RELEASE_NOTES

1st of June, 2013                                                  EduMIPS64 1.1

                           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 1.2 of EduMIPS64, a bug-fix release that follows up on
version 1.1, that was released almost 3 months ago. The codename for this
release is "Ringsend", since most of the code has been written in the
beautiful neighborhood of Ringsend, in Dublin 4.

This release mainly fixes bugs in the Dinero Frontend, plus another critical
bug (access to negative memory addresses would just raise a
StringIndexOutOfBoundException) and includes some internal cleanups.

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 or open an
issue on GitHub.

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 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 (1.0)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New functionalities:
--------------------
- New configuration preference storage system: cross-platform and based on a
  standard Java feature (Issue #27) (andrea).
- New Ant targets to build JAR files with no embedded libraries, useful for
  distro packagers (andrea)

Bugs fixed:
-----------
- Build JAR for every master push and make it available at a known location
(Issue #30)
- Refactor sphinx conf.py code internal-cleanup (Issue #18)
- Automatically populate version fields throughout the code/docs (Issue #17)
- Settings window's buttons are often hidden (Issue #38)
- StringIndexOutOfBoundsException raised at run-time (Issue #36)
- The Dinero frontend sometimes hangs while running Dinero under Windows
  (Issue #35)
- Consistency issues between the Settings window and the actual options' value
  (Issue #34)
- Missing Italian strings for --help (Issue #33)
- Splash screen not working for "slim" jar (Issue #31)
- Dinero Frontend does not support paths containing spaces for the DineroIV
  executable (Issue #29)
- Dinero tracefile tracks both Load and Store memory accesses as read (Issue
  #28)
- Handle the JavaHelp dependency in a better way (Issue #9)
- Fix src-release ant target (Issue #13)
- Forwarding error with a H&P example (Issue #20)
- Add contact information in the first page of the help (Issue #21)
- Mention github issues link in the bugs report dialog (Issue #24)
- Resource mechanism doesn't work when the app is not inside a JAR
  file (Issue #25)
- GUICycles window was not behaving correctly when the same instruction was
  present multiple times in the pipeline.

Misc improvements:
------------------
- Added several unit tests, including some for forwarding and for the FPU
  (andrea)
- Better source code organization, with directories that match the package
  hierarchy (andrea)
- Source code moved to the org.edumips64 package (andrea)
- General code clean-up:
  * fixed the style, by using an external linter (Artistic Style);
  * enabled compilation warnings and fixed all of them;
  * refactored the GUICycle code;
  * converted everything that needed conversion to UTF-8.