**THIS IS A HIGHLY WORK/DEVELOPMENT IN PROGRESS VERSION**
**THINGS ARE BROKEN AND EVERYTHING IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE**
First cut after massive refactoring with most critical and fundamental changes implemented.
We need to start somewhere, and this might be as good as anything else, so we can get started
with testing, bug fixing and iterating for the next releases.
The following list is non-exhaustive, does not guarantee anything does work, yet, and is supposed
to give a high level idea of what all of this is about. Updated documentation will reflect all of
this at some later point in time in more detail.
* A common "core" now abstracts logging, thread, property and configuration infrastructure and
provides a common interface. This is used by bemanitools internally as well as all tools, hooks
and APIs provided and don't depend on the game, version of the game or AVS version available
anymore
* New bemanitools (public) API
* Versioned API allowing for handling incremental API changes as well as breaking changes by
providing a new/different version when necessary
* Unified interfaces for bemanitools core API, i.e. logging, threads, configuration
* SDK with examples (TBD)
* Dogfooding approach: Bemanitools uses its own (public) API to implement and provide fundamental
features like configurable keyboard implementations for IO or hooks for different games and
versions
* All bemanitools hooks and IO libraries have been or are about to be re-worked to use the new APIs
* New hook API allows for more fine grained runtime control when stages of the hook are to be
executed, i.e. pre AVS, before main game, iat hooking instead of relying purely on DllMain
(which is still a compatible option though)
* launcher as a replacement for bootstrap: Bring it significantly closer to the original bootstrap
by supporting completely vanilla data and bootstrap.xml configurations to run the games. Note
that bemanitools does not include any code or means to run DRM'd data, only decrypted
* inject is also being reworked to use as much of the same "infrastructure" as launcher to provide
a more seamless bootstrapping process for games that keeps pre-eapki data as vanilla as possible
Summary:
Test Plan:
Summary:
Test Plan:
Summary:
Test Plan:
Summary:
Test Plan:
Boils down to:
- Include headers
- Reduce boiler plate with helpers
- Swap out explicit usages with core API layer
and ensure the right API is configured beforehand
Wrapper/shim library to drive another ddrio in a dedicated
IO thread. Depending on the other ddrio backend used, this
can significantly improve performance while staying
compatible to the existing ddrio API interface
This turned out to be a good solution to solve performance
problems when running MAME with ddrio-p3io that is
(currently) implemented with synchronous IO calls that are
very costly: ~12 ms for a write over the ACIO protocol, ~4 ms
for a read using an IOCTL. As this already adds up to nearly
a full frame (60 fps) regarding latency, there isn't a lot
of time left to do other stuff in a synchronous update loop.
MAME's performance was unstable and dropped all the time below
100%. The result was a choppy gameplay experience.
Combining ddrio-async with ddrio-p3io, the combined backend
is able to drive inputs/outputs at a rate of ~250hz = ~4
updates per frame. This results in an average input latency
of ~4 ms which is as good as it can get with the p3io
hardware's performance limitations that I measured (see
the 4 ms for the IOCTL mentioned above).
This is more than good enough as as update frequency of
the 573 hardware is slightly less than that (I got told
something ~180 hz?).
tl;dr: Gameplay on MAME is great, smooth frame rate, IO feels
amazing and responsive.
icex2