WinUAE 4.9.0 beta series (Was 4.5.0)

[White]

@Toni
I realized that after the versions of winuae with voodoo support came out even if I deactivated for example the screensaver in the 4.1 system after a while I do not use the system the screen of the workbench turns black is normal with the previous versions before the voodoo this never happened
Is it normal for this to happen?

if I move the mouse, the workbench screen reappears as if the screen saver had been activated

Thank you .

[DamienD]

@Toni; no pressure or great rush.

Do you have a rough ETA when 4.5.0 final will be released?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by hexaae

Ok, it's hard to explain a step by step repro path... I'll try to make a video or finally report detailed instructions.
I've noticed this once I tried to add as 2nd remap list for port2=Joystick (attached my Hori Fighting Stick Mini) some buttons to P, Space, Return for some games... Once I returned in game they didn't work, or WinUAE forgot some others secondary remapped assigned keys I had previously set etc. then I noticed those apparently disappeared remaps did show up again in the GUI after I scrolled up/dow etc. a mess to explain

It does not need to be 100% reproduciable, just as simple as possible sequence that can trigger it.

Originally Posted by White

@Toni
I realized that after the versions of winuae with voodoo support came out even if I deactivated for example the screensaver in the 4.1 system after a while I do not use the system the screen of the workbench turns black is normal with the previous versions before the voodoo this never happened
Is it normal for this to happen?

if I move the mouse, the workbench screen reappears as if the screen saver had been activated

As I have said repeatedly: I don't know or care what OS 4.1 does.

Originally Posted by DamienD

@Toni; no pressure or great rush.

Do you have a rough ETA when 4.5.0 final will be released?

Hopefully before summer but you never know..

[hexaae]

@Toni
Preliminary test (besides the other GUI glitches I've reproduced...):
Use this remapped input devices config https://gofile.io/d/bCffmy (some additional functions for the extra USB joystick buttons remapped to P, Space, Return, Ctrl...).

I use to start WinUAE with Hori Fighting Stick Mini plugged-in (Port2=Hori (Joystick mode))... play some WHDLoad game and then from Workbench I unplug the joystick and switch Game Port: Port2=Xbox controller (CD32 pad mode), play a game supporting CD32 pad like recent WHD installer for Barbarian II (Psygnosis).
Then I quit back to WB and switch again to joystick turning off XBox controller, and plugging in joystick before I switch to Port2=Hori (Joystick mode)...
Usually, at this point extra buttons assigns (P, Space, etc. mentioned at the beginning for the extra joystick buttons) are still listed from GUI but NOT WORKING.
To make them work again I have to RE-OPEN the GUI go to Input settings and just press OK to go back to emulation...

In brief strange things happens when I switch controller and settings from Game Ports. Sometimes WinUAE also totally resets my extra joystick button config after I switched back to it from XBox controller (CD32 mode).

Hope it's clear enough. If you can't reproduce it I'll try to do a repro-steps video.

[Toni Wilen]

Another status report:

Display emulation rewrite is mostly done. Lots of testing to do (all my test statefiles must still work before official beta!).

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Another status report:

Display emulation rewrite is mostly done. Lots of testing to do (all my test statefiles must still work before official beta!).

Nice one Toni

I'm sure you haven't forgotten, but there were slight audio pops / noises in the betas that are not present in v4.4.0.

[falken]

good news!

[Toni Wilen]

Status:

Bitplane and copper emulation rewrite mostly complete. Almost all test cases work.

TODO: pipelined sprite emulation. "Fast mode" support (optimized routine when there is not copper activity in scanline).

[falken]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Status:

Bitplane and copper emulation rewrite mostly complete. Almost all test cases work.

TODO: pipelined sprite emulation. "Fast mode" support (optimized routine when there is not copper activity in scanline).

Are these changes going to have any impact on the overall performance of WinUAE?

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by falken

Are these changes going to have any impact on the overall performance of WinUAE?

At least at first: much more CPU power required. Later: chipset heavy programs (=demos) might require slightly more CPU power but otherwise differences should be small enough. At least I hope.

RTG mode active: no difference.

[Toni Wilen]

Rewrite complete. Also part of optimizations re-implemented (This is more annoying than actual rewrite..)

winuae.7z has started updating again but I recommend not using it yet. Any unofficial beta related posts will be ignored (and probably deleted).

[Mclane]

Thank you for the rewrite and all the work, it's clearly not fun but we do appreciate it...

[Toni Wilen]

Only few known issues left to fix. Plan is to have next beta this weekend.

[falken]

Awesome

[malko]

Thank you Mr Wilen !

[AZka]

I am excited

[nivam]

Awesome

[Zarnal]

@Toni

With these schematics, have you discovered new interesting things that were unknown until now (except blitter active logic) ?

[Toni Wilen]

https://download.abime.net/winuae/fi...uae_4900b18.7z

WARNING: don't use it you aren't sure, this is "more beta" than usually.
32-bit only. Better only have single version until things stabilize.

Beta 18: Version bumped to 4.9. (Which will become 5.0 later this year. Probably. New chipset and Voodoo 3 emulation are big enough features.)

Display emulation rewrite. Bitplane sequencer, copper (mostly) and internal pipelining is rewritten to match schematics.

NOTES:
- Performance is slower when running custom chipset heavy programs. Will be improved later.
- There should be no visible differences when running "normal" programs.
- Horizontal positions shown by debugger are now shifted by 4 cycles compared to previous versions. Old versions basically used wrong origin (based on DDFSTRT immediately starting BPL DMA which was not correct). I'll write more detailed notes about internal Agnus logic later.
- Programmed mode (BEAMCON0 and friends) rewrite is still work in progress, some glitches might be visible.
- D3D9 shaders are not currently supported in D3D11 mode.

What to check:

- Old bug(s) reappearing (hack removed but missing edge case wasn't reimplemented properly)
- Other bugs.
- Really bad performance. (But buy a new PC if you have something like pre-Sandy Bridge era CPU). New emulation is more complex but also some previous "lazy evaluation" optimizations might not be fully working.

- Bitplane logic internal pipeline is accurately emulated (DDFSTRT/limit check, BPRUN latch, sequencer output, RGA output latch = 4 cycle delay from DDFSTRT decision to first possible BPLxDAT slot). All known side-effects can be easily explained now. For example bitplane/copper/sprite DMA on/off mid scanline is now fully accurate (including all side-effects) with explanation that actually makes sense.
- Copper free cycle check uses pipelined bitplane allocation, copper decisions are done early (2 cycles).
- Display rendering part of emulation is now from hsync to hsync. Was previously scanline to scanline which required extra hacks to support displaying early horizontal positions in right border. All of that simply work automatically now.
- Bitplane DMA "overrun" condition special cases removed, it isn't needed anymore to handle overrun correctly. Lots of other similar hacks also become obsolete and are gone.
- Bitplane overrun new undocumented "feature": because BPL sequencer uses horizontal counter bit 0 as a clock signal, HPOS 226 to 0 transition does not increment BPL sequencer counter: same BPL cycle gets repeated.
- Lots of special case BEAMCON0 blanking/sync improvements. (Thanks Ross )
- HBSTRT/HBSTOP now supports AGA-only 140ns/70ns/35ns resolution bits.
- BPLCON3 EXTBLKEN didn't affect blanking timing if it was changed after BEAMCON0 was written to enable programmable blanking.
- Sprite emulation is now also pipelined but because most of sprite decision logic is in "STCMSD" black box, exact behavior is still not 100% known. No non-working programs known.
- DMA debugger now shows DMA cycle conflicts, top/left contains string "!<register number that conflicts>" if conflict.
- Programmed display mode vblank timing calculation fixed (usually was less than 1Hz off), also correctly uses NTSC base clock if NTSC hardware.
- Copper debugger (od) now stores also copper jumps and copper disassembler follows jumps automatically (if not after SKIP). o3 = start from vblank (COP1LC value when vblank started).
- Loading statefiles created with 4.4 or older and blitter was active when statefile was created: loading statefile corrupted memory. Old-style blitter active statefiles are not supported: blitter is restored in stopped state. I haven't yet decided if support gets re-implemented.

- Prometheus PCI config word wide access byteswap fix. Fixes Prometheus Voodoo 3 Picasso96 driver hang. Note that 8-bit has graphics corruption, driver is buggy and has off by one error when it tries render fonts (extra line of garbage) and when rendering icons (and probably other image elements), it sets host-to-screen blit height to 1 but actually keeps writing multiple lines worth of data to blitter's CPU data input register. It seems real Voodoo 3 blits all extra lines and drops the last line. Partial workaround implemented.
- Saving config file: Confirm overwrite (which is actually rename as configuration.backup) if it is read-only.
- Softfloat FMOD, FREM update. FSINCOS implemented, calculates both SIN and COS simultaneously, previously FSINCOS called SIN and COS separately. (Andreas Grabher)
- uaeserial.device CMD_WRITE with io_Length=-1 is now supported. Sends data until first zero byte.
- uaeserial.device EOFMODE support implemented.
- uaeserial.device io_ExtFlags Mark and Space parity support implemented.
- American Laser Games Platoon and Space Pirates v1.4 descrambling support added.
- Add quotes to serial, parallel and MIDI port names in config file if they begins or ends with a space. Also escape if name contains quotes.

[Viceroy]

Thank you Toni ;-)