[MULTI] Bsnes HD beta 7

Top Gear 2 (1993, Kemco). 16:9

Bsnes HD Beta 7

• auto detection for perspective correction. Quite primitive implementation, but worked out surprisingly well. Covers "Super Castlevania IV" (tube), "Terranigma" (underworld) and "Final Fantasy III" (credits), but not the "Mohawk & Headphone Jack" title screen (levels are fine). If you find other other false positives or negatives, please try all 3 widths (see below) and report back here, thanks.
• HD Mode 7 with priorities that make some pixels foreground now is properly composited in HD resolution (was erroneously done at 1x resolution, causing artifacts in "Mohawk & Headphone Jack", thanks G-F-D for finding that one).
• perspective correction width setting. "narrow" fixes black flicker in "Tales of Phantasia" Mode 7. Use "wide" when there is no issue.
• settings to avoid black bars at the widescreen edges (e.g. "Top Gear 2") or top/bottom (e.g. top of "Super Mario Kart").
• more settings for "ignore window", allowing more widescreen e.g. in "Final Fantasy III" (no good results) and ability to disable some shadows or similar effects (for use with layer disable feature below, e.g. for "F-Zero").
• option to disable background layers and sprites, e.g. for screenshots for wallpapers (also see "ignore window") (thanks jprjr)
• soft crop option to allow certain sides of the image to overflow the screen, so other can be larger
• compile fixes (thanks to IamRifki for the report and the macOS binary for the last beta)
• some minor restructuring of the settings dialog
• first version of a readme. Not much at all, but I try. I'm just really lazy when it comes to prose. Feel free to post corrections or extensions.

Wings 2: Aces High (1992, Namco)

bsnes v112 r10 2019-10-17

• Update: beta version 111.10 is up to address an issue with deterministic states on Windows. If you had bad luck trying run-ahead before, it should work now.

bsnes v112 r9 2019-10-15

• I've posted a new beta build of bsnes, version 111.9, which adds run-ahead emulation. Run-ahead is a technique to remove internal processing delay frames from games, resulting in the perception of reduced input latency.

Bsnes HD Beta 9

• Smooth (true color, high resolution) gradients for color math from fixed color, e.g. for pseudo perspectives
• True color processing for all color operations
• Fixed crashes on combined high scale and widescreen settings
• HD and super sampling scale up to 10x (4K+)
• preview: Smooth (high resolution) Window effects, like shadows or spells (top and bottom edges have issues)

Super Mario Kart (1992,Nintendo)

Bsnes HD Beta 8

• option to disable widescreen for non-Mode 7 scenes (default now), fixing menus and widescreen-incompatible 2D levels with no setting switching during gameplay. The widescreen areas in that case can either be black or adopt the background color.
• simple auto widescreen settings for backgrounds, based on size and position(s) of the background, works e.g. for the HUD in "F-Zero" or the title screen box in "Super Mario Kart".
• new Mosaic mode for HD Mode 7, using 1x scale, providing a good compromise between SD Mode 7 and no Mosaic at all, and also allowing widescreen, e.g. for the "Terranigma" underworld.
• optional markers for the widescreen areas, in the form of lines or darkening at configurable translucency. Also sprites can now be clipped at the edges of the widescreen areas.
• soft crop setting changes are now applied immediately.
• some settings changed type and/or got new defaults. Using the empty configuration files from the release zip or deleting the config files from the user directory is recommended.
• bsneshd-dev at Emulator Nexus Discord: https://discord.gg/3bVaNcK (not just for developers, feel free to post suggestions, issues, game specific settings, recommended games, broken games, videos, screenshots, ...)

Bsnes HD Beta 6

New features:

• Super sampling can now be combined with higher scale factors as a sort of anti-aliasing. Please remember that the CPU load is the product of the two factors.
• HD Mode 7 can now be set to 1x scaling aka original resolution, with any combination of perspective correction, widescreen and supersampling.
• Added setting to ignore outside window, allowing for widescreen in Terranigma and Final Fantasy III/VI. Please test any other games that had no widescreen for no obvious reason in the previous beta.
• Fixed crash when high resolution backgrounds met widescreen, incl. Donkey Kong Country, Secret of Mana and hopefully all others that crashed.
• Fixed interlacing-like looking artifacts during during fade to black transitions in various games.
• Tweaked some default settings and setting value names.
• Tweaked widescreen resolutions. In addition to some ARs (incl. 4:3) there is "HDcrop" which is intended to be used with a scale factor of 5x and "Output:Center" in fullscreen. On 1080p 16:9 monitors this will result in native resolution output, at the cost of 4 line on the top and on the bottoms, which does not break any known game.

Known issues:

• Setting very high scale factors and a widescreen AR at the same time causes the emulator to terminate. The solution would be increasing the size of the arrays that store the pixels. That, however, causes lower frame rates at any settings. So I won't fix this, until I can do so without impacting performance for everyone. My lack of C++ experience makes this difficult. Maybe someone can help me out here.

Coming next:

• Auto detection for perspective correction. I wanted that to be done at least partially by now, but I underestimated that. So only unnoticeable groundwork for now. Diving into research for his next.

Bsnes HD Beta 5

• The project is now named « bsnes-hd », as « HD Mode 7 mod » was simply too long. Also I have moved beyond just Mode 7 and have plans for more. A repository will be available soon.
• Widescreen for non-Mode 7 backgrounds. Results of course vary between games and even scenes.
• To avoid HUDs repeating and other unwanted effects I have added settings to disable widescreen for the separate background layers and even just the top or bottom of a layer.
• The default is always « on » for all 4. Sample values for some games are:
  • « F-Zero »: BG3: « off »
  • « HyperZone »: BG2: « >80 »
• Sprites that are partially inside the non-widescreen area are now drawn entirely when possible.
• The new « unsafe sprites » settings allow sprites to enter widescreen areas further if the game keeps updating them. This will however cause significant artifacts in many games. If ROM-hackers want to discuss optimizing games for this, feel free to contact me.
• more widescreen aspect ratios (16:10, 21:9, …)

Pilot Wing w widescreen, z nowym filtrem gfx podbijającym ilość pikseli. Photo@project

Bsnes 107.3 HD Mode Beta 4

New in this version:

• Widescreen: Setting to expand Mode 7 backgrounds to the left and right for a 16:9 aspect ratio.
• Tweaked the behavior of Output/Center to drop the top and bottom 4 scanlines in 1080p fullscreen. This bumps the scaling form 4x to 5x and with widescreen allows native 1080p fullscreen Mode 7 with uniformly scaled sprites.
• Replaced magic numbers with preliminary detection for values at the edges that break perspective correction. Fixes Tales of Phantasia (and should not break Super Mario Kart).
• Disabled the automatic switching to non-scaled when there is no Mode 7 background, as it breaks with widescreen. [may also help with some shaders, IIRC someone asked for this]

Some of the previous improvements since beta 1:

• mine: fixed Contra III, Yoshi's Island, HyperZone (including perspective correction) and Terranigma (make sure disable perspective correction and optionally mosaic)
• byuus: higher scale factors [up to 9x instead of 4x], instant switching, supersampling setting

Future plans:

• Auto detect for perspective correction, so you don't have to manually switch it off for Castlevania, Terranigma and so on
• Allow supersampling and scaling at the same time, e.g. 4x resolution and each of those pixels averaged from 3x3 subpixels.
• Optimization. Getting a few more FPS. Or a step or 2 higher without dropping below playable rates.
• Fix interlacing at odd scale factors.
• Higher color depth ('normal' 8 bits per RGB component instead of the SNESs 5 [256 values instead of 32, 16,777,216 colors instead of 32,768]). Should allow for:
  • better supersampling results
  • slightly improved blending in general
  • Allowing a new HD feature to smooth the blended colors that help with the illusion of depth [I'm so looking forward to this. Those gradients only changing every few scanlines clashes strongly with the HD background.]

Capitan Commando (Capcom U.S.A., Inc., 1995)

bsnes v106r44 beta 2018-06-27

I'm releasing a beta version of bsnes, for the purpose of gathering feedback and ensuring that the first official release of bsnes is as solid as possible.

With the exception of dynamic rate control for automatic audio/video sync, and no pack-in video shaders or cheat code database, it is mostly feature complete. However, please do not form a lasting opinion of bsnes based on this beta.