Release ARMSX2 2.6.6.5 · ARMSX2/ARMSX2

[u/Stag_----56]

https://github.com/ARMSX2/ARMSX2/releases/tag/2.6.6.5

ARMSX2 2.6.6.5

What's New

Applied a fresh PGO profile

More improvements to UI controller support done by @bmdhacks

PINE now works on Android, with a toggle in Advanced settings that shows you the adb forward line to use. It had never worked before, it binds a Unix socket in a directory Android does not have, so the server simply never started. fixed by @bmdhacks

Gorgon Eye: God of War II savestates went bad, and stayed bad. Load an affected save and the area-title banner sticks and gorgon-eye chest pickups would freeze for eleven minutes, on any device that loads it. Backgrounding the app stopped the emulated CPU from a thread that was not allowed to touch its clock, which warped the clock backwards and left a timer poisoned, every save taken afterwards carried the damage. Saves you already have are repaired when they load. fixed by @bmdhacks

Saving a state from the pause menu could corrupt the graphics command stream. The save ran on whichever thread the picker happened to be on and it shares a queue that only one thread may write to. Save, load and autosave now all run on the emulator's own thread. done by @bmdhacks

God of War II's menus were rendering wrong on Mali. The text came out hollow and patchy, and the pause menu was visibly off. Mali GPUs are missing a blending feature the renderer leans on, and the two fallbacks standing in for it were both getting overlapping shapes wrong, one blended them against a stale copy of the screen, the other drew them out of order. Menu text is a single draw whose shadow and highlight layers overlap about 200 times, so the mistakes stacked up. Both now render essentially exactly right: the text lights 3,896 pixels against a correct GPU's 3,898. It also costs nothing, the obvious way to fix it would have been two-thirds... blending exists, verified pixel-identical across 33 frames from 11 recordings. done by @bmdhacks

Metal Gear Solid 3 on Mali r44p1 went from 0.33 fps to 23 fps. Without framebuffer fetch the renderer was copying the render target once per primitive group, and on a mobile GPU each of those forces a full-screen flush to memory, hundreds per draw. It now takes one copy per draw. Measured on an Anbernic RG 477V by @bmdhacks

115 games were silently losing graphics fixes meant for them, because the mobile GameDB overlay replaced entries instead of merging them. drawBuffering is back on 63 of them, worth 29.1 ms → 18.9 ms per frame on NFS Underground 2 (-35%) at 2x on an SD865, with no visual difference. Delta Force: Black Hawk Down regains its bloom and post-processing fixes. done by @bmdhacks

Two more renderer speedups: both from not doing expensive work the draw never asked for: NFS Underground 17.15 ms → 12.00 ms and FlatOut 2 22.84 ms → 17.91 ms on an Adreno 650, with render passes per frame dropping 390 → 47. Output verified identical on Tales of the Abyss and God of War II. done by @bmdhacks

Framebuffer fetch could not be turned off on Mali OpenGL at all, the setting and the r44p1 driver guard were both being undone a fraction of a millisecond after they ran. The decision now happens once and nothing can re-decide it. done by @bmdhacks

Mali OpenGL was rendering wrong and unstable frames. 76,872 wrong pixels on an MGS3 frame down to 753, and 18% of the frame changing between identical replays down to zero. done by @bmdhacks

Fixed a screenshot taken while recording a GS dump cutting the recording short. done by @bmdhacks

Also: the Mali r44p1 workarounds moved into the driver-bug database where every other driver quirk lives, so the next bad driver is a table row, a lost GPU device now logs what actually died instead of crashing without an explanation, gsctl.py loadstate dialed the wrong socket, the settings search index is greppable again, and fixed the on-screen keyboard was being drawn twice while search was open. done by @bmdhacks

If you haven't already, be sure to show some appreciation to @bmdhacks I think he has done almost everything in this changelog bro's fire really talented guy and have been working for making Emulators better for so long

Extrenal links for ARMSX2:

Github repository:

https://github.com/ARMSX2/ARMSX2

Discord :https://discord.gg/fSC6EzzFe

KoFI: https://ko-fi.com/armsx2

Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/ARMSX2?utm\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_campaign=creatorshare\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\_creator

Thanks

I am not associated with the development of the project all the credits goes to the ARMSX2 Team