NESten 0.61 beta 1
posted in Emulator Release by xip on Feb 11th, 2001
After a long period of inactivity, a new NESten version is here. This is an overview of what's new:
First of all, I would like to thank Quietust for his work on the mappers. He has basically rewritten, organized, debugged and verified a lot of the mappers. So a lot of games will have much better support. Visit the NESten homepage to look for updated mappers. At the same time, I must mention kevtris, who has reverse engineered a lot of new mappers, and has supplied Quietust with a lot of accurate info making the games work perfectly. Without Quietust & kevtris pushing me, this new release would probably not be made.
Mapper interface has been changed totally to be more true to how the NES actually works. An updated SDK will follow.
Added UNIF format support. Many new roms will be dumped only in this format since the iNES format only allows a 8 bit mapper number assignment (max 256 different cart types). UNIF does not share this limit. A big thanks to Repulse for creating the format.
Added FDS support. This basically means, you can play FDS games. For those of us that don't understand japanese, a game is most likely waiting for you to eject a disk, and insert another one, if it just pauses with some weird charachters. That means, you have to enter the menu, and press eject, then enter menu again, and insert the disk side you think it's requesting :)
Added external rendering plugins. What this basically means, is that you can make your own plugin with your own special effects. My default Vid_DirectX.DLL is included with this version, hopefully new plugins will be available via the NESten main page at a later time.
Made timing more accurate, but I have not updated both cores to use the new timing, so only the interpretive core is in use.
A lot of weird things have been fixed too, hope noone noticed these weird things ;)
A problem with DirectSound not being released (IE, Sound in old DOS programs got lost) should be fixed.
Well, fire it up and see if anything else has changed :)
Like it says, fire it up. Get it at the NES page.
