openMSX 0.3.1 released

Today a new version of openMSX was released: openMSX 0.3.1 - Quibus Birthday Release. The released version runs on Linux. We're working together closely with Reikan, so you can expect a Win32 version soon. The release notes are included below.

Release notes for openMSX 0.3.1 (2003-05-18)

It's been a short time since 0.3.0, but we thought the following changes are important enough to release now:

Fixed compilation on GCC 3.3.
Fixed SDLGL renderer on XFree86 4.3.

Regular development continued as well, so this release also contains the following improvements:

New feature: configurable file-extentions.
Improved layout of help text (try "openmsx -h").
Many improvements to the console, including:
- Extended the console editing keys (left, right, del, bs, home, end etc).
- Added key repeat.
- Reset the scrollback when any key other than page up/down is used.
- Added resizing and moving to the console.
- SDL console characters are no longer blended (improved readability).
- SDL backgroundimage can be scaled and can have any pixel format.
- Fixed colour of font on GLConsole overlayed on Text1 mode.
Emulation and event handling are now done in a single thread. The previous multi-threaded solution was not very portable among platforms or even different versions of the same platform. As a bonus, the single thread model is simpler and more efficient.
Improved "make install".
Cleanups of the directory structure.

Read the "ChangeLog" inside the archive for a detailed list of changes. In "doc/openMSX-HOWTO.txt" you can find a lot of useful information on openMSX, make sure you read this if you haven't used openMSX before.

Known issues / caveats:

In its current alpha state, openMSX is usable for power users, but its interface is not very friendly to casual users yet.
Emulation is not perfect yet. However, in the emulator comparison of msx.org, openMSX scored highest on accuracy of all emulators tested. See the bug tracker on sourceforge.net for known bugs.
Until we reach version 1.0.0, file formats can change in an incompatible way without backwards compatiblity. Keep this in mind if you create machine descriptions, rom database entries etc.
This openMSX release is only tested on Linux. Reikan maintains a Win32 port, which follows openMSX CVS closely, but is not the same. You can find it at www.ranpub.com/openMSX4Win32/
Running on BSD, Mac OS X, BeOS etc (wherever SDL runs) should be possible, but will probably not work out-of-the-box. If you are compiling on such a platform, please share your experiences (see below for contact info), so we can make openMSX more portable.
CPU and graphics performance varies a lot, depending on the openMSX settings and the MSX hardware and software you're emulating. Some things run fine on a 200MHz machine, others are slow on a 2GHz machine. Some performance tips:
- Make sure there are no CPU consuming background processes running.
- Generally, MSX1 emulation is fastest and turbo R emulation is slowest.
- SDLGL renderer needs hardware acceleration to run at a decent speed. Disabling scanlines and blur (set to 0) helps on older graphics cards.
- Use 16-bit colour mode instead of 32-bit (platform setting is used).
- Use line accuracy (default) instead of pixel accuracy.
- Turn on frame skip ("set frameskip auto").
- Use low-res SDLLo renderer (75% less pixels to fill).