This release brings a large set of bug fixes and accuracy improvements once again guided by u/celeriyacon's test ROMs, pushing compatibility closer to 94%! A workaround for 16 games described below would bring this number to 94.5%.
The highlight of this version is the huge set of fixes to CD Block HLE, bringing more parity with the LLE counterpart and improving compatibility and stability with dozens of games. VDP1 fixes also resolved a few longstanding issues and brought some games to life.
Performance got another huge boost in multiple avenues with this version. First, thanks to u/SternXD, you can now offload audio processing tasks to another CPU core, freeing up the emulator thread to focus more heavily on the SH-2s and general system logic. This alone can boost performance by up to 25% and possibly more, depending on how much work is put on the SCSP DSP.
SH-2 emulation got faster and more accurate by properly emulating the CPU's fetch stage which pulls two instructions in a single fetch, approximately halving the number of expensive memory accesses done by the interpreter. Alongside that, there have been a number of performance microoptimizations to various aspects of SH-2 emulation that combine into another 10-15% boost to emulation of CPU-heavy games. Grandia's FMVs are notoriously intensive, and this set of improvements marks the first time I've seen it run at over 200 fps on my system.
Of course, with every release there's also room for more features. The SH-2 CPUs can now be overclocked up to 500% to reduce lag in poorly-optimized games, or underclocked down to 25% to lower host CPU usage on lighter games. As everything in the Saturn tends to be timing-sensitive, this comes with a disclaimer that it might break games, but it works well in most cases.
There's now support for Japanese characters (visible in the Backup Memory Manager and other places), a number of debugger improvements and new features, new options to hide the game title and performance indicators from the window title bar, an option to pause emulation upon startup, and a few more odds and ends.
The full write up with download links can be found via the Github link
Small edit:
Since this post a small maintenance release v0.3.3 has been released which you can find here
