red-viper changelog

This release fixes a graphical issue with Virtual Bowling (#111), introduced in v1.3.3.

This release brings Dragon Hopper to playable status on both new and old 3DS, including when 3D is enabled. I haven't been able to test this as thoroughly as I usually do, so please let me know if there are still issues!

• Optimize rendering of affine worlds covering multiple background maps (such as those in Dragon Hopper)
• Improved accuracy of draw sorting replacement in Virtual League Baseball 2

This release brings Zero Racers to playable status on old 3DS. Dragon Hopper remains stuttery on old 3DS for now, but should be better on new 3DS, especially with 3D disabled.

• Improved performance significantly in Zero Racers and to a lesser extent in Dragon Hopper
• Run Zero Racers title animation at correct speed

This release adds some compatibility fixes for Zero Racers and Red Alarm.
Note that on old 3DS, performance is currently dodgy for both of the newly released games, Zero Racers and Dragon Hopper. New 3DS works fine though. In any case, please show Nintendo some thanks by playing the games on Switch!

• Fix wireframe layering in Zero Racers
• Fix title screen animation tearing in Zero Racers
• Fix wireframe layering on controller menu in Red Alarm
• Hopefully minor performance improvements in Test Chamber

• New rendering mode that downloads GPU-rendered image to CPU for post-processing (#88)
• Enabled in Test Chamber, meaning black walls are no longer transparent on old 3DS and performance is improved on new 3DS
• Test Chamber should now be fully compatible with good performance
• Fixed half of the court being black in Virtual Bowling
• Improved floor transitions in Jack Bros.
• Fixed some transitions flashing the wrong thing for 1 frame when antiflicker is enabled in Jack Bros.
• General minor performance improvements

• Fixed an issue causing slowdown in Innsmouth no Yakata, among others

• Fixed a bug where toggling anaglyph mode in-game causes a crash with the top screen slowly fading to black
• Avoid recalculating column table every frame

• Fixed a potential performance regression introduced in v1.2.2

v1.2.2 changelog in case you missed it:

• Fixed a bug where in homebrew that doesn't use tile worlds, the screen may be completely black
• Fixed crashes when closing the emulator during and when exiting multiplayer
• Detect a few additional busywait patterns

• Fixed a bug where in homebrew that doesn't use tile worlds, the screen may be completely black
• Fixed crashes when closing the emulator during and when exiting multiplayer
• Detect a few additional busywait patterns

This is a minor bugfix and optimization release.

• Added some HLE for slow code in Virtual League Baseball 2 - multiplayer should now run at full speed on old 3DS
• Fixed an issue where after toggling anaglyph mode, the home menu would run slowly

This release introduces local multiplayer!

• Added local multiplayer
• Accessible from the main menu
• Two nearby 3DS systems can play Virtual Boy games together
• Games can be loaded from the SD card, or downloaded from the host system
• Forwarders can only play the game they were configured with
• Save data is saved and loaded per system
• The input buffer can be manually adjusted: higher values may be more stable in noisy environments, but incur longer delays
• Because both Virtual Boy simulations are ran on both 3DS systems, games may slow down sometimes if either player is using an old 3DS. The following games are confirmed to play well on old 3DS:
• Mario's Tennis multiplayer patch
• Hyper Fighting
• Improved loading savestates from old versions

This release fixes a bug introduced in v1.1.0 where savestates from prior versions could no longer be loaded.

This release contains a number of bugfixes.

• Fixed Virtual League Baseball 2's title screen advancing immediately
• Fixed a regression in v1.1.0 which caused enemies to disappear in Red Alarm and scoring in Space Invaders to break (#94)
• Fixed keyboard showing up when selecting the red monochrome tint
• Improve graphical oddities when exiting pause menu in Golf
• Improve occasional glitches during Jack Bros. level transitions
• Improved performance regressions introduced in v1.1.0
• Fixed softlock when loading abarth's wireframe demo
• Fixed ROM loader crash in folders with only one ROM (#90)
• Disable antiflicker when software rendering is active - in this case, there is likely no flickering to protect against, and it was causing issues

This release improves the software renderer and enables it for Test Chamber on New 3DS. This fixes the issue where black walls may appear transparent.
The old 3DS is not fast enough to run a software renderer, so it is not enabled there. There is an alternative solution that could work on the o3DS, but it is not yet clear whether this solution is viable. See #88 for more information.

• Improve software renderer and enabled it for Test Chamber on New 3DS, fixing see-through black walls
• Fixed XB instruction not saving when register is in-memory, resulting in crashes in the comet shooting minigame in Galactic Pinball's Colony stage (#87)
• Numerous improvements to interpreter
• These changes do not affect any existing games, but do make it easier to test the emulator in alternate environments

This patch addresses an issue introduced in v1.0.1 where accessing the multicolor shade selector screen too many times in one session would crash the emulator.

This patch improves the UX for multicolor mode, allowing people to more easily share their palettes with others, and fixes some bugs that snuck into the v1.0.0 release.

• Multicolor changes:
• Up to 4 palette slots are available, configurable per game
• Color entries and brightness scale can now entered directly using hex color values
• These same raw color and brightness values are visible within the emulator
• Boost maximum brightness scaling factor from 2x to 4x
• Fix random crashes during screen transitions in Golf
• Fix bug where toggling anaglyph mode while in-game caused games to speed up
• Ensure Circle Pad Pro applet runs at 60Hz

30 years ago today, the Virtual Boy released in Japan. What better time to release a big Red Viper update?

• New "Multicolor" mode, allowing for more versatile color remapping
• Circle Pad Pro support
• Software renderer to reduce visual glitches, enabled in Golf
• Double buffering to hide garbage frames and improve frametime accuracy, enabled in Red Alarm and Bound High
• Numerous performance improvements
• In particular, interrupt checking was moved from a polling-based system to predicting exactly when the next interrupt will trigger, improving performance particularly in the Space Invaders intro
• A ROM can be bundled with a Red Viper CIA, to create what is commonly called a "forwarder"
• An error code is now shown when loading a ROM fails
• Fix "Discard" not correctly restoring settings for New 3DS Speedup
• Fix occasional graphical glitches on touch screen when toggling Home Menu

When I originally released Red Viper, I chose to release it as v0.9.0, to indicate that while there were still some compatibility issues, it was most of the way there. I decided that I would bump the version to v1.0.0 once all officially released games fully ran at playable speeds, with no major glitches or slowdown. The optimizations introduced in this update bring the Space Invaders intro up to full speed and fixes rendering bugs and audio stutters in Golf. These were the last big things (and I didn't like how close it was getting to being v0.9.10), so I'm happy calling this v1.0.0.
This new version number does not mean that I am done updating this emulator - some homebrew is not yet fully compatible, and there are additional features I would still like to implement. Stay tuned :wink:

This patch includes a number of accuracy improvements, primarily related to timing (plus a few game-specific hacks where hardware research is insufficient). With these improvements in tow, Red Viper is currently the most accurate emulator for Virtual Boy games on any system, even disregarding the whole 3D thing.

• Improved timer emulation to fix sample playback in Galactic Pinball and Teleroboxer
• Added memory access time emulation, which fixes numerous games
• Fixes sample playback in Virtual Bowling and Niko-Chan Battle, along with improved timer emulation
• Improves emulation performance in 3D Tetris
• Correctly emulated game speed in Golf
• Fixes Blox 2 intro cutting off early
• Fixed graphical glitches and fixed intro chime in Waterworld
• Improved audio emulation to fix some homebrew, including the Blox games and the Formula V demo
• Allow loading savestates from older versions

This patch introduces anaglyph mode, render time emulation, and numerous bugfixes.
Render time emulation means that some in-game sequences run at the same speed they did on a real Virtual Boy, which no previous emulator has emulated accurately. This includes the Jack Bros. level transitions being as choppy as they originally were, so a toggle has been added to revert to the old behaviour. For more information, check out my write-up.

• Added anaglyph mode, with configurable colours for each eye
• 2DS users can configure a depth offset in anaglyph mode, as they have no depth slider
• Add render time emulation, including a toggle to turn it off
• Fix audio bug in Colony intro in Galactic Pinball
• Fix various issues in the Game Boy emulator
• Fix Red Alarm wireframe graphics drawing on top of UI
• Add a hack for Jack Bros. to make the intro chime play at roughly the correct speed
• Apply game fixes based on game ID rather than checksum, for better compatibility with ROM hacks
• Increased frameskip aggressiveness to improve performance in Elevated Speed
• Update software framebuffer more conservatively to improve performance in Waterworld and 3-D Tetris
• Adjusted gamma correction for improved visibility
• Fix D-Pad ABXY mirroring having an incorrect right input

This patch adds an antiflicker mode and an input display.

• Added antiflicker option to mitigate image retention issues, particularly on IPS models
• Added an input display (buttons light up in red if turbo is enabled and blue if toggle is enabled)
• Fixed a critical bug where the emulator crashes when starting a game if the home directory doesn't exist

This release features significantly improved input remapping.

Control changes

• New "Custom" control scheme (#67)
• In the Custom control scheme, any 3DS button can be mapped to any VB button
• Toggle and Turbo modes are available for each button
• The previous control menu is still available as "Preset" for its ease of use
• Added remapping option to 3DS D-Pad in Preset mode (#65)
• Virtual buttons on the touchscreen can now be set to the face buttons by default
• "Switch" button can now be turned off

Other settings changes

• Configurations can now be game-specific, including controls, graphics, etc
• Moved rv_config.ini to a more standard location (sdmc:/config/red-viper)
• The red-viper directory with savestates and per-game configs can be moved by manually editing rv_config.ini
• Added VBLink for homebrew developers, accessible by pressing Y on the main menu (will be supported in future versions of VUEngine Studio)

Other changes

• Improved stability for capture cards
• Fixed occasional bug where the emulator would crash on startup

This release features savestate support, as well as a new splash screen. There are 10 savestate slots per game, and the savestates are stored in a "red-viper" directory on the root of your SD card.

• Added savestates (#59)
• New splash screen by Morintari
• Added a fallback interpreter when executing code from RAM to fix Formula V
• Fixed the reset button on the touchscreen config turning off the touchscreen
• Fixed the default file select cursor being offset in folders with subfolders
• Added toggle for New 3DS speedup

This release features much smoother gameplay, partially thanks to running the 3DS displays at 50Hz! Also includes a number of compatibility improvements, especially with homebrew.

• Run 3DS displays at 50Hz (thanks to everyone in #46 who knows much more about this than I do!)
• Improve frame pacing by rendering on VBlank
• The image is now displayed in full 24-bit colour
• Various renderer optimizations, significantly improving performance in Elevated Speed
• Improved audio clarity
• Fixed issues with various sound effects in Wario Land
• Fixed compatibility hack for Virtual Lab's English patch
• Improved performance in Nester's Funky Bowling
• Compatibility fixes for lots of homebrew
• Add a confirmation prompt to Reset and Quit menu options
• Game progress is now saved when entering sleep mode

This patch features fixes for a few critical bugs that snuck into v0.9.2, including the .cia not working on O3DS and the crash screen causing a ghost image when left alone for too long.

v0.9.2 changelog

This release features a new audio engine allowing for sample playback, improved support for some homebrew such as Hyper Fighting and Elevated Speed, and a number of UI improvements, including button controls.

Some games may play samples at an incorrect speed. A compatibility list has been created, listing these and any other lingering issues.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed!

Emulation improvements

• New audio engine allowing for sample playback
• 16MB ROMs can now be loaded on o3DS
• Fixed music speed in Golf
• Faster affine layer drawing
• Various other emulation bugfixes (including #41 and #43 by @pizzarollsroyce)

UI improvements

• Button input in GUI (#47 by @JeffRuLz)
• Zip file support
• Improved debug dumps for easier crash reproduction
• Allow mapping face buttons to the triggers on N3DS (#39 by @vaguerant)
• Button to turn off the touchscreen backlight (#48 by @vaguerant)

The cia for this doesn't work on O3DS, please use a newer version!

This release features a new audio engine allowing for sample playback, improved support for some homebrew such as Hyper Fighting and Elevated Speed, and a number of UI improvements, including button controls.

Some games may play samples at an incorrect speed. A compatibility list has been created, listing these and any other lingering issues.

Big thanks to everyone who contributed!

Emulation improvements

• New audio engine allowing for sample playback
• 16MB ROMs can now be loaded on o3DS
• Fixed music speed in Golf
• Faster affine layer drawing
• Various other emulation bugfixes (including #41 and #43 by @pizzarollsroyce)

UI improvements

• Button input in GUI (#47 by @JeffRuLz)
• Zip file support
• Improved debug dumps for easier crash reproduction
• Allow mapping face buttons to the triggers on N3DS (#39 by @vaguerant)
• Button to turn off the touchscreen backlight (#48 by @vaguerant)

This release fixes the random crashes in T&E Soft's games (Red Alarm, 3D Tetris, Golf). Now all official games are actually playable!

Features

• 3D depth slider support (#10 by @djedditt)
• Pick which eye is rendered in 2D mode
• Fast-forward button on in-game touch screen (either hold or toggle)
• GUI matches colour filter (#5 by @JeffRuLz)
• Additional face button layouts

Fixes

• Fixed random crashes in T&E Soft's games (Red Alarm, 3D Tetris, Golf)
• Fix crash when closing through home menu while in the pause menu

Many updates from r3Ddragon v0.87, including:

• New hardware renderer
• Fully implement instruction set
• Busywait optimization
• New UI
• Improved controls

With these changes, all officially released games are playable at full speed on the original 3DS.

Known issues:

• Sample playback doesn't work (affects Teleroboxer, Galactic Pinball, and a few other games)
• Mario Clash and Space Invaders have slight performance issues during intro cutscenes, though Space Invaders is likely alleviated on the New 3DS
• Minor graphical glitches in Golf and Waterworld
• Homebrew may not work