Project64 3.0 - 20 Year anniversary

[zilmar]

I released the first public version on May 26, 2001, 20 years ago. I would have thought working on the project for over 20 years, I would have been done or quit a long time ago. But there is still a long list of things I want to get done.

Project64 3.0

The version has been available in the nightly builds as 2.4 and been worked on for a long time, I am rebranding it to 3.0 to signify the changes.

Here is a high level view of the changes:

• GLideN64 has been added and you can select it as the default plugin in the welcome screen
• Add new audio and input plugin
• Added "enhancement patches"
• Cheat system has been rebuilt from the ground up
• Ability to change defaults
• Saves in their own unique directory
• Add Shygoo's debugger code
• Fixed FPU issue - Indiana Jones, Donkey Kong 64
• Fix bugs in shortcut assignment
• Large address aware
• Now built with Visual Studio 2015

There are close to 2000 commits to the source since the last public release.

20 Year anniversary
Project64 exists thanks to a lot of people especially Jabo, Smiff, Gent with help getting it to come to life. Some other people I would like to give thanks to are Jahra!n, Witten, RadeonUser, Azimer, Shygoo, Frank, LuigiBlood, theboy181, Gonetz, BlueToonYoshi, Kimbjo, Melchior, retroben, AIO, and krom

I would like to thank all the people who have supported the project, it helps a lot.

What is still to be done
With the release of 3.0, I plan to work on a dual strategy. I have a lot of huge changes I want to make to the code base of project64. This will be done on a new branch and will be slowly working towards a 4.0 version. I will be also maintaining a 3.x branch and doing bug fixes and small features to it and making sure this stays up to date and is good for users to be able to always use.

One of the new things I want to work on is getting a configuration where the emulator can run in pure low level software rendered using accurate timing, to get it close to 100% accurate. While this might not be of much use to end users it will give a good reference point.

Some of the other things I want to look at is removing the use of exception handling, having compiling in another thread, and being able to have RSP in another thread.

The aim is to look at a lot more tests and compare the n64 with the emulator to make it as accurate as possible.

You can download Proejct64 3.0 from the download page (https://www.pj64-emu.com/public-releases)