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@github-actions github-actions released this 03 Sep 04:57
· 133 commits to master since this release
v3.6.0
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Virtual Jaguar libretro v3.6.0

Debugger & libretro surface. A GDB remote stub you can attach a real
m68k-elf-gdb to, the disk-control interface that makes booting with no content
and swapping a disc mid-session possible, a user-authorable patch/hook file, and
a broad SIMD pass that speeds up the parts of the emulator that were actually
hot.

91 commits since v3.5.1.

Debugging

GDB remote serial protocol stub (#652). Attach m68k-elf-gdb (or lldb) to a
running core over TCP and debug Jaguar code the way you would any other target:

  • Breakpoints, single-step, register and memory access.
  • The GPU and DSP appear as GDB threads, so you can inspect all three
    processors from one session.
  • Connect scripts, editor plugins, and an installer ship in the repo; see
    docs/gdb-stub-design.md.

The per-instruction cost of the stub was measured, attributed per processor, and
reduced — see "Performance" below.

libretro surface

Disk control interface (#651). The core now implements
SET_DISK_CONTROL_EXT_INTERFACE, which was the shared blocker behind two
features:

  • Launch the core with no content and insert a disc afterwards.
  • Reach the Virtual Light Machine by putting in an audio CD.

Two things to know about how it behaves. Inserting a disc restarts the
console — the boot strategy is derived from the disc itself (its session layout
decides HLE versus real BIOS), so the core has to re-read and boot it; real
hardware does not need to, so a swap here is a restart rather than a continuous
session. And eject is a frontend-level flag, not an emulated tray: the Jaguar
CD unit has no modelled disc-present line, so the previously mounted disc stays
readable until an insert replaces it.

Savestates are now tied to the disc they were taken on. Since a disc can be
swapped mid-session, a state records which disc was mounted (session count, track
count, total sectors) and is refused against a different one, naming both in the
log. States written by earlier versions carry no such record and load exactly as
before.

Auto frameskip driven by audio buffer status (#690), and an enhancement
profile option (#706) — auto / quality / performance — deciding whether
the per-title database may switch on expensive visual enhancements by default.

No-content boot (#646): the core can launch with no cartridge or disc and
show the boot ROM, as real hardware does with an empty slot.

Patching a game

One routing doc (#637). We shipped three overlapping ways to modify a game
with no single door: cheats, soft patching, and enhancement hooks. There is now a
single page — docs/patching-a-game.md — that routes between them, linked from
the README and from each of the three existing docs.

User-authorable hooks. Drop a vj_hooks.txt in your system directory:

crc=DC187F82
hook=my-patch 0x0012A4 4E71 4E75

Turn on the Enhancement Hooks core option (off by default; a hook file cannot
switch on its own gate). Every fence from the built-in table applies: the
expect bytes are mandatory and checked, application is all-or-nothing, and any
malformed line discards the whole file rather than applying a patch set we only
partly understood.

Performance

RISC idle-loop fast-forward is now on by default (#608). Previously opt-in
while the compatibility corpus grew; a sweep of 148 cart images plus 6 CD
spot-checks came back byte-identical off-versus-on across framebuffer, audio and
savestate hash streams, so the largest single speed-up the core offers now reaches
everyone. It was also ported to the GPU interpreter (#699), not just the DSP.

SIMD. NEON and SSE2 fast paths for the parts that measurement said were hot:
Object Processor phrase stores and 16bpp fixed bitmaps, TOM scanline converters
(direct/24bpp/RGB16), the hi-res Stage-1 store and line resolve, and the voice-chat
mixer. Plus ARMv8 hardware CRC32 with runtime dispatch, and byte-swap
intrinsics for the GET/SET macros.

Per-SoC ARM tuning and LTO by default for ELF targets.

GDB stub overhead measured and fixed. The hooks cost 4.5%, not the ~0% first
reported; caching the armed flag in a slice-entry local took that to 2.7% with the
GPU's share to zero. The measurement gates are permanent and listed in
BUILD_AXES, so the attribution can be repeated on any target in four runs.

Game fixes

White Men Can't Jump (#635) — froze at its menus and produced no audio at
all, in both BIOS modes. The game stops its DSP by raising a CPU interrupt whose
handler is a shutdown routine; delivering that interrupt to an already-stopped DSP
left it pending, so the freshly reloaded DSP program serviced it during its own
init and shut itself down. The 68K then waited forever on a mailbox nothing would
ever clear. Audio went from zero non-silent samples to 1.8M.

Audio-only CDs route through the real CD BIOS (#683), whose player front-end
is the VLM — HLE cannot boot an audio disc, since it synthesizes its boot stub
from session-2 data a music CD does not have.

Object Processor: the object window is clamped to the visible window rather
than VBB; object processing stops at VBB when VDE runs past the end of the field
(#641); scaled 24bpp line-buffer writes are clamped to tomRam8 (#604).

Blitter: a nested blit dispatched from inside a running one is refused and
logged (#663, #677).

Widescreen statics reset per load (#605).

Build and packaging

Package.swift ships in this repo (#614), so Apple frontends no longer need
to vendor a fork. It is guarded: a CI job builds it, and a second fails if its
source list drifts from Makefile.common.

Cross-platform core installer (#640) for getting the core into RetroArch.

SPM builds no longer inline the scalar blitter on arm64 (#612) — the arch
autodetect now tests for actual SSE2/NEON availability rather than the arch alone.

Documentation

A settings and performance tuning guide (docs/settings-and-performance-guide.md)
covering what each option costs and when to turn it on, plus a site page. The
timing-accuracy work is documented as a non-versioned ongoing campaign rather than
being promised for a particular release.

Known limitations

  • Inserting a disc restarts the console (see above). A continuous swap depends on
    CD BIOS disc-presence polling that has not been verified.
  • The enhancement profile governs internal_resolution and true_color only —
    performance-oriented per-title defaults such as idle-skip are unaffected by it,
    deliberately.
  • docs/WHATSNEW has no sections for v3.1.0 through v3.5.1; the per-release
    notes in docs/RELEASE_NOTES_v*.md are complete and authoritative for those.

Artifacts in this release

SHA256SUMS.txt
cue2cdi-linux-x86_64
cue2cdi-macos-universal
cue2cdi-windows-x86_64.exe
jagcd-tools-linux-x64.zip
jagcd-tools-macos.zip
jagcd-tools-windows-x64.zip
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-arm64-v8a-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-arm64-v8a.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-armeabi-v7a-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-armeabi-v7a.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-x86-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-x86.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-x86_64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-android-x86_64.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-emscripten-wasm-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-emscripten-wasm.bc
virtualjaguar_libretro-ios-arm64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-ios-arm64.dylib
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-aarch64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-aarch64.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-i686-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-i686.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi1-armv6-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi1-armv6.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi2-cortex-a7-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi2-cortex-a7.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi3-cortex-a53-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi3-cortex-a53.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi3_64-cortex-a53-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi3_64-cortex-a53.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi4-cortex-a72-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi4-cortex-a72.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi4_64-cortex-a72-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi4_64-cortex-a72.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi5-cortex-a76-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi5-cortex-a76.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi5_64-cortex-a76-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-rpi5_64-cortex-a76.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-x86_64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-linux-x86_64.so
virtualjaguar_libretro-macos-arm64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-macos-arm64.dylib
virtualjaguar_libretro-macos-x86_64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-macos-x86_64.dylib
virtualjaguar_libretro-switch-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-switch.a
virtualjaguar_libretro-tvos-arm64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-tvos-arm64.dylib
virtualjaguar_libretro-vita-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-vita.a
virtualjaguar_libretro-windows-i686-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-windows-i686.dll
virtualjaguar_libretro-windows-x86_64-debug.tar.gz
virtualjaguar_libretro-windows-x86_64.dll
virtualjaguar_libretro.info

SHA-256 checksums

Verify with sha256sum --check SHA256SUMS.txt (Linux) or
shasum -a 256 --check SHA256SUMS.txt (macOS).
See SECURITY.md
for full verification instructions and antivirus false-positive guidance.

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