ElSemi and I have been fixing up the SCSP emulation in MAME lately due to the emergence of .SSF (Saturn/ST-V) music rips. He’s still working out why samples in Radient Silvergun get overdriven all to heck, but in the meantime I’ve done the following:

• Fixed the effects DSP to work properly in MAME – the kick drum in Shienryu now has the proper reverb applied, and this fixes missing sounds/instruments in several ST-V games. It also fixed a Saturn Qsound demo disc that boots over in MESS
• Rewrote the timers to use MAME timers. This fixes missing sound in a few ST-V games and gives Die Hard Arcade correct tempo. It also eliminates the IRQ storms you may have seen running ST-V games with -oslog
• Fixed some IRQ trouble. This got sound working again in Model 2A games, like Dead or Alive

The final version of Audio Overload 2.0b8 is out on Richard’s page. It’s got a few more GUI touchups over the previews I’d posted here before. I’m working on a 64-bit Windows version with Vista UI enhancements but there’s no ETA currently. The fact that there’s no 64-bit GCC for Windows yet makes this more annoying as I must first get the AO core (that’s the DLL file) to build with Visual Studio. After that it’s pretty simple though – just build with the VS.NET “Orcas” beta and my patience with MFC is rewarded by the app becoming magically Vista-aware.

One off-topic thing: if anyone reading this knows anyone who’s doing .PSF (PS1 music) rips, *please* have them test their rips on AO and not just on Neill Corlett’s plugin. This isn’t just me being selfish – rips that only work on Neill’s plugin will likely not run properly on real hardware either in case someone makes a hardware player in the future. (Don’t laugh, hardware players exist for SIDs and NSFs). I’m more than happy to work with rippers on things that don’t work in AO – it’s often something fairly simple.

I’m currently on vacation (until Saturday the 15th) and deliberately limiting my online access. I do not know what happened to bannister.org, I have not been in contact with Richard. bannister.org is back after an ISP screwup. And sending me time-critical stuff (e.g. eBay auctions) is probably a bad idea – you may wish to contact Aaron or Haze or Guru in the meantime.

I finally got the scanline interrupts and vertical position counter for the MESS Apple IIgs driver behaving, although that exposes a new problem: the RGB values for the border colors aren’t quite right. Oh well, one step at a time. (Update: the border/text colors now match the official values from IIgs Tech Note #63, and the screenshot has been updated). At least the Split Demo looks a lot better. For the unfamiliar, the first set of bars that are the full width of the screen are raster effects, switching the border color to match the graphics part of the image. The bars lower down are actually fully within the bottom border.