Version 2.5 of blueMSX will be released globally 8.7 at 14:00 GMT ! The big launch event has been arranged today at the MSX Info Update 2006 party in Helsinki. Daniel Vik presents new features to all party visitors on video.

After almost 10 months since the previous release, the new version of blueMSX is a big update, full of very advanced features :

- The implementation of a new controllers and keyboard editor gives still more comfort to the gamers and will allow to support easily other computers or consoles in future versions.

- Requested since a long time by the MSX developers, the hard disk emulation is now a reality and besides the well-known Sunrise IDE hard disk controllers, blueMSX has also implemented the Beer IDE and GIDE supports.

- In the musical domain, blueMSX is the first emulator that is capable to support the Yamaha CX5M, CX5M-128 and CX7M-128 computers by emulation of the YM2151 sound chip and the YK-01, YK-10 and YK-20 music keyboards. The MIDI part of the Yamaha SFG cartridges is not yet available.


Which are the other changes ?

In the emulator :
- Added support for the MHT Ingenieros Gunstick and the ASCII Plus-X Terminator Laser
- Added support for two 80 columns graphics cards on MSX1 : Microsol VMX-80 and SVI-737 
- Added support for Video In, Sony HBI-V1 digitizer and the digitization part of the Philips NMS-8280 computer
- Added superimpose and external video source support in V9938 emulation
- Added support for PNG screenshots
- Added support for creating new disk images of various size on MSX and SVI-328
- Added support for undocumented screen mode (screen 0 with screen 2 style name table addressing)
- Added a new display synchronization method
- Added a video option to blend consecutive frames and get smoother picture
- Added support for the YM2149 PSG
- Fixed the MIDI-IN support in the Turbo-R machines
- Added new rom mappers for SFG-01 and SFG-05 (used in the Yamaha music computers), the F&M Direct Assembler System and the SG-1000 version of The Castle
- Improved SRAM enable/disable handling in FM-PAC
- Restructured Keyboard and Joystick input
- Optimized the video rendering
- Added support for running blueMSX from read only media
- Added support for running blueMSX without storing any data on local machine
- Fixed addressing in Konami mappers
- Fixed bug in 1kB ram mapper used in ColecoVision and SG-1000
- Border rendering is now cycle accurate
- Fixed HREFRESH timing in VDP
- Fixed bug in XVRAM emulation
- Fixed sprite status bug
- Fixed VDP timing in Turbo-R and MSX2+ machines

In the debugger :
- Added find dialog to search for strings or values in the memory
- Improved editing in memory window
- Added debugging support of OPL sound chips

In the trainer :
- Extended the cheat database to 396 MSX games

You can find this emulator here : http://www.bluemsx.com

You can find in CVS an alpha lite version for Linux, but there's no lite version for Windows.

There is indeed a blueMSXlite based on SDL/SDLgl in the CVS that compiles for actually both linux and windows. The lite version doesn't have any menus so all configuration needs to be done in the ini files or command line arguments.

Note though that at least on windows its quite a lot slower than the full version, mainly because openGL sucks big time when it comes to transfer big chunks of data from RAM to the video card. But I haven't tried to optimize it or use gl extensions but plain openGL was a big disappointment to me.

I've been testing the lasts experiments I've written and here are the results :



That's how they look by having enabled the blending of consecutive frames, I like it! . Btw, the last one is from the [WYZ] demo and it works flawlessly too! 

Now some comments...the skull demo doesn't sync well and some garbage appears in screen on MSX1 config. I can't recall correctly; but I think that I've tested it over OpenMSX, old BlueMSX and my real MSX1 (a bare one, only with external diskdrive) and always works without glitches. Last OpenMSX still shows the image correctly, BlueMSX don't, only does it right when running a MSX2 or higher configuration. I've tested this demo again some days ago on my MSX1, this time with a CF-IDE and it shows the same desync that in BlueMSX. So, let's see:

OpenMSX + MSX1 = OK
BlueMSX + MSX1 = NOK
MSX1 + CF-IDE = NOK (like BlueMSX)
MSX1 + diskdrive = OK? (must to test it again...)

From the results I can guess that one of the emus has some timing problem, isn't it?

Another anoying bug (or at least it seems so...). I've not been able to take those screenshots using PNG, every program I've tried to view them says that they're invalid PNG files . Seems that the blend setting has nothing to do with this behaviour, the PNGs are always corrupt. Maybe I'm doing something in the wrong way?
 
I'll keep testing...

Thanks for the feedback jltursan. The timing is indeed not correct in the skulls part. The problem is that I fixed another timing bug, the copper bars in Unleashed. But when fixing that bug, I introduced another one, basically its the timing between several events (vint, draw area, vram to display). So now I actually reverted the first bug fix which makes Unleashed buggy instead, but I'll try to find a solution that it correct.

The png support is a bit unfortunate, because the png files are shown in some image viewers but not in others. Unfortunately I didn't test the more common once 

There are almost 10 known bugs in 2.5, none that serious but  I'm thinking of doing a new release in a month or two with fixes for the bugs and perhaps one or two new features.

Are you thinking about a something-like RZX feature for blueMSX. I use this very often in Spectaculator for playing Spectrum games and it's a good thing because I can "record" how to finish a game or how to play with it...

Support for something like RZX is actually what I was thinking of as one new feature. I've been promising this feature for quite some time now and it shouldn't be too hard to do. The trickiest part of it is to support smooth rewind of a recording but maybe thats not needed in a first version. The other tricky part is how to combine the recording with save states. It would be very nice if you could start a recording and then do save states and when a save state is loaded, the recording would continue from that point.

Wave cassette support is also something that would be very nice. I've been thinking of this but I'm not sure whats the best solution. openMSX always converts cas files to wav files inside the emulator which is what I prefer too, but I guess some users think its loading too slow. What do you think?

And .. I would like a more powerfull and faster debugger with a friendly GUI.Now I find it works fine but slow and hard to use. Softice alike would be perfect.