RELEASE_NOTES

24th of November, 2012                                             EduMIPS64 1.0

                           EduMIPS64 RELEASE NOTES	
                           http://www.edumips.org

EduMIPS64 is a GPL MIPS64 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) simulator and
graphical debugger.

Notes for this release:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is version 1.0 of EduMIPS64, the first major one since 2007. The codename
for this release is "Philadelphia", since it is being released from
Philadelphia (PA), in the USA.

The simulator has proven to be quite stable in the last years, and only 4
bugfix releases have been necessary (less than one per year) despite the
simulator is being used yearly by a few hundred people.

The 2 big new features since 0.5 are the Floating Point Unit (FPU) support,
written by Massimo Trubia (max83t) and the new help system based on RST, that
allows to create both in-app HTML-based help and PDF documentation from a
single source.

These new features and the demonstrated stability led us to dare to use the
dreaded 1.0 version number. To keep the software stable, unit tests have been
added, and even if the coverage is not great the framework will help us to
keep improving the quality of the code.

Please keep in mind that this is still EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE. It may
BURN YOUR HARD DISK, DESTROY ALL YOUR DATA and even GO OUT WITH YOUR
WIFE/HUSBAND. :)

If you find a bug, please send us a bug report to bugs@edumips.org.

If you use the simulator, please consider subscribing to the low-traffic
mailing-list edumips64-devel@lists.sourceforge.net, and help us by giving us
suggestions and sending bug reports. Thanks!

EduMIPS64 is now hosted on GitHub (www.github.com/lupino3/edumips64), and we
have a git mirror (that lags a bit) on Google Code
(http://code.google.com/p/edumips64/). Our web site is www.edumips.org and we
still use it to communicate with our users. Releases are done on Sourceforge
(http://sourceforge.net/projects/edumips64) and we also have a development
blog on http://edumips64.blogspot.com.

New in this release since last major version (0.5):
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New functionalities:
--------------------
- Floating Point Unit support (max83t)
- Added unit test framework and some unit tests and regression tests (andrea)
- Embedded JavaHelp viewer (andrea)
- Added Splash Screen (visible with Java6+, not shown with Java5) (andrea,
  vanni)
- Added the MIPS alias to each register's name in the Registers window (andrea)

Fixed bugs:
-----------
- Issue #2 (Misaligned memory operations are not handled correctly) (andrea)
- Issue #8 (Weird GUI under Mac OS X) and #9 (Incorrect behavior of
  MOVN and MOVZ) (andrea)
- Issue #10 (Random freeze when executing SYSCALL 5 under Java 7) (andrea)
- Issue #14 (ant javadoc not working) (andrea)
- Issue #15 (Make debug mode change verbosity)
- Data/code window label fixes (andrea):
  . added labels to the Data frame; 
  . fixed Data and Code default column widths so that they can be read;
  . added real-time language change support for Data/Code column labels.
- Fixed a bug that disallowed access to odd memory locations from the code
  (odd labels were not correctly parsed). (andrea)
- Fixed a bug about a stall for synchronous exceptions and forwarding (max83t)
- Fixed Java 6 Swing bug (andrea)
- Fixed ReportDialog bug (mancausoft)
- Fixed aligned read/write with labels (andrea)
- Fixed MIPS32 alias visualization (thegoodgiant)
- Updated embedded manual with a SYSCALL page (jesky)
- Parser bug fixes (mancausoft)
- Memory bug fixes (mancausoft)
- Fixed Jump-after-Break bug (andrea)
- Fixed OSX issues (mancausoft)

Misc improvements:
------------------
- Converted the TeX docs to RST, so that the same sources can be used for
  the PDF manual and for the newly-embedded JavaHelp viewer (andrea)
- Manual fixes (jesky)
- Added debug info to svnjar (mancausoft)
- Removed GUI Log viewer, the debug messages now go to stdout (andrea)