Our first Progress Report is now online!

One of our regular contributors Velocity volunteered to write a progress report, capturing everything we've been up to over the past month or so. Rinnegatamante added a blog to the website to enable it. Check the link for the full report, but here's a quick run-down of what was discussed:

Module loading

While homebrew games are generally self-contained, commercial games often load some libraries from the memory/game card when they start up. Now the emulator has some support for loading these, enabling a few commercial games to boot!

We still have a way to go before commercial games show anything onscreen, let alone are playable, but we're working on it!

Kernel synchronisation primitives

The emulator previously had enough support for multithreading to allow homebrews like vitaQuake to run without crashing, but not enough for any real world communication between threads. Now we support semaphores and the two types of mutexes.

GUI/debugger

With the emulator increasing in complexity, we needed a way to inspect its state at runtime. We integrated the "dear imgui" library and added some inspection windows, showing the state of threads, semaphores and mutexes.

Lots of fixes and improvements

There were too many changes made to cram into a Progress Report, so we concentrated on discussing the bigger ones that have the most visible effect.

Other changes included improvements to logging, better support for Linux, more resilience to unrecognised shaders, clearer bridge between ARM and C++, and lots more stuff.

Finishing up

A big thanks go to all our contributors. I didn't expect we would have such support from the development community and it's been inspiring to have them on board. Thank you also go out to our testers, IllusionMan1212, Zangetsu38 and others, for testing games and building a comprehensive homebrew compatibility database!

And of course, thanks go to you, our patrons, for your support!

- Peter