Sunday, November 8, 2009

Beta licensing

Today I finished up the licensing implementation for the upcoming v0.5.3 beta releases.

Each beta release will contain a single CD-i Emulator executable; it will act as a limited edition unless you have already activated an unlimited edition v0.5.2 on your machine or (at least for the initial releases) you're using a Mono-I player system ROM (BIOS).

The former exception has two purposes: it delivers the promised free compatibility updates to my existing customers, and it should encourage new customers as well (several people have promised to buy CD-i Emulator as soon as keyboard support was working).

The latter exception is mainly intended to allow for full compatibility tests against the MESS CD-i driver; I haven't decided yet for how long this will be maintained.

It will not be possible to directly activate beta releases, for that you will need an unlimited v0.5.2 edition (which will remain available). However, when the beta cycle is over, I will do a full unlimited release that can be activated directly (for paying customers only, of course).

After that I fixed a few bugs, including an outright crash that turned out to be caused by a small array misdeclaration in the signal tracking code (used only when you turn on Traps tracing using the debugger "et trp" command, but I often do this when tracking some bug). I had been looking for this for ages, but today it finally "clicked" that the crash only happened (sometimes) while tracing.

Also slightly extended the input record/playback functionality; the recording now includes the CD-i player model and title and the disc image being emulated. Next step is to automatically select these on playback and to account for a few options such as -playcdi that significantly impact the input.

Need to add input dump support to cdifile sometime...

Created a new title screen; this is a complex exercise as the screen is actually using a CLUT7 overlay over a DYUV background. When I get proper CD-i IFF support finished (also needed for save states) I will allow the title screen to be loaded from an external file, possibly customized per player model and/or CD-i title. Not for the first beta.

Proper CD-i IFF support would also allow a frame to be saved in about 250K (actual CD-i data including DCP) instead of the 1.2 MB for a full RGB dump. This would potentially make movie file generation faster, and it would allow offline inspection of video data and control information (useful to catch bugs).

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