:
Fixed some broken HTML and added a changes entry for the dn990121 release.

1999 Jan 21:
A new release.
Did some work toward PC-Engine emulation. I expect that this will be much slower to come about than the SMS emulation was.
Fixed some compile errors when disabling sound in nes_psg.c.
Undid the changes of 19990110 to mapper 4 (I wouldn't have made them if I had done proper regression testing).
Added SVGALib support (all of the hard work done by Toby Deshane).
SVGALib version also has gzipped rom support (battery file goes to "/tmp/darc..sav"), and an additional set of keys (ctrl, alt, tab, enter), again code from Toby Deshane.
Started cleaning up some of the nes ppu stuff.

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