gnuboy

This release marks a feature freeze in preparation
for 1.0 stable, which is likely to be the next
version if all goes well. Several bugs in the i386
assembly cpu emulation core, which caused visual
glitches in Pokemon Yellow and a crash in
Montezuma's Return, have been fixed. A minor
visual glitch in Alleyway has been corrected as
well. Minor new features include support for
hardware scaling on the Linux console with
matroxfb (MGA G200/G400 only at this time), and
more optimized scalers for particular scale factors.

Hardware YUV-space screen scaling has been integrated (currently only in the
SDL port). This allows scaling the screen image to any size with virtually no
increase in CPU usage. Several bugs have been fixed as well, including one that
prevented the impressive homebrew game Binary Chaos from working.

Many emulation bigfixes. Games that used to fail
but are now playable include the GBC Konami
Collection series, Worms Armageddon, and Turok 3.
Timer-related sound bugs were fixed in Spiderman
(GBC version) and Bionic Commando: Elite Forces.
SDL_HWSURFACE mode no longer crashes on Windows,
so it is now always enabled, which improves
performance considerably in some situations. The
new screen scaling code is slightly faster and
supports more scale factors: 2x, 3x, and 4x.

Options have been added for primitive but very fast screen scaling (only by a factor of two), and for static palette (3/3/2 bit per channel) in 256 color mode to better support highcolor games on 8bpp displays. Several emulation bugs have been fixed; now Daedalian Opus and Super RC Pro-Am are playable and some graphical glitches are fixed in Spiderman GBC. Other minor compiletime and runtime bugs have been fixed, and performance may be improved under certain conditions.

A major bug was fixed that could cause saved states to be loaded incorrectly, sometimes rendering them useless or difficult to recover. Various fixes have been made in the SDL sound code, and fullscreen mode may now work on Windows. The DOS port is now entirely thinlib-based; it supports more video modes (although the method of selecting them is slightly different) and should handle keyboard input much better, without the occasional stuck key problems that some users experienced before. Various optimizations have also been made to the graphics code, improving performance noticably on low-end systems.