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melonDS 0.7.3
Jan 5th 2019, by Arisotura
After another round of fixoring, we present you melonDS 0.7.3. So, what are the changes in this version? Mostly addressing the issues that popped up in 0.7.1/0.7.2, and improving the interface a bit.


Something that should have been done long ago, and has finally been done: the emulator's main loop was rewritten to use absolute timestamps to keep track of cycle counts. Overall, it's more reliable (far less chances of desyncs), more accurate, and also a bit faster, and the code is cleaner. So we win on all fronts.

This should fix the recent flickering issues, like that of Colour Cross.

The downside is that this breaks savestate compatibility with older melonDS versions.


In the same vein, there's another fix to GX timings. We knew that vertex timings were different when a vertex completed a polygon, but we just found out that timings also differ based on whether the polygon passes culling and clipping. This will help with games that need their display lists to be running fast enough.


To hopefully fix the saving issues, we built a new database, resulting of a mix between the Advanscene XML and savelist.bin from the R4 Wood firmware. For better detection, the new romlist.bin indexes games by their serial code rather than by the ROM's CRC32, which also means that it will work with hacked ROMs. This means you will need to make sure to replace romlist.bin with the newer one if you're extracting this melonDS release over an older one.

There's also a particular fix for Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - Explorers of Sky, which uses 128K EEPROM. It should now save properly.

However, note that the correct savefile size for this game is 128KB. If you have a savefile which is 256KB, the game will read it fine but fail to save to it (because that size is detected as FLASH memory and not EEPROM). You can fix this by opening your savefile in a hex editor and deleting the upper half of it. This is especially important if you use a savefile coming from DeSmuME as it will create a 256KB file.


We also have a neat little pile of UI improvements.

melonDS now supports hotplugging joysticks. That being said, it still defaults to the first joystick available on your system. I'm not quite sure how to go about handling multiple joysticks.

Under Linux, the crashes coming from the input config dialog should be fixed.

The main window is smarter about remembering its size: it also remembers whether it was maximized.

There's a tentative fix for hiDPI under Windows, which should atleast make the screens scale correctly.

There's a new menu for setting the window size to an integer scaling factor (1x to 4x).

The setting for savefile relocation when using savestates is now disabled by default. While the feature may be useful, having it enabled by default was confusing for unaware users.


And finally, the misc fixes:

* fix STRD_POST (fixes music in Just Sing - Vol 2)
* 2D: fix blending bugs
* add support for 8bit reads to DISPCNT/BGxCNT (fixes The Wild West)
* make nocashprint also work in ARM mode


Enjoy!


melonDS 0.7.3, Windows 64-bit
melonDS 0.7.3, Linux 64-bit

melonDS Patreon if you're feeling generous
16 comments have been posted.
< Some brighter news thoSome news >
MelonMan says:
Jan 28th 2019
StapleButter changed their username to Arisotura, so they are the same person.

Proof = https://melonds.kuribo64.net/comments.php?id=75#comment544
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