Progress update & (rough) road map
In the past weeks, amongst a number of smaller feature requests, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about SuperFX progress. I’ve even seen rumors spread about SuperFX support being cancelled. This is not the case.
SuperFX is the most complex core to implement to date, and it even took me several months to complete Cx4 support. That was before the public release of sd2snes, however, so less people noticed. Rest assured that SuperFX support is still in progress. It will take at least the rest of this year though.
To me, having existing features working properly takes priority. That’s why I’m addressing reported bugs and also minor feature requests which have been in the queue for quite long in parallel to working on SuperFX. I expect there to be 1-2 more releases before SuperFX support is introduced in v0.2.0, not counting critical bug fixes should need for them arise. Since people seem to get annoyed at my love for the Satellaview I’ll put off further work on that until after SuperFX. 😛
There will be a v0.1.5 release shortly, which supports large SRAM properly, fixes sorting of long directory entries, fixes a glitch in SPC playback with S-APU consoles, works properly with non-standard controllers plugged in (e.g. Super Scope), and has more faithful BS-X memory mapping (<- actually finished a couple of weeks ago).
v0.1.6 will probably introduce proper SuperCIC support (allowing to select 50/60Hz from the menu) and maybe rudimentary cheat code support (ROM patching only). Both might be delayed to v0.2.0.
Keep in mind that while I’m continuing work on SuperFX support it helps doing something else now and then. 😉
Thank you very much for the update, ikari! As interested by the Satellaview as I am, I’m definitely anticipating the SuperFX more. 🙂
Good to hear from you 🙂 Thanks for the post! On top of this everything, can I ask for some help? I’ve been trying to compile the firmware myself as I’m hopelessly impatient, but with no success. How old and which distro/kernel/gcc should I use and is the Xilinx ISE really needed? For example Insight does not compile on Ubuntu 10.04 and I had other major problems with 8.04 and older releases.
Both Ubuntu 10.04 and 8.04 seem a bit old for the task. You might have to adjust the software versions in the toolchain-cm3 Makefile to older ones.
Lately I’ve compiled successfully on Fedora 17 with gcc 4.7.2.
Due to a known compile error in gcc 4.6.2 when building with gcc 4.7 I changed the “gccfile” and “gcc” entries in the toolchain-cm3 Makefile from gcc-4.6.2 to gcc-4.6.3.
insight and gdb aren’t required so if you don’t need them you can remove them from the “all” target in the Makefile (or type ‘make gcc cmsis headers’).
Wow. That update almost feels like a direct reply to me. So much so that I gotta say I feel a bit quilty. (Thought maybe that´s just my illusion of grandeur lol)
What can I say. except a big THANK YOU for all the work you have do so far and for your continued work and support for this awesome product!
I love you <3 – Dont stress yourself to much.
I agree with other comments, we’re supporting YOUR work, so make it as you want.
And please don’t stress about requests, again your work is great and most of us are happy with it.
Thank you so much Ikari.
Rimaille
Still having trouble when trying to compile the firmware 🙁 I compiled the toolchain with gcc-4.4.5 (yeah, it’s old) and I was using gcc:= gcc-4.6.3 in the makefile, didn’t get any errors though during the build. Could it be this combination anyway that’s causing the following error when doing ‘make’ in sd2snes-develop/src? cli.c: In function ‘parse_wordlist’: cli.c:141:7: error: array subscript has type ‘char’ [-Werror=char-subscripts] cli.c:141:7: error: array subscript has type ‘char’ [-Werror=char-subscripts] cc1: all warnings being treated as errors make: *** [obj/cli.o] Error 1 I tried to use the contact form but it was complaining about illegal characters and injection… Read more »
Looking good! I just got my SD2SNES early last week and been using it with Firmware v0.1.4a, and I’ve been extremely impressed with it. It works great and I’ve yet to run into any kind of bugs, and I very much enjoy playing Front Mission: Gun Hazard and Seiken Densetsu III in English on an actual console. I look forward to SuperFX and better Satellaview support, and have my fingers crossed for possibly having SA1 support in the long term :p. But yeah, work on the features you want to work on and don’t burn yourself out.
Looking at GITHUB, it appears it isn’t updated with in-progress code. Is there a online repository with the in-progress SuperFX work or do you not check in until you’re ready for release?