Bliss 1.4
posted in Emulator Release by xip on Feb 12th, 2001
Another version of Bliss has been released. There are a lot of changes:
Added emulation of the Entertainment Computer System, an add-on component for the Intellivision that gave it some computer-like enhancements. Some of the games required the ECS and they now work properly in this release.
Added ability to configure the input controls.
Added support for joysticks and gamepads. Currently only three axes supported. Support for POVs and most throttles is not included in this release and will be added in some future release, but how would you use these on an Intellivision anyway?
Added support for the second Intellivision hand controller, meaning two people can finally play each other.
Added support for cartridge RAM. The two games that required it, Land Battle and USCF Chess, now work properly.
Added an sample rate option for sound emulation. Now you can choose a sampling rate of 11khz, 22khz, or 44khz. Note that this does not affect the evaluation of the PSG chip in the Intellivision, but only how often the samples output from the PSG chip are averaged to fit into the sound output of the computer. This is a subtle difference, but important for accuracy.
Added emulation of bus isolation mode. You can now grab the sledgehammer in Donkey Kong and Dracula no longer looks like he’s emerging from his coffin twice before changing to a bat.
Fixed a CPU bug that caused some barrels in Donkey Kong to be invisible.
Fixed some sprite collision bugs. Now you can finally kill that white robot in Night Stalker and you can no longer walk through walls in Tron Maze-a-Tron.
Fixed some sound bugs and increased the sound accuracy. Part of the long-term goal for Bliss was to model the sound accurately enough so that even the experienced Intellivision enthusiast would be unable to perceive a difference between Bliss audio and that of a real Intellivision. Have I met that goal? Let me know.
Fixed a DirectX bug that caused Bliss to crash with video cards that only supported texture sizes of 256x256 or less.
Optimized the core emulation a bit more. It should play very well on a P2-300 now. Let me know if this is not true.
Get it at the Intellivision page.
