Daedalus R11 plans

**blackrave** · April 5th, 2007, 02:29

Via StrmnNrmn

I had planned on posting this update on Monday, but I've spent the last couple of nights catching up on a few games that I've not had chance to play since they were released (Crackdown on the 360 and Afterburner : Black Falcon on the PSP for the curious

For R11 I'm hoping to fix the Expansion Pak support for once and for all. Memory is currently very tight, so I need to look at shaving off a few hundered KB here and there. Almost all the memory Daedalus uses is allocated up front - there are very few dynamic allocations at runtime, with the biggest culprit being the texture cache. So for R11 I want to introduce a pooled allocator for the texture cache, which will mean that when it runs out of memory, you just get white textures appearing rather than a hard crash.

The other feature I want to improve in R11 is the way that global settings and per-rom settings are handled. At the moment Daedalus discards any changes to settings that you make when you restart your PSP, and it can be incredibly tedious setting things up every time you run a game. This is quite a small feature to add, but I think it will make the emulator much nicer to use.

Behind the scenes, I want to spend a short while working on some scripts to handle packaging new releases for distribution. Current I do all of this by hand, and it's one of the things I least enjoy about the project. Hopefully, the more automated I can make this, the more frequently I'm likely to release builds

I'd like to get all these changes done and release R11 within a couple of weeks. I have a couple of busy weekends coming up, so I'm not going to specify an exact date. You can expect it before May though (I'll try not to be a couple of days late this time

R11 is essentially going to be a compatibility release - hopefully the Expansion Pak support will lead to a few more roms running (Majora's Mask being one I've already verified). Looking further ahead, R12 will be back to concentrating on speed (as it happened, R10 achieved a 10-15% speedup without having implemented the majority of the optimisations I had planned

-StrmnNrmn

PS Off to Spain again over the Easter bank holiday weekend. Back on Tuesday