v0.1.9 RC0

Arrrr, Sea Zero

Since there are no more huge sweeping changes to the firmware on the horizon (a shame, they were always so exciting) and the focus of development has been mostly fixes, tweaks, tidyup and refactoring I'm going to do the unthinkable and call 0.1.9...

Release Candidate 0 (RC0)

This means we're fixing to drag 32blit kicking and screaming out of its "beta" phase and the development focus should be on fixes and improvements.

This doesn't mean things wont change. But 32blit has been pretty stable - in terms of not horribly breaking compatibility with games - for a while now and the "Beta" moniker doesn't quite fit anymore.

In fact as I dawdle on tagging and publishing this release we have even more things in the pipeline that are potentially breaking, but not quite so breaking as the things before them. Woohoo!

Firmware/Launcher/Update Tweaks

From lessons learned in 0.1.8 we've refactored the launcher and firmware to be smarter about handling updates. Now you can just throw launcher.blit and firmware-update.blit onto an SD card and - on the next reset - they will be flashed and deleted.

The firmware now also cleans up any leftover launchers or updaters from external Flash when a new one is installed.

Firmware updates are now identified by a metadata category of "firmware"- so you don't need to worry about the metadata name if you ship your own updater. The same applies to launchers which use "launcher" as their category. Suffice to say... don't use these to categorise your games!

Launcher Tidyup

@Daft-Freak has swept through the launcher, tidying up a lot of organically grown code into something more sensible. This includes de-duplicating some functions that must run under various different circumstances, cleaning up the handlers for flashing/launching games and lots of other tweaks to make the code less scary to behold.

Operation Operators

While neck-deep in writing Sprite Editor I found a few things I wanted the 32blit Engine to do- chiefly things like Pen == Pen, Size / N and Size * N.

Performance & Stability Fixes

@Daft-Freak realized 32blit's CPU clock was a little... unstable... and also realized we hadn't updated the clock config to use the external oscillator used for USB. That's been fixed and things might be ever so slightly faster and more stable now. You'll probably only notice this if you're benchmarking emulator code against a reference implementation or have a very keen ear for pitch.

@Daft-Freak has also fixed some oddness in the SD implementation, removing some of the very broken timeout handling. This has made - and I pinged my SD card across the room a few times trying this - SD card insertion pretty darn reliable. If your SD card contents weren't appearing when plugging in a card... this probably fixed it.

SpriteSheets

The file extension for spritesheets is now ".blim" for "Blit Image." Sort-of rolls off the tongue, but sheesh dreaming up file extensions is tricky and we've already used .blit.

The Launcher will now afford special consideration for 128x128 pixel .blim images and allow you to preview them like screenshots. If you have Sprite Editor installed, you can load these right into it for editing.

Scrolly Tile / Rainbow Ascent Hi-Score

@ThePythonator has added high score saving to Rainbow Ascent so you can track your progress. It doesn't take account of level seed or mode, but since the whole game is hard as nails it's a good barometer for progress none the less.

Docs

@titimoby and @dstretch have made some contributions to the docs. This is much appreciated- if you run into any problems setting up for development, or working with 32blit then let us know!

Summary

As always, the full list of tweaks is available here: v0.1.8...v0.1.9