After almost a year, a new release of openMSX has been made – v0.8.2! According to the developers, this release fixes loads of bugs and adds many other features and improvements. Additionally, an updateing version of Catapult, their user friendly GUI, was released. For those who do not know openMSX, it’s an open source MSX emulator using a distinctive emulation model to achieve the highest level of accuracy possible. It’s available for multiple platforms, including POSIX and Windows, and emulates a large amount of related MSX hardware. Visit the official website for more details, or see the changes below.

Changelog:

• Bug fixes:
  • (regression) sprite colors in screen 7/8 (visible in Ikari for instance)
  • VDP emulation bug, which was visible in Psycho World's 3×3 power up matrix
  • Y8950 (MSX-AUDIO) when using NOP Real Motion
  • MoonSound FM 4op mode
  • crash in YM2151 (in Yamaha CX5M)
  • sample playing in Nettou Yakyuu
  • several small issues in existing MSX machine configurations
• Accuracy improvements:
  • MSX-MUSIC (YM2413 (Okazaki)): implemented SETTLE (or DUMP) phase
  • MoonSound (YMF278): fixed x-tal frequency and some other details
  • GFX9000: added basic support for set adjust registers
• Added support for several laserdisc features to be able to run the Lascommate Junior High School Mathematics LD's, including a dummy Lascom Kanji cartridge implementation
• Added emulation of the following mapper types:
  • Baby Dinosaur Dooly
  • Manbow 2 2nd release
  • Best of Hamaraja Night
• Added emulation of memory based I/O for MSX RS-232C, making emulation of Sony HBI-232 possible
• Added Sony HB-F9S and Sony HB-G900P machine
• Added support for JoyMega: Mega Drive joy pad with 6 buttons
• Video output:
  • Faster laserdisc rendering
  • Added horizontal stretch for SDL renderer (useful for Dingoo for instance). As horizontal stretching is enabled by default, the CPU usage of openMSX  when using the SDL renderer will now be higher than before. Set horizontal_stretch to 320 to disable it and gain some performance (but have a less accurate aspect ratio of the screen).
• Sound generation:
  • Sync sound to EmuTime (greatly improves sample playback in e.g. Real Motion and TRAX Player
  • Added new sound driver based on libao
  • Fixed sound quality of blip resampler
• MSX developer features:
  • Added vdpcmdinprogress_callback setting, which can be used to trigger a script when a write to the VDP command engine registers is detected while there is still a VDP command in progress.
  • Fixed memory usage issue when using step_back (e.g. via debugger)
  • Greatly improved performance for step_back
  • Fixed bug with watchpoints that triggered too late sometimes
• Command line options/support:
  • Added recognition of .tcl extension as extra start up scripts
  • Fixed recognition of OMR/OMS files which were re-gzipped
  • Added command line option -replay to load and view a replay and also support dropping replays (OMR files) on openMSX to view them
  • Added command line option -savestate to load a savestate and also support dropping savestates (OMS files) on openMSX to view them
• OSD menu improvements (mostly useful for hand held users):
  • added connector submenu
  • added support for running tapes
  • added support for horizontal stretch setting
• Joystick support:
  • Allow joystick axis motion events to be bound, as the manual promises
  • Made real joystick support a bit more flexible: read all axes
• Channel recorder:
  • Fixed record_channels command to record to the soundlogs directory
  • Added option to record all channels of all sound chips with record_channels
• Platform specific improvements:
  • Fix Caps lock behaviour on Mac OS X
  • Add support for MIDI output to a virtual endpoint for Mac OS X
• Comfortable machine configurations:
  • Added new fantasy machine: Boosted MSX2+ JP, based on Panasonic FS-A1WSX
  • Added basic compiler to Boosted MSX2 EN
• Miscellaneous:
  • Updated all scripts to make full use of Tcl 8.5 (and clean them up in the process) to improve performance
  • Support in the hardware config XML format for using a single ROM image (i.e. a physical (EP)ROM dump) which is used by several devices
  • Make PgUp/PgDn reverse step depend on the speed setting
  • Reverse bar now indicates recording (red) and replaying state
  • The 'about' console command can now also be used to find settings
  • Fixed 64k ROM mapper detection

Download: openMSX v0.8.2 (official download page)