Makaron Test 10 released

[Bobbi]

Great news for all dremcast fans: dknute has updated his homepage with the 10th test release of his DC emulator Makaron. This emulator features a great compatibility, if you want to see some games in action, make sure to check out the blog for many screenshots.

Here are the most important changes and notes for Makaron T10:

[*]T10 might be a bit slower than T9 series. It'll most likely affect only low-end systems as there isn't really much of a difference (if any) on my E6600. [*]WinCE games usually crash when emulation speed drops below certain treshold. In other words, if you got fast system you should get stable performance. [*]Due to changes in GD-DMA code loading times are back. It's considered normal behaviour since this is how Dreamcast works. Thanks to those changes compatibility has improved and following titles should now boot and work: All Dream Preview discs, original MIL-CDs, Street Fighter Zero 3, SEGA Tetris Online and Tetris 4D. [*]CD-DA (audio tracks) will play, but still use the older method of fetching data. This might cause Makaron to crash but it's very unlikely as data reads and playing audio are mutualy exclusive tasks. [*]There are some minor changes in full-screen setup code (the debug window will be hidden and not forcibly refreshed). No 16:x aspect ratios yet. [*]Changes to sorting/drawing code broke shadows in Virtua Fighter 3tb. I'm not planning on fixing that anytime soon though, as it would break many other things. Late T9 versions have this problem too, by the way. [*]Makaron now disables screen saver when run. It's only going to be a problem if it crashes, as it might not re-enable it on exit. Just so you know. [*]If you manually enable MMU the recompiler will not switch to address translation mode until it's actually requested, so there's no speed penalty in BIOS and most games. Some however (like Ikaruga) use only partial translation and this can be emulated without full-blown MMU support. It'll work either way but will be a lot slower with MMU enabled. Some WinCE games are automatically recognized (this works only for GD images) and MMU will be turned on when necessary. In short: keep it off unless Makaron complains about it.

Please keep in mind that Makaron is configured through an INI file - if you are too lazy or don't know how this works, make sure to take a look at MKFro, a frontend for Makaron, which has also been updated to work with T10.

» Download Makaron T10 directly from NGEmu now.
» Check out the official homepage for many more notes on this test release.
» Thanks to legend100 for reporting this news item!