ares v144 has now been released.

This release's highlights include steady improvements to the Game Boy Advance, WonderSwan, and Nintendo 64 cores, as well as a selection of application bug fixes, behaviour improvements and updates to third-party libraries.

Since v143, 14 contributors have created 81 commits to the ares codebase.

As always, if you wish to see the full changelog in a per-commit format along with their authors, you can do so on GitHub here.

ARM7TDMI (Game Boy Advance CPU, ST018 Super Famicom coprocessor)

• Fixed disassembler mnemonic for CMP
• Fixed R15 read offsets on many instructions = Fixed miscalculated carry flags in Thumb mode
• Disallowed writing 0 to the uppermost bit of PSR mode
• Added an idle cycle to instructions that perform shifts by register values

NEC V30MZ (WonderSwan CPU)

• Improved interrupt timing accuracy
• Improved timing of I/O port accesses

Bandai - WonderSwan

• Added color emulation support to the original “mono” WonderSwan.
• Note that WS games on WS are displayed using linear gamma, as opposed to WS games on WSC.
• Fixed bugs involving cartridge-side RTC protocol emulation
• Improved APU emulation accuracy
• Improved interrupt timing accuracy
• Added support for emulating cartridges using an 8-bit ROM bus width
• Fixed color zero not being writable on translucent PPU palettes
• Fixed UART IRQs not being cleared by disabling the UART

Nintendo - Game Boy / Game Boy Color

• Tick timer on the falling edge of DIV bits
• Implemented PCM12 and PCM34 registers for APU

Nintendo - Game Boy Advance

• Latch lower address lines when accessing ROM during burst transfer
• Improved background VRAM access timings
• Updated cartridge database
• Fixed handling of mid-scanline writes to linear background scroll registers
• Fixed some bugs that occurred when pixel accuracy was disabled

Nintendo - Famicom Disk System

• Added delay to disk state when swapping disks, resolving issues with multiple games where a disk swap was happening too quickly

Nintendo 64 / Aleck 64

• Fixed an issue that could cause an application hang under certain titles that deactivate the VI
• Add support for the unreleased port “O.D.T. - Escape… Or Die Trying” to the internal DB
• Fixed ID in internal DB for Rampage 2, so controller pak and rumble pak should now work correctly
• Added compile-time accuracy flag to bypass IPL2 checksum validation for development purposes
• Improved error messaging if the Aleck 64 Pif ROM is missing when trying to load an Aleck 64 game.
• Added support for configurable Controller Pak storage sizes
• Applied a fix to allow booting ROMs with non-standard PI DOM1 parameters in headers
• Disabled super-sampled RDP readbacks: fixes some accuracy issues/passes more test cases in the official RDP test suite.

Nintendo - SNES / Super Famicom

• Fixed loading of some games that require additional firmware for chips included in the cartridge

Sega - Master System

• Updated PAL only entries in the local DB so that they play at the correct 50Hz

Sega - Mega Drive / Genesis / CD / 32X

• Fixed incorrect hash for Wonder Boy in Monster World (USA, Europe) that allows for correct EEPROM detection, making the game playable
• Fixed YM2612 LFO ‘AM’ bit emulation (Fixing broken audio in Kid Chameleon and others)
• 32X: In H32 mode, the display is offset by approximately 3.25 pixels to the right
• 32X: Fix registers and machine state on reset
• CD: Fixed an issue where resetting the system while a game was running would result in the BIOS locking up on reboot.
• 32X: Improve synchronisation between MD/32X: fixes H/V tests in testpico when running in 32X mode.
• Improved VDP IRQ delay emulation
• Improve YM2612 timer emulation

Sony - PlayStation

• Fixed an assertion in Lunar disc 1 when walking into Alex’s house or the barn to the right of it, preventing a crash.

UI / Program

• Fixed a runtime crash on arm64 Linux with builds compiled with GCC
• Improved compatibility inside sandboxed environments
• Fixed passing relative paths for ROMs when launching ares on the command line
• Fixed an issue with the displayed release version name on Windows
• Fixed an issue causing malformed save directory names when a custom save path was specified
• Fixed an issue causing the “missing firmware” error to appear twice
• Fixed an issue that could cause runaway memory use on startup under the SDL input driver
• Fixed an issue affecting compatibility with macOS versions before 12.0

Dependencies

• Updated SDL to version 3.2.10 (SDL3)
• Updated librashader to version 0.6.3
• Updated slang-shaders to ref 25311dc