Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Back Online

Apologies for the lack of updates. I've not had internet access at home since moving flat at the end of August. My ADSL was activated today so I'm finally up and running again. I can't believe how long it's taken!

Between the flat move and a busy few weeks at work (getting ready for the Tokyo Game Show) I've not had that much time to work on Daedalus, but I have made some progress on a really cool feature people have been asking for for some time, namely savestate support.

For those not familiar with savestates, the basic premise is very much like 'hibernate' or sleep modes on PCs and laptops. A savestate can be created at any point during emulation. At a later time the savestate can be reloaded to restore the emulator to the exact state it was in when the savestate was created.

What's really useful about savestates is that they work even if the underlying save mechanism used by a rom isn't supported properly. I'm hoping that by adding savestate support Daedalus will become significantly more usable for many roms. Savestates also make development a lot easier as it means I can jump straight into the middle of a game when debugging/profiling rather than sitting through the title sequence dozens of times.

I still have a little bit of work left to do on the savestate system, mostly on the UI side, but there are a number of additional optimisations I want to finish off before I release R13. I'm currently planning to get everything ready for release on either the weekend of the 29th Sept, or possibly the first weekend in October.

-StrmnNrmn