ares v135 has now been released.

Since v134, a total of 14 contributors have created 51 commits to the ares codebase.

If you wish to see the full changelog in a per-commit format along with their authors, similarly to how previous release notes were written, you can do so on GitHub here.

New Release Schedule

Up until now, releases of ares were made when the changes felt 'significant' enough to do so. As of v135, we are moving to a monthly release schedule.

We will aim to publish a new release each month from this point forward, however, there is no strict date allocated for this, so there's still an aspect of 'when suitable'.

User Interface

• Renamed "Reload" to "Apply" in Driver Settings to clarify its function
• Fixed an issue where the "Deep Black Boost" setting would not save
• Rename FPS to VPS (VBlanks per second), as it represents emulation speed and not game frame rate
• Fixed an issue where the Firmware Path setting would not save

Debugging

• It is now possible to use instruction tracing even with the recompilers in use
• Fix an issue where GDB would not reconnect after a disconnection

Coleco - ColecoVision

• Added support for Xin1 and MegaCart mappers

Nintendo - NES / Famicom / Famicom Disk System

• Use HKROM for MMC6
• Improved Famicom Disk System timer interrupt generation

Nintendo - Game Boy Advance

• Improve unmapped I/O register behavior: passes I/O read tests in mbga suite
• Improve save type detection
• Improve ROM to RAM DMA timing

Nintendo - Nintendo 64 / 64DD

• Added the ability to disable the Memory Expansion PAK
• Simulate SysAD freezes when accessing non-RDRAM areas via the cache
• Improve SI emulation to approximate the correct SI Status values
• Fix a bug where I/O writes to PIF ram would not trigger interrupts
• Improve and extend cache coherency checks
• Implement register mirroring
• Improve PI latch emulation
• Improve PIF HLE emulation by reducing latency
• Add support for roms >= ~63.9MiB
• Implement undocumented accesses in FPU half-mode

Sega - Mega Drive / CD / 32X

• Enabled support for the Mega Mouse for 32X and CD32X games
• Improve I/O port emulation (Fixes Decap Attack + others)

Sony - Playstation

• Fix an issue where controller input would stop working if sideloading a PS-EXE

ARM7TDMI

• Improved ldmia and stmia timings in Thumb mode
• Fix additional instructions that require offset when reading PC

Motorola M68000

• Correct prefetch order for ASR instruction

Zilog Z80

• Implement newly discovered inir/indr/otir/otdr behaviour

Other

• Fixed an issue where macOS builds were being optimised for the build machine rather than for distribution
• Fixed an issue where the recompilers were broken on Apple Silicon
• Fixed an issue where unloading systems after disc swapping could cause a crash
• Fix an issue where ares could crash on startup with LTO on macOS
• Added support for the SDL input driver on macOS
• Fix an issue where the ares would look for resources inside the app bundle rather than alongside it on macOS