It has been 2 years since our last stable release and today we (finally) bring you the newest stable release: 0.9.8! 馃槉 There has been a massive amount of extensive changes to the emulator as a whole, so let's go over some of the biggest ones!
Jake Stine (Air) has retired from PCSX2, after more than two years of vigorous work on the emulator.
Work on 0.9.7 is in progress and with very promising results some of the changes are making it into the 0.9.6 build which is probably going to be the last for this version.
The coding team and staff of PCSX2 wish you a Happy New Year, filled with happiness, health and new hardware!馃槢
Some forum members had shown quite an interest in the history of the emulator, so i thought, why not? I'll write a history of the emulator to the best of my knowledge for everybody to look at! Hopefully those who have been here longer (like bositman) can fill you in a bit more on what happened. My apologies for any inaccuracies, I didn't join the team until version 0.8.0 (January 2005)! So, here goes.....
I finally got around updating the now (huge) configuration guide for the new beta version of PCSX2 v0.9.7! You can read it here.
As most people probably know, PCSX2 is primarily a dual-thread application. The two main threads are described as such:
Hey people, today we make the second 0.9.7 beta release available: PCSX2 0.9.7 (r3878)!
Over the past two years I have become dearly intimate with Microsoft's Visual C++ 2008 compiler, and the methods it uses for optimizing code. Now generally speaking MSVC 2008 does well -- very well -- especially for everyday "not-so-clever" code. Its global optimization feature (aka Linktime Code Generation, or LTCG) is also a tremendous advantage over GCC -- though GCC is in the process of (finally!) adding LTCG to their own C/C++ compiler. MSVC does have a few very annoying failings as an optimizer, though. The most glaring of which has to do with templated code and inlined functions .
For those who don't know, DMA stands for Direct Memory Access , and it refers to logic circuits in a computer that allow for the automated transfer of system memory to and from peripherals . DMAs are beneficial because they are simple circuits that do work in parallel to the CPU -- while a DMA transfers data, the CPU is free to do other work.that requires more complex computations and logic. The end result is better utilization of the computer's maximum memory transfer bandwidth and computational/logical ability.