mii_emu/CHANGELOG.md

MII Version Changelog

1.9

Video

• Video driver now only draw when the apple II video really changes. It keeps track of touched lines across the screen, and only updates when needed. This saves a considerable amount of CPU time.

• Redid the monochrome video rendering, low-res, double low-res and dhires now have luminance based on the color, and not just a fixed value. This makes the monochrome rendering a lot more accurate (and attractive).

• Added 2 other RGB color palettes, an alternate NTSC and the Mega2 (apple IIgs) one.

NTSC Palette	Mega2 Palette
--------------------------------------	--------------------------------------

• Added AVX/SSE/generic vectorial versions of some code paths, for speed.
• Added some more 'artifacts' color frindges to the HIRES rendering as well.

Other bits

• Fixed a bug in the floppy stepper motor code that was preventing some floppies (demos, but also some prodos disks) from booting.
• Reworked the SmartPort code a bit, should be more compatible with some prodos programs. Also fixed a crash in block reading code.
• Joystick can now be plugged after starting the emulator, it will be detected.
• Changed the way the 65c02 core emulator is interfaced to the rest of the emulation. It was made to be 'pretty' but was also quite suboptimal, so I made it a bit less pretty, but it is now easily twice as fast as before.
• While before the emulator was using perhaps 25% of a core on my current machine, now it uses about 9% CPU for the same task.
• The 'floppy' and 'hard drive' file selector dialog now has a small popup menu with the last few directory used, so you can quickly switch between them.
• Added support for 'pasting' text in the emulator. Paste your pet BASIC programs, it works now. (Control-SHIFT-V -- not in a menu yet).
• There is a non-functional Mockingboard driver in the code, it's not hooked up to the UI, it still needs work (mostly make the audio output work).
• UI library got a massive overhaul, since it was released separately it had to get a serious cleanup. Some files are duplicated unfortunately, but that is needed to be able to use it as a standalone library.

1.8

• Changed the floppy disk view. It now rotates, and the heat map is now a 'trail' of the head, showing where it's been. It looks awesome!

Poor quality gif, It is a LOT smoother at 60fps in the program!

• Added support for a Ramworks III card, with 1MB of RAM. It could have more, but I thought and extra whole friggin MEGABYTE was enough for anyone.
• Added support for flashing text in text mode. I know, it was a bit of a glaring omission, but it's there now.
• Internal changes to the UI, I've split the whole codebase into a few more files, split the 'XORG/GLX' code from the 'Pure GL' code from the 'MII UI' code, so it should be a lot easier to port to other platforms.
• Redid the DHRES rendering, it's now a lot more accurate, has the correct artifacts. It's not as optimized as the previous version, but it looks better.
• Now remap the joystick coodinates to a 'square' -- my current 8bitdo joystick has a circular deadzone, and it was a bit annoying to use. I might make that a setting, but for now, it's hardwired.
• Emulator now passes a2audit. There is only one kludge to do it, regarding the 'phantom read' of the indirect addressing.
• Working Super Serial Card Driver, it can bridge to a Linux /dev device for the moment, or to a 'fake' loopback device. IN#x and PR#x works, and I can bootstrap using ADTPro. It's all in there so I can run Mastodon!

Super Serial Card config dialog

libmui

• Standard file picker now shows floppy icons.
• Added a Color Apple Menu, in pure Macintosh II style.

• Fixed a few minor memory leaks.
• Tons more stuff in libmui, inc new font styles (bold, underline, condensed). There is also a text edit control now (still prototype).

Internals

• Made an architecture document, see Compiling for a top-down view.
• Ported the support for VCD (Value Change Dump) from simavr, so I can now record and playback the whole simulation of the floppy driver. No real use for the user.
• Split the video rendering into bits with a 'main' line rendering function pointer that is set only when video mode changes. This is a bit faster, and that gets rid of the Giant Function.

1.7

• New animated about box, because, everyone loves a good about box.
• Added support for Write Protect of floppy disks; disk can be write protected manually, or if the file lacks write permissions, OR if the file format (NIB, DSK) doesn't support writes.
• New fancypants 'bit view' of the floppy are they are read/written, with a heat map to show where the head was last. Drive 1 appears left of the screen, drive 2 on the right. It fades out after the drive motor stops.

DOS 3.3 Disk 'bitstream view' on the left, the green trace shows what's just be read.

1.6

• Another big update, yanked the old DiskII driver, and replaced it with a homebrew one, low level, with native support for WOZ (1 & 2) files (read AND write!) as well as NIB and DSK (read only).
• This is big news, and MII can now boot all kind of copy protected disks, in fact I tried a few hundreds, and they all worked so far!
• There is currently no way to create a new disk, but you can use a tool like CiderPress to create them, and then use them in MII. Or just copy your DOS 3.3.woz file and reformat it!
• There were a few other minor changes, mostly added some timing measurement tooling, and a couple of (necessary for disk to work) tweaks to the emulator itself as it was not counting cycles correctly for a couple of instructions.
• The UI now has support for pure power-of-two textures, for really old OpenGL implementations, it is turned off by default, but could work with some old hardware. Also updated libmui to make it less linux-centric.
• Fixed some more color issues, mostly DHIRES.
• Added 'typeahead' for when you select files in the dialog, like on old Macs

1.5

• BIG update, loads of changes, fixes, improvements.
• New super UI, using home-made libmui, channeling both GS/OS and MacOS 7.x!
• New emulation fixes, way more accurate. Video redone, audio redone.
• New front-end program using XLib and OpenGL 'low level'.
• New Icon.

1.0

• Fixed a few graphics rendering bugs/color swapped
• Fixed a few Makefile issues involving pathnamed with 'spaces' in them.
• More tweaks to the emulation, added a few cycles here and there.

0.9

• Added a 'debugger' shell, accessible via telnet.
• Added a mini-assembler, used to compile the drivers and the CPU unit tests.
• Added a 'Titan Accelerator IIe' simulation, to turn on/off fast mode.

0.5

• Initial release