openMSX 0.6.3

A new version of openMSX, the multi-platform emulator that aims for perfection, has been released! A lot of work has gone into this new version, resulting in -among others- many new sound related features. As usual, this emulator comes without system ROM's. If you don't own these essential ROMs, you won't be able to use all the possible MSX configurations and extensions. For this reason, C-BIOS ships with openMSX, a legal alternative, enough to play all the essential ROM's. Also included in the package is Catapult, the user friendly launcher for openMSX.

As mentioned, openMSX 0.6.3 contains several new features and improvements related to sound. All sound chips are emulated at their native frequency and resampled using advanced resampling techniques to the desired output frequency (typically 44.1 kHz). The advanced resamplers improve the sound quality a lot, because they are free of aliasing distortion.

There are three resamplers you can choose from: "fast", which produces approximately the same results as previous openMSX releases, "blip", which produces better sound and is still quite fast and "hq", which produces the best sound but takes a lot of CPU power. Since the quality difference between "blip" and "hq" is very small and the speed difference quite large, "blip" is the recommended resampler and the new default.

More sound related improvements include stereo balance settings for each sound chip and the ability to record individual channels of sound chips. This is a feature that may well serve people who make remixes and/or remakes. For PSG two brand new effects have been added: vibrato and detune. As many of the more recent games have vibrato in their PSG player, the effect may not be suitable here. For older games however -including games from Konami-, the effect may make the sound much richer and more pleasant to listen to. Try this in games such as Penguin Adventure and Vampire Killer. Detune is all about slight fluctuations in the frequency of individual PSG channels. This effect mimics the human errors from a real performance. A simple PLAY "L1c","L1c","L1c" in MSX-BASIC should make everything clear. To make usage of all these new PSG settings easier, a few common PSG profiles are included as console command.

Thanks to the blueMSX Team, the openMSX team was able to quickly bring on some new features: emulation of the VLM5030, the sample chip used in the unreleased Konami game Keyboard Master and emulation of the synthesis part of the Yamaha SFG-05 sound module (keyboard and MIDI support is still missing).

Also on the non-sound department, the code of the blueMSX Team has enabled the openMSX team to add some new features: Gouda SCSI, MEGA-SCSI, ESE RAM, ESE SCC and WAVE SCSI. Note that the SCSI emulation is still experimental, so make sure you don't use it to store data of which you don't have recent backups.

Last but not least: a lock-up bug was removed from the Windows version, which could occur on Dual Core and Hyper Threading CPU's.

All the essentials in a nutshell:

New or improved emulator features:

• Several resampling algorithms now available: hq, blip and fast; the first two eliminate aliasing
• Channels of sound chips can be individually recorded and muted
• Sound chips now have a stereo balance setting instead of a left/right/mono mode
• PSG sound effects: vibrato and detune
• SDLGL-PP renderer (OpenGL 2.0) can now do RGBTriplet scaling in hardware
• Several small optimizations, mostly in SDLGL-PP renderer and CPU emulation
• Many new game trainers

Home-grown MSX device support:

• Improved accuracy in SCC emulation
• Support for password cartridge
• Support for the Super Lode Runner mapper

MSX device support ported from blueMSX:

• Partial support for Yamaha SFG-05
• Support for Konami's Keyboard Master
• Support for ESE Artists' Factory devices: MEGA-SCSI, ESE RAM, ESE SCC, WAVE-SCSI
• Support for Gouda/Novaxis SCSI
• Real support for the Halnote mapper

Build system, packaging, documentation:

• Added support for building a statically linked executable on Windows
• Added support for building a backwards compatible executable on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (thanks to BouKiCHi)
• Added support for DESTDIR, which should help packagers

For the complete list of changes, please read the release notes. You can download openMSX 0.6.3 from SourceForge; source, Win32 and Mac OS X (universal) packages are available. Andete made packages for Debian Etch and Ubuntu Gutsy. Packages for Debian Lenny and FreeBSD 6 should be available soon in their respective repositories.

Relevant link: openMSX website