v2.0.2 - April 25, 2005
- Fixed a major performance bottleneck in the use of the Direct3D Present() function. Turns out there is a big difference between "IMMEDIATE" and "DONOTWAIT" that the Direct3D docs don´t exactly make clear. The end result is that the emulation should be MUCH smoother for everyone in this release.
- Enabled Electronic Computer System (ECS) support. Games that used the ECS now work correctly, including The Jetsons, Melody Blaster, Mind Strike, Mr. Basic, Scooby Doo´s Maze Chase, the Song Players, and World Series Major League Baseball. The input configuration dialog still needs some cleanup work related to the ECS, but at least it´s functional for now.
- Added support for banked ROMs in cartridges. As a result, World Series Major League Baseball now works correctly.
- Fixed several collision detection problems (Space Spartans, Mouse Trap, etc.)
- Reworked .bin/.int support to no longer use bin2rip.exe. The database of known cartridges is exposed in the file "knowncarts.cfg". If you update this file to add new cartridges or fix existing mappings, please send me your updates so others can benefit.
- Several carts in .bin/.int format that were not loading properly are now working (AD&D Treasure of Tarmin, for example).
- Added support for cartridge RAM. Land Battle and USCF Chess are now working.
- Added .zip support. Bliss will search for the first .bin or .int file found in the .zip that matches a known configuration in the "knowncarts.cfg" database and attempt to load it.
- Reworked .rom support to no longer use rom2rip.exe

Two significant bugs have already been reported from the 2.0.2 release. First is that several .bin/.int files are still not loading. It turns out that the check for the file extension is case sensitive. If you just modify the filename to reduce the extension to lower case, Bliss will load the file just fine.

The second bug is that I've accidentally modified DirectX initialization to request a device with hardware vertex processing, even though it's not necessary for Bliss. This obviously causes DirectX initialization to fail on video cards that do not support hardware vertex processing.

I plan to fix these two bugs when I get home tonight and post a 2.0.3 release this evening.