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Summary
The main focus of this maintenance release is to fix a couple of regressions introduced in 0.82.0 and older releases, mostly related to game compatibility. The other big improvement is the CPU usage of the 3dfx Voodoo emulation has been reduced by about 50%, so your computer won’t go into hoover-mode anymore when playing those Voodoo games 😎 🌀
This release was made possible by everyone who tried 0.82.0, submitted bugs and pull requests, and tested the updates. Thank you!
Game compatibility fixes
- Fix DreamWeb regression introduced in 0.81.2 where the grayscale text in the intro appeared “quantised” to pure black and white colours.
- Fix Epic Pinball: Super Android (shareware v1.1) regression where the music was playing too quickly with doubled notes on the Gravis UltraSound (the Epic Pinball: The Complete Collection CD version was not affected).
- Fix audio stuttering regression above ~100k cycles in Nethack: Falcon’s Eye.
- Fix regression where an executable could not be started by its extensionless name if another file with the same name and no extension was present in the same directory (e.g., if you had SKI.EXE and SKI in the same directory, SKI.EXE would start the executable, but SKI resulted in an error). A non-exhaustive list of affected games:
Fahrenheit 451
Overkill
Ski or Die
Treasure Island
Wizard of Oz
- Fix Jane’s Combat Simulations AH-64D Longbow (original non-Gold version) regression where the in-game options menu could not be opened (v1.07), and fix the game crashing when launching any mission (v1.08).
- Fix emulator crash in Chess Housers (1993) which happened a few seconds after starting the game.
- Fix dual-mouse gaming support not working on Windows. This broke dual-mouse support in The Settlers and The Settlers II: Veni, Vidi, Vici.
Other fixes and enhancements
- The CPU usage of the 3dfx Voodoo emulation has been reduced by about 50%.
- Fix regression where the audio was not muted when the mapper was open.
- Fix subtle Gravis UltraSound regression where the high-frequency content of the GUS’s output was a little harsher than before in some games.
- The default audio volume (master channel volume) has been reduced to 50% (-6 dB) in the mixer to avoid audible distortion in games with a loud output.
- Enabling crossfeed (e.g., by setting crossfeed = on in the config) now only applies the crossfeed effect to the OPL and CMS channels.
- Fix old regression introduced in 0.78.0 where the zoom-rotator effects in the demos Show and Face by Majic 12 were offset horizontally by roughly half the screen.
- Fix regression where sometimes the real mode cycles value was incorrectly displayed in the DOSBox Staging window’s title bar in protected mode programs.
- File sharing and locking emulation introduced in 0.82.0 can now be disabled with the new file_locking setting. A very small number of DOS programs might misbehave or crash with file locking enabled (e.g., the demo Astral Blur by TBL).
Other changes
- The minimum required macOS version has been increased from macOS 10.15 Catalina to macOS 11 Big Sur.
