Jawaid Bayzar, famous for the Apple IIgs Second Sight card, has been working on a new Apple IIgs Emulator for the past several months. He has just released the latest update of his work.
GSSquared 0.3.0 is now available on Jawaid’s github page. According to the press release with the emulator:
The video display now offers three modes: NTSC (default), RGB, and Monochrome. Monochrome offers three colors: white, green, and amber. Pressing F2 will cycle between the three modes. In the On Screen Display (OSD, F4) you can click buttons to enable these settings. There is one more setting: Fuzzy (default) vs Sharp, toggled with F5. NTSC + Fuzzy provides to my eye the most realistic old-time look. But some people like crisper. Between these settings, there are 10 different display modes you can choose with GSSquared.
The NTSC lookup table generator has been optimized so boot time of GSSquared is significantly faster than before. Also we now are able to use a smaller lookup table with same quality as before. Also allows us to recalculate LUT during runtime:
Shift Keypad Plus, and Shift Keypad Minus - changes the color saturation of the output.
Alt Keypad Plus, Altl Keypad Minux - changes the color hue of the output.
These emulate old composite monitor controls.
Green mode color is set to same dominant/peak frequency of output of a Monitor ///.
The audio code has significantly improved fidelity. Distortion present in v0.2.0 has been cured. (See recent YouTube.com/@BazyarCodes videos about this).
Added command line flags:
-x: experimental mode. When enabled, GSSquared runs the CPU in ludicrous speed mode while the Disk II drive is on - making disk accesses basically instant.
-s: enable sleeping versus busy wait. With busy wait (standard), GSSquared uses a highly accurate sync of the next video frame, but, it causes 100% CPU usage. With sleep mode, an experimental feature, it's possible that there will be some jitter (i.e., 1/60th cycles won't be exactly 1/60th). But beat on it and try it out!
The Mac build now builds a "fat" binary that has both the Apple Silicon and Intel Mac versions of the program. However, I don't have the hardware to test Intel Mac. Maybe someone can do this for me.
The Joystick support has been reworked to always recognize buttons and joysticks exactly the same way, and, to properly handle joystick add / removal during operation. Also now supports two joysticks / gamepads. (Not tested - need help!)
We now have Mockingboard emulation. It's a work in progress. The majority of Mockingboard software I tried works, but there are a couple notable exceptions: Skyfox for one. But try out the Mockingboard demo disks. Also, Ultima IV works great. (Mockingboard is currently incompatible with the -x disk acceleration switch).
We now support Videx Videoterm emulation. Since this is an Apple ][+ currently, PR#3 will go into Videx mode. I was able to use AppleWorks patched to support Videx, though, clearing a cell in the spreadsheet causes a hang.
There are a lot of other reorg and refinement under the hood. Check out the changelog and feel free to engage with questions!
For more information, check out the GitHub page for GSSquared at:
https://github.com/jawaidbazyar2/gssquared
