IMPORTANT: Before downloading, open Settings > General > Date & Time, and set the date back at least one day in the past. Once GBA4iOS has downloaded, open it, then. Escaping the shrieking maw of Twitter aboard the hashtag #CNNblackmail, a story started circulating today about the news network threatening to release the personal. It’s a jailbreak. A Universal jailbreak for almost every eInk Kindle eReader. To block these annoying links, just install Freedom ($29/year or $119 forever), open your dashboard, select “Add a blocklist,” and enter these domains.

Welcome to Kotaku’s Sunday Comics, your weekly roundup of the best webcomics that usually occurs on Sunday except when it doesn’t. The images enlarge if you click. Yet another success for our burgeoning class of Silicon Valley overlords and their relentless quest to delegate all menial tasks in life to some sort of app: Booster. The developers have revealed plans to add link cable support for trading Pokemon, and they even hope to provide GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS support at some point.

Emulator Lets You Run Regular Windows PC Apps on Windows RTLast month, Windows RT users saw the arrival of a jailbreak tool to remove one of Microsoft’s restrictions imposed upon the new platform; by taking advantage of the tool, they could run non- Microsoft- approved executables in the tablet’s desktop mode. That was cool, but you couldn’t just run any old Windows app for a PC, as code had to be compiled especially for the ARM processors in tablets like the Surface RT.

Open source apps could be recompiled with such goals in mind, but that still left a lot of commercial software unavailable. Now there’s some progress towards overcoming that limitation, with the release of an x. Windows RT. This program is very much in beta, and it has a number of limitations, but at the very least it’s a functional demo of what’s possible. For instance, it only works with 3. Windows apps, and it can’t deal with one Windows app trying to launch another.

Today, we celebrate two years of GBA4iOS 2.0 Here's to a fantastic 2016.

Happy Chick Emulator is an exhaustive collection of video games from across platforms and generations, including various home consoles, handsets and arcade devices.

As work on the emulator continues, compatibility should start getting better, and it may even evolve into a tool that runs seamlessly in the background; for now, apps need to be started- up through the emulator like a launcher. If you’re interested in giving it a spin, the project’s thread over on the XDA- Developers forums containers a number of tips for tweaking settings to help get stubborn apps running acceptably. Source: XDA- Developers forums.

Libretro – A crossplatform application API, powering the crossplatform gaming platform Retro. Arch. I needed a break from para. LLEl RDP, and I wanted to give PSX a shot to have an excuse to write a higher level Vulkan renderer backend.

The renderer backends in Beetle PSX are quite well abstracted away, so plugging in my own renderer was a trivial task. The original Play. Station is certainly a massively simpler architecture than N6. After one evening of studying the Rustation renderer by simias and PSX GPU docs, I had a decent idea of how it worked. Many hardware features of the N6. Perspective correctness (no W from GTE)Texture filtering.

Sub- pixel precision on vertices (wobbly polygons, wee)Mipmapping. No programmable texture cache. Depth buffering. Complex combiners. My goal was to create a very accurate HW renderer which supports internal upscaling. Making anything at native res for PSX is a waste of time as software renderers are basically perfected at this point in Mednafen and more than fast enough due to the simplicity. Another goal was to improve my experience with 2. D heavy games like the Square RPGs which heavily mix 2.

D elements with 3. D. I always had issues with upscaling plugins back in the day as I always had to accept blocky and ugly 2. D in order to get crisp 3.

D. Simply sampling all textures with bilinear is one approach, but it falls completely flat on PSX. Content was not designed with this in mind at all, and you’ll quickly find that tons of artifacts are created when the bilinear filtering tries to filter outside its designated blocks in VRAM. The final goal is to do all of this without ugly hacks, game specific workarounds or otherwise shitty code. It was excusable in a time where graphics APIs could not cleanly express what emulation authors wanted to express, but now we can. Development of this renderer was a fairly smooth ride, mostly done in spare time over ~2 months.

Credits. This renderer would not exist without the excellent Mednafen emulator and Rustation GL renderer. Tested hardware/driversn. Vidia Linux/Windows 3.

AMDGPU- PRO 1. 6. Linux (works fully)Mesa Intel (Ivy Bridge half- way working, Broadwell+, fully working, you’ll want to build from Git to get some important bug fixes which were uncovered by this renderer : D)Mesa Radeon RADV (fully working, you’ll want to build from Git to get support for input attachments)– But, but, I don’t have a Vulkan- capable GPUWell, read on anyways, some of this work will benefit the GL renderer as well.– But, but, you’re stupid, you should do this in GL 1. No . Interestingly enough, this VRAM is actually organized as a 2. D grid, and not a flat array with width/height/stride.

This certainly simplifies things a lot as we can now represent the VRAM as a texture instead of shuffling data in and out of SSBOs. Unlike N6. 4, the CPU doesn’t have direct access to this VRAM (phew), so access is mediated by various commands.

Textures. The PSX can sample textures at 4- bit palettes, 8- bit palettes or straight ABGR1. Texture coordinates are confined to a texture window, which is basically an elaborate way to implement texture repeats. Textures are sampled directly from VRAM, but there is a small texture cache. For purposes of emulation, this cache is ignored (except for one particular case which we’ll get to .

There is no real alpha channel to speak of, we only have one bit, so what PSX does is set a constant transparency formula, (A + B, 0. A + 0. 5. B, B – A, or 0. A + B). If the high- bit of a texture color is set, transparency is enabled, if not, the fragment is considered opaque. Semi- transparent color- only primitives are simply always transparent. Mask- bit. Possibly the most difficult feature of the PSX GPU is the mask- bit. The alpha bit in VRAM is considered a “read- only” bit if mask bit testing is enabled and the read- only bit is set.

This affects rendering primitives as well as copies from CPU and VRAM- to- VRAM blits. Especially mask- bit emulation + semi- transparency creates a really difficult blending scenario which I haven’t found a way to do correctly with fixed function (but that won’t stop us in Vulkan).

Correctly emulating mask- bit lets us render Silent Hill correctly. The trees have transparent quads around them without it. Intersecting VRAM blits. It is possible, and apparently, well defined on PSX to blit from one part of VRAM to another part where the rects intersect.

Reading the Mednafen/Beetle software implementation, we need to kind of emulate the texture cache. Fortunately, this was very doable with compute shaders, although not very efficient. Implementation details. Feature – Adaptive smoothing.

As mentioned, I prefer smooth 2. D with crisp- looking 3. D. I devised a scheme to do this in post. The basic idea is to look at our 4x or 8x scaled image, we then mip- map that down to 1x with a box filter. While mip- mapping, we analyze the variance within the 4. The assumption here is that if we have nearest- neighbor scaled 2. D elements, they typically have a 1: 1 pixel correspondency in native resolution, and hence, the variance within the block will be 0.

With 3. D elements, there will be some kind of variance, either by values which were shaded slightly differently, or more dramatically, a geometry edge. We now compute an R8. To avoid sharp transitions in LOD, the bias- mask is then blurred slightly with a 3. Sure, it’s not perfect, but I’m quite happy with the result. Consider this scene from FF IX. While some will prefer this look (it’s toggleable), I’m not a big fan of blocky nearest- neighbor backgrounds together with high- res models.

With adaptive smoothing, we can smooth out the background and speech bubble back to native resolution where they belong. You may notice that the shadow under Vivi is sharp, because the shadow which modulates the background is not 1: 1. This is the downside of doing it in post certainly, but it’s hard to notice unless you’re really looking. The bias mask texture looks like this after the blur: Potential further ideas here would be to use the bias- mask as a lerp between x.

BR- style upscalers if we wanted to actually make the GPU not fall asleep. There is nothing inherently Vulkan specific about this method, so it will possibly arrive in the GL backend at some point as well. It can probably be used with N6. Obviously, for 2. FMVs), the output is always in native resolution.

GPU dump player. Just like the N6. RDP, having an offline dump player for debugging, playback and analysis is invaluable, so the first thing I did was to create a basic dump format which captures PSX GPU commands and plays them back. This is also nice for benchmarking as any half- capable GPU will be bottlenecked on CPU. PGXP support. Supporting PGXP for sub- pixel precision and perspective correctness was trivial as all the work happens outside the renderer abstraction to begin with. I just had to pass down W to the vertex shader. Mask bit emulation. Mask bit emulation without transparency is quite trivial.

When rendering, we just use fixed function blending, src = INV. To solve this, I made use of Vulkan’s subpass self- dependency feature which allows us to read the pixel of the framebuffer which enables programmable blending. Cessna 172 Garmin G1000 Poh on this page.

Now, mask- bit emulation becomes trivial. This feature is a standard way of doing the equivalent of GL.

For mask- bit in copies and blits, this is done in compute, so implementing mask bit here is trivial. Copies/Blits. Copies in VRAM are all implemented in compute. The main reason for this is mask bit emulation becomes trivial, plus that we can now overlap GPU execution of rendering and blits if they don’t intersect each other in VRAM. It is also much easier to batch up these blits with compute, whereas doing it in fragment adds some restrictions as we would need to potentially create many tiny render passes to blit small regions one by one, and we need blending to implement masked blits, which places some restrictions on which formats we can use.