blueMSX 2.5

Yesterday, a brand new version of blueMSX was released during the MSX Info Update party in Helsinki, Finland. Daniel Vik, main developer of the popular emulator, presented new features of the emulator to the visitors of this event by video.

With a full changelog available on the blueMSX website, the main new features, fixes and improvements since the previous version are:

The implementation of a new controllers and keyboard editor, which gives even more comfort to gamers and will allow relatively simple support for other computers or consoles in future versions
Hard-disk emulation, by emulation of the Sunrise IDE, Beer IDE and GIDE interfaces
Emulation of the YM2151 sound chip and the YK-01, YK-10 and YK-20 music keyboards, which makes blueMSX the first emulator to be able to support the Yamaha CX5M, CX5M-128 and CX7M-128 computers. The MIDI part of the Yamaha SFG cartridges is not yet available
Added support for the MHT Ingenieros Gunstick and the ASCII Plus-X Terminator Laser
Added support for two 80 columns graphics cards on MSX1 : Microsol VMX-80 and SVI-737
Added support for Video In, Sony HBI-V1 digitizer and the digitization part of the Philips NMS-8280 computer
Added superimpose and external video source support in V9938 emulation
Added support for PNG screenshots
Added support for creating new disk images of various size on MSX and SVI-328
Added support for undocumented screen mode (screen 0 with screen 2 style name table addressing)
Added a new display synchronization method
Added a video option to blend consecutive frames and get smoother picture
Added support for the YM2149 PSG

And many other additions, fixes and tweaks. Apart from the emulator itself, the debugger was improved as well, while the blueMSX trainer now boasts from a cheat database with cheats for no less than 396 popular MSX games.

Relevant link: blueMSX

Comments (19)

By mars2000you

Enlighted (6430)

09-07-2006, 16:05

A little precision !

IMPORTANT ! There were some little bugs in the first version that was made available (build 26581) ; they concerned the ColecoVision joystick, the timing in Turbo-R machines and the Knightmare cheat. If you have downloaded this first version, please download the bugfixed version (build 26597). You can find the build number in the About menu.

By tfh

Prophet (3316)

09-07-2006, 16:23

TFH is looking forward to the new MSX Emulator comparisation

By snout

Ascended (15187)

09-07-2006, 17:45

I'm looking forward to -doing- the next MSX Emulator Comparison... but, alas it will not appear on extremely short notice...

10-07-2006, 09:00

Hmmmzzz.. I expected you would have had it almost finisched by now!

By wolf_

Ambassador_ (10092)

10-07-2006, 11:05

Well, the Worldcup is over again, snout.activity++;

By sunrise

Paragon (1091)

10-07-2006, 12:06

Big compliment for this brandnew version,although I was a little privilged to test it a little earlier

10-07-2006, 16:57

sunrise, many thanks also for your great help and support !

By only_69

Hero (565)

10-07-2006, 21:49

Nice release and ... no video recording support

By dvik

Prophet (2200)

10-07-2006, 22:15

I know you've been asking for it for a long time now and I also know you'd use it to create really nice videos so it is about time that we do something about the video recording support now.

11-07-2006, 00:49

Great Daniel!!!! For sure, you will make someone happy!

By SLotman

Paragon (1242)

11-07-2006, 04:33

Everytime I try the emulator, it crashes on me
(Installed on a empty dir, no SSE or SSE2 version, on Win98 on a p2-400, 256mb ram)

I even try to remove some register keys, but to no help... the strange thing is that the "beta" released some time ago worked without problems...

11-07-2006, 04:35

...and by crashing I mean: I double click on the exe, crash (not even showing the main window)

very strange behaviour... and I was looking forward to see the terminator lightgun emulation

11-07-2006, 04:48

Do you have a video capture card on your PC? If you do then you can replace the following line in blueMSX.ini:

videoIn.disabled=0

videoIn.disabled=1

It seems to be some video capture cards that causes problems. I haven't found one that is not working yet, but it solved a similar crash for another user. Even if you don't have one, can you try to change this line?

11-07-2006, 15:33

Although I dont have a video-capture card, it indeed solved the problem, thanks dvik!

By jltursan

Prophet (2619)

11-07-2006, 21:13

I've found some strange issues about PNG screenshots saving. I'm not able to see a single screenshot saved with this format. All the viewers keeps yelling that they are invalid or corrupt image files. I'm using Irfanview and Firefox mainly; so I suposse that they are right

11-07-2006, 21:41

I've made some tests : it works in default Windows tools : the 'quick viewer' and Paint. But tools like HP Image Zone or Firefox can't open the PNG files created by blueMSX. Strange ...

11-07-2006, 22:12

Strange indeed. I only used the tools mars listed when testing the png screenshots. I'll try to figure out whats wrong and fix it for next release.

11-07-2006, 22:29

If I check with WinHex PNG files created by blueMSX and the result of conversion in Paint of BMP files into PNG files, the problems seems to be in the header : between the PNG/IHDR 'flags' and the IDAT 'flag', some other 'flags' or data are missing in the blueMSX PNG files.

By BiFi

Enlighted (4348)

12-07-2006, 07:33

isn't there some library for saving png files? I thought it was common knowledge microsoft does everything standardized the not-standard way...

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