Today a new version of openMSX was released: openMSX 0.3.1 - Quibus Birthday Release. The released version runs on Linux. We're working together closely with Reikan, so you can expect a Win32 version soon. The release notes are included below.
Release notes for openMSX 0.3.1 (2003-05-18)
It's been a short time since 0.3.0, but we thought the following changes are important enough to release now:
- Fixed compilation on GCC 3.3.
- Fixed SDLGL renderer on XFree86 4.3.
Regular development continued as well, so this release also contains the following improvements:
- New feature: configurable file-extentions.
- Improved layout of help text (try "openmsx -h"
. - Many improvements to the console, including:
- Extended the console editing keys (left, right, del, bs, home, end etc).
- Added key repeat.
- Reset the scrollback when any key other than page up/down is used.
- Added resizing and moving to the console.
- SDL console characters are no longer blended (improved readability).
- SDL backgroundimage can be scaled and can have any pixel format.
- Fixed colour of font on GLConsole overlayed on Text1 mode. - Emulation and event handling are now done in a single thread. The previous multi-threaded solution was not very portable among platforms or even different versions of the same platform. As a bonus, the single thread model is simpler and more efficient.
- Improved "make install".
- Cleanups of the directory structure.
Read the "ChangeLog" inside the archive for a detailed list of changes. In "doc/openMSX-HOWTO.txt" you can find a lot of useful information on openMSX, make sure you read this if you haven't used openMSX before.
Known issues / caveats:
- In its current alpha state, openMSX is usable for power users, but its interface is not very friendly to casual users yet.
- Emulation is not perfect yet. However, in the emulator comparison of msx.org, openMSX scored highest on accuracy of all emulators tested. See the bug tracker on sourceforge.net for known bugs.
- Until we reach version 1.0.0, file formats can change in an incompatible way without backwards compatiblity. Keep this in mind if you create machine descriptions, rom database entries etc.
- This openMSX release is only tested on Linux. Reikan maintains a Win32 port, which follows openMSX CVS closely, but is not the same. You can find it at www.ranpub.com/openMSX4Win32/
Running on BSD, Mac OS X, BeOS etc (wherever SDL runs) should be possible, but will probably not work out-of-the-box. If you are compiling on such a platform, please share your experiences (see below for contact info), so we can make openMSX more portable. - CPU and graphics performance varies a lot, depending on the openMSX settings and the MSX hardware and software you're emulating. Some things run fine on a 200MHz machine, others are slow on a 2GHz machine. Some performance tips:
- Make sure there are no CPU consuming background processes running.
- Generally, MSX1 emulation is fastest and turbo R emulation is slowest.
- SDLGL renderer needs hardware acceleration to run at a decent speed. Disabling scanlines and blur (set to 0) helps on older graphics cards.
- Use 16-bit colour mode instead of 32-bit (platform setting is used).
- Use line accuracy (default) instead of pixel accuracy.
- Turn on frame skip ("set frameskip auto".
- Use low-res SDLLo renderer (75% less pixels to fill).
If you want to contact the openMSX development team you can:
- Send a message to the openmsx-devel mailing list.
- Talk to us on channel openmsx on irc.freenode.net.
- Use the "Support" tab on the project page.
Relevant links:
openMSX Home Page,
Project page on SourceForge
