ares is a cross-platform, open source, multi-system emulator, focusing on accuracy and preservation.

ares v135 has now been released.

Since v134, a total of 14 contributors have created 51 commits to the ares codebase.

If you wish to see the full changelog in a per-commit format along with their authors, similarly to how previous release notes were written, you can do so on GitHub here.

New Release Schedule

Up until now, releases of ares were made when the changes felt 'significant' enough to do so. As of v135, we are moving to a monthly release schedule.

We will aim to publish a new release each month from this point forward, however, there is no strict date allocated for this, so there's still an aspect of 'when suitable'.

User Interface

Renamed "Reload" to "Apply" in Driver Settings to clarify its function
Fixed an issue where the "Deep Black Boost" setting would not save
Rename FPS to VPS (VBlanks per second), as it represents emulation speed and not game frame rate
Fixed an issue where the Firmware Path setting would not save

Debugging

It is now possible to use instruction tracing even with the recompilers in use
Fix an issue where GDB would not reconnect after a disconnection

Coleco - ColecoVision

Added support for Xin1 and MegaCart mappers

Nintendo - NES / Famicom / Famicom Disk System

Use HKROM for MMC6
Improved Famicom Disk System timer interrupt generation

Nintendo - Game Boy Advance

Improve unmapped I/O register behavior: passes I/O read tests in mbga suite
Improve save type detection
Improve ROM to RAM DMA timing

Nintendo - Nintendo 64 / 64DD

Added the ability to disable the Memory Expansion PAK
Simulate SysAD freezes when accessing non-RDRAM areas via the cache
Improve SI emulation to approximate the correct SI Status values
Fix a bug where I/O writes to PIF ram would not trigger interrupts
Improve and extend cache coherency checks
Implement register mirroring
Improve PI latch emulation
Improve PIF HLE emulation by reducing latency
Add support for roms >= ~63.9MiB
Implement undocumented accesses in FPU half-mode

Sega - Mega Drive / CD / 32X

Enabled support for the Mega Mouse for 32X and CD32X games
Improve I/O port emulation (Fixes Decap Attack + others)

Sony - Playstation

Fix an issue where controller input would stop working if sideloading a PS-EXE

ARM7TDMI

Improved ldmia and stmia timings in Thumb mode
Fix additional instructions that require offset when reading PC

Motorola M68000

Correct prefetch order for ASR instruction

Zilog Z80

Implement newly discovered inir/indr/otir/otdr behaviour

Other

Fixed an issue where macOS builds were being optimised for the build machine rather than for distribution
Fixed an issue where the recompilers were broken on Apple Silicon
Fixed an issue where unloading systems after disc swapping could cause a crash
Fix an issue where ares could crash on startup with LTO on macOS
Added support for the SDL input driver on macOS
Fix an issue where the ares would look for resources inside the app bundle rather than alongside it on macOS