One problem that has plagued PCSX2 since as long as most anyone can remember is it's general inflexibility and instability when flipping between windowed and fullscreen modes. This was something we really sought to address as we re-write the user interface in 0.9.7.
It's that time of the year again, so i had some time to work on pcsx2/mac, now with nice sound as well. 馃槈 This update is about solving the missing textures problem that has been plaguing pcsx2/mac for ages.
Wondering about who's watching as we make and break bleeding edge alpha/beta versions of PCSX2? I do! Here's a map representing the visits to our SVN repository at Googlecode, for the past 2 weeks.
One thing is for sure: The new 0.9.7 betas will use a lot more threads than the current 0.9.6 releases. Now this doesn't necessarily mean the emulator will take advantage of quad core CPUs better than 0.9.6, least not in a gameplay sense. As I explained in my previous blog, threading is as much a function of improving responsiveness and recoverability as it is about sharing a workload across multi-core cpus, and so far most of the threading implemented into 0.9.7 is the scalable/responsive sort.
It's the year 2009, and it's almost over at that; and as anyone reading this blog well knows, multithreaded applications are the here-and-now and future of desktop computing. It's the only way we can take advantage of multicore CPUs. But multithreaded programming offers more than just improved multicore performance. Using threaded programming is actually very important to developing software that behaves nicely . By that I mean software that refreshes its window contents quickly, responds to your mouse clicks, and lets you cancel stuff.
As of Sept 30th , we've re-enabled user comments at our SVN repository PCSX2 @ Googlecode.
From 0.9.5 onward PCSX2 has been a mostly open SVN revisioning process, where beta builds are SVN-marked and are widely built and distributed to users. 0.9.5 itself was never released as an official 'stable' build, and after the release of 0.9.6 we just called all subsequent SVN builds of PCSX2 "betas." (mostly because we were too lazy and/or busy to bother worrying of version numbers). This lackadaisical version pattern was a source of confusion for users and developers alike.
A lot is going on behind the scenes these days so without further ado here's our news:
This begins a series of blog posts intended for ps2 developers and ps2 emu authors. Its purpose is to give some light to some of the secrets I've learned about the VUs while developing my mVU recompilers, and to describe what happens in situations that are a bit questionable.
In pcsx2's advanced options dialog (if you've dared to look), you've might have noticed there's "FPU Clamp Mode" and "VU Clamp Mode" settings. You may even have experimented with some of these modes and found out they fix or break games. But what are they doing? And why so many options?