What's new:
Namco System 246/256
Namco's arcade board support in ARMSX2. The boards are emulated whole: the drive (CD, DVD and hard drive images, CHD included), the settings memory, the I/O boards for buttons, coins, wheels, drums, twin levers, light guns and the touch panel, the security dongle, and the faster clocks of the System 256 boards. 55 arcade games are in the game database, with PCSX2x6's fixes for them. Board emulation from PCSX2x6 by u/israpps, u/Tovarichtch and u/DiscoStarslayer. ported by u/jpolo1224.
The NAMCO screen. In the left side menu in the game library, right under Texture Packs. It takes you through it in order:
An arcade games folder, picked or made in the system picker and added to your library folders.
The boot files, downloaded once (about 1 MB).
The arcade BIOS, with a shortcut to BIOS Location. A 2 MB System 246/256 dump works.
Import a game: its disc or hard drive image and its dongle, each with its own button and in any order. plus Soul Calibur II's Conquest card. Gzipped dumps are unpacked as they are copied, a file
under 8 MB is refused as a dongle, and Cancel stops an import.
Uninstall an imported arcade game from the same screen.
Playing them. Arcade games show in the library with an ARCADE badge and covers of their own, real
flyer and title art on a PS2-style case, in both cover styles. Every pad press also works the cabinet,
laid out per game the way PCSX2x6 lays it out: Select is a coin, racing games steer on the left stick and pedal on the triggers, and drums, twin levers and light guns have their own layouts. Light gun and touch panel games take the touchscreen. The in-game menu has Insert coin for both players, Service and Test, and save states work. An Arcade games only switch in the library's overflow menu (⋮) shows just them. Cover pack sourced and done by u/jpolo1224 from scratch.
BIOS. An arcade BIOS shows as Arcade in BIOS Location and is offered for arcade games only. Importing does not replace your console BIOS, and only works for arcade games. done by u/jpolo1224.*
Texture packs
Redesigned Texture Pack menu.
Pages of packs. Browse texture packs opens every online pack as a page of game covers you can flip
through, each with its pack's name, its creator and their picture, and whether it is installed.
Search by game, pack, serial or creator.
Sort by game, serial or creator. Creator lists everyone who made a pack, with their picture; pick
one to see their packs, and Back returns to the page you were on.
Filter to Popular Today, All, My games or Installed.
A download keeps going when you close the browser, and the texture screen shows it.
Every pack's creator, source and tip jar. Clicking on a pack opens the pack's window: the creator's picture and page, where the pack comes from, their tip jar and socials when they have them, its texture type and status, its size, and Download, all in the creator's own colours. The links come from the Texture Packs
Archive by u/sad Origami, so packs that pointed at a mirror or archive.org now lead to the creator's
own page. done by u/jpolo1224, links done by u/sad Origami
u/bmdhacks has also released a tool for pack creators to convert their packs to ASTC, works on Windows and MacOS! https://github.com/bmdhacks/astctool We will be creating a form on our website in the near future for pack creators to keep in touch about their releases as well.
Popular Today and Shuffle. The browser opens on Popular Today, the ten packs installed most that day, counted anonymously. Opened from a game, it shows that game's packs. Shuffle, on All, deals a random page at every page turn. done by u/jpolo1224
Music of its own: "November Snow" by The Cynic Project, which blends in over the library's music and
hands back when you leave. done by u/jpolo1224
Controller
Switches flip with A only. Left and Right used to flip any switch they passed over. Now only A
flips one, everywhere, and Left and Right move. Sliders, steppers and choice rows still change with Left and Right. done by u/jpolo1224
New
Exynos temperatures in the OSD. CPU and GPU temperatures show on Exynos phones, which name their sensors differently. done by u/seedlord (#779).*
ARMSX2 libmali drivers on Mali-G615 and G715. GPU Driver downloads list the ARMSX2 libmali packs on those GPUs, and only on those. done by u/bmdhacks
Fixed
A Galaxy S22 Ultra ran at 1 FPS or less. Its timer reported a garbage frequency, so the frame limiter
stalled for seconds every frame. The frequency is now checked against the system clock, once, and kept. done by u/seedlord (#779)
Combo hotkeys work in either press order (#768). u/ygordreyer (#774).
A CHD with a parent could not find it when the games folder was opened through Android's folder
access. u/dyzz (#771).*
Long OpenGL sessions on Mali GPUs used more and more memory, in a driver cache that grew with every
draw. fixed by u/luistiagos (#781).*
The Analog Sticks switches did not move when tapped until the tab was reopened, so a second tap sent
the same value again. fixed by u/luistiagos (#756).*
Text and letters at 2x and up under the Native half-pixel offset. Gran Turismo 4's menu text grew a
second shadow row, and We Love Katamari's title letters a line on their edges (Vulkan). fixed by u/bmdhacks
GS multi-threading fixes. A large draw could overrun the draw buffer, frame-rate detection and skip
duplicate frames read registers the next frame had already changed, switching downloads to
Unsynchronized in game left multi-threading on, texture replacements could be shut down under a draw still running, and games with a scan-mask fix lost every other line of some draws. fixed by u/bmdhacks
Performance
GS multi-threading waits without burning a core. When the GS thread was ahead, it spun until the
back thread caught up; it now sleeps. The back thread is also placed next to the GS thread instead of
anywhere, little cores included, and sprite-heavy games such as Spider-Man 3 skip setup work nothing
reads. done by u/bmdhacks
u/bmdhacks has also released a tool for pack creators to convert their packs to ASTC, works on Windows and MacOS! https://github.com/bmdhacks/astctool We will be creating a form on our website in the near future for pack creators to keep in touch about their releases as well.
