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openMSX is one the most advanced emulators of MSX, an 8-bit home computer system from the 80’s for which many great games exist. Compared to the preview version, this version starts up much quicker, has a more responsive and better designed OSD menu and has a virtual keyboard.

Changes:

MSX device support:
– Bug fixes:
– overscan: 512×512 demo by NYYRIKKI and Don’t Cock It Up by Matra now work
– several small issues in existing MSX machine configurations
– 2nd drive detection on National machines
– detail in MSX-AUDIO that prevented proper detection in MSX-AUDIO BIOS 1.3
– fixed crash with fast resampler and 8192 samples
– Accuracy improvements:
– much improved accuracy for Floppy Drive Controllers (mostly WD2793 and
alike)
– added support for delayed motor off for disk drives, as in real machines
implemented by the CXD1032 chip
– disk drive rotation is now correct
– added support for persistency of S1985 back-up RAM
– added support for specifying the initial content of RAM and VRAM. Fixing
this for the Philips MSX2’s shows why Cas Cremers never noticed a bug in
Akin, causing white pixels on the screen
– improved timing of the VDP LINE command (thanks to NYYRIKKI for the ideas)
– Added support for the FDC connection style of the Victor HC-9x
– Added support for several floppy drive extensions: Sanyo MFD-001, Mitsubishi
ML-30DC/ML-30FD, Talent DPF-550, AVT DPF-550, Philips NMS 1200
– Added Spanish Mitsubishi ML-G1, Spanish Mitsubishi ML-G3, Japanese Sony HB-10,
Toshiba HX-21, Toshiba HX-22 and Toshiba HX-22I. The latter two have a
switchable RS-232C interface (use the new toshiba_rs232c_switch setting)

New or improved emulator features:
– OSD menu improvements:
– list of machines and extensions are now sorted alphabetically
– file lists are now filtered on extension case insensitively
– Performance improvements:
– OSD
– start-up time
– several scripts
– improved console rendering speed (uses less CPU)
– improved Tcl integration
– speed up low level disk emulation
– Miscellaneous:
– guess_title script is now a lot better and is used to generate file names
if no file name was given (e.g. to screenshots)
– don’t print an error when an initial CMOS/SRAM file isn’t found
– enable auto-run for cassettes by default
– additional files for ROMs (like samples for Playball) can now also be in
the same directory as the ROM file

Build system, packaging, documentation:
– Upgraded 3rd party libraries
– First step in phasing out the roms/ directories: removed them (including
SHA1SUMS file which was redundant with the hardwareconfig.xml files) and new
configs do not use the path with roms/ anymore; use the systemroms pool
instead

And of course the usual various bug fixes.