So with the sporadic updates and information, or otherwise, regarding SquirrelJME and questions... it was suggested that I make a kind of post describing the state of everything so to speak. So this is that!
I do want to thank Hit Save! for sponsoring SquirrelJME! This is honestly going to be a huge help and will cover the costs of CI/CD.
Half of the year was spent building up ScritchUI which was a complete rewrite
of the user interface system in SquirrelJME. The old UI system was full of
bugs and there were a number of software titles which would freeze or not
even function at all, usually crashing. With the new UI in place, this is
fixed, it now handles situations of badly implemented usages of the UI
in software titles. An example of bad usage would be drawing from multiple
threads, or performing event handling in the wrong order. ScritchUI alleviates
this by forcing everything to happen in regard to the UI in the UI thread
itself. This now means that titles such as MegaMan Legacy of Network and
Phantom of Network now enter past the title screen, assuming the utility
class java.util.Calendar is implemented, and Super Monkey Ball now actually
renders something and does not instantly crash. This itself was a huge
undertaking but one that was very much needed. So in short, so much old
software is broken because it now has to deal with something it never had to
deal with in the past: multiple CPUs each with their own cache. Hopefully,
not anymore!
What is done?
- MIDI Playback (small)
- Currently, very simple MIDI playback.
- In the future I plan to switch to SF2 as this will be needed for proper DoJa/Star support.
- NanoCoat descriptor and name parsing (tiny)
- ScritchUI (huge, March 2024 - August 2024)
- Native widget system for user interfaces, required to be done for major compatibility fixes.
What is in progress?
java.util.Calendar(small)- Needed for some software, currently there is a partial implementation.
- NanoCoat byte code execution (huge)
- This actually interprets the byte code and makes it so the software runs. This is a huge chunk of work that is currently in progress.
- ScritchUI Cocoa (small)
- UI library for macOS, NeXTSTEP, and GNUstep.
What needs to be done?
- ScritchUI Pure Framebuffer UI (small)
- Support for systems which have no native widget system and thus everything needs to be drawn and handled by SquirrelJME itself.
- Fixing ScritchUI Out of Memory Issues (medium)
- There are some cases where ScritchUI does not properly free resources, so it eventually runs through all available memory.
- RetroArch Core Implementation (medium)
- The actual core itself, at the time it is gotten to everything else above would be done, so it would just be fitting in everything together.
I am expecting a release candidate window to start from at the earliest December 2024 to at the latest March 2025. A release candidate is a version that could be released, but naturally there could be some major bugs or crashes that need fixing first, this is to avoid those so please do test if you get a chance to!
Going forward, I will be using this RSS feed which I have essentially built into the repository itself as its own versioned resource. I rewired it through some services I have been paying for as well which were sitting idle since the destruction of Twitter.