What's New!

v1.61  September 7, 2001
New in this release...
- Fixed bug which prevented player from throwing the grappling hook
  in the second scene in Ice Trek.
- Fixed bug which allowed Lupin to walk through many barricades in
  Lock 'n' Chase.

v1.60  July 2, 2001
New in this release...
- Speed increases in the video output with the addition of some
  "dirty" flags in the codebase to indicate when it's really necessary
  to update the video display.
- Support for the complete dump of World Series Major League Baseball.
  Previously, the announcer speech was missing because the only dump
  of this game available was missing a 4K image of the memory bank
  which contained this speech information.  If you locate this complete
  ROM image, you'll now be able to hear the announcer voices in WSMLB.
- Support for several new variations of the Intellivision test
  cartridge, including the "elusive" IMI test cartridge.
- Rewrote the input mapping code to remove some input bugs.
  Input should be a bit more responsive as a result. This also allowed
  some reorganization of the ECS input mapping dialog so that the
  controls are in a more meaningful order.
- Fixed a bug which was causing the window to be really tiny on Linux
  systems under some Java Runtime Environments.


v1.54 - April 7, 2001
New in this release...
- FINALLY found and fixed the bug which was causing the "Unable to set
  requested video mode" errors.  However, the users who were
  experiencing the video bug are now having problems with DirectInput
  initialization.  I added code to this release to display a very
  specific DirectInput error, so if you receive a DirectInput
  initialization error, please let me know exactly which message you
  receive.
- Fixed a bug which caused some games to "blink" erratically.  The
  blinking was caused by the change that made Dreadnaught Factor work
  correctly.  Now Dreadnaught Factor still works, but the blinking
  in other games is gone.
- Fixed saving and loading, which was accidentally broken in the
  previous release.
- Fixed a bug which caused the mouse cursor to do some weird things
  when it passed over the window.
- Fixed the problem with several video cards where you would only see
  a black screen, although the game sounds could be heard playing in
  the background.  If you had this problem, the video should now work
  correctly for you in this release.
- Fixed the problem with switching to another app in full-screen mode
  where the screen would never restore after switching back to the
  game.


v1.53  April 7, 2001
New in this release...
- FINALLY found and fixed the bug which was causing the "Unable to set
  requested video mode" errors.  However, the users who were
  experiencing the video bug are now having problems with DirectInput
  initialization.  I added code to this release to display a very
  specific DirectInput error, so if you receive a DirectInput
  initialization error, please let me know exactly which message you
  receive.
- Fixed a bug which caused some games to "blink" erratically.  The
  blinking was caused by the change that made Dreadnaught Factor work
  correctly.  Now Dreadnaught Factor still works, but the blinking
  in other games is gone.
- Fixed saving and loading, which was accidentally broken in the
  previous release.
- Fixed a bug which caused the mouse cursor to do some weird things
  when it passed over the window.
- Fixed the problem with several video cards where you would only see
  a black screen, although the game sounds could be heard playing in
  the background.  If you had this problem, the video should now work
  correctly for you in this release.
- Fixed the problem with switching to another app in full-screen mode
  where the screen would never restore after switching back to the
  game.


v1.52  April 4, 2001
New in this release...
- Fixed emulation bug that prevented Dreadnaught Factor from working.
  Thanks go to Joe Zbiciak for the troubleshooting help.
- Fixed emulation bug that prevented Melody Blaster from working.
- Completed a rewrite of the audio mixer to enable much higher quality
  audio output.  Since this can adversely affect performance, an option
  has been added to the options dialog to allow the user to enable or
  disable high quality audio mixing.
- Reorganized some of the DirectX code in an attempt to fix the DirectX
  video and input problems some users have been experiencing.
- Fixed the View->All Games/Available Games" menu options so that the
  current view is remembered when you restart Bliss.
- Corrected some palette inaccuracies.  Joe Zbiciak originally provided
  the palette colors, but I converted from his 24-bit colors to 16-bit
  colors for DirectX performance reasons.  However, I just discovered
  that my math was bad so some of the color conversions were off.  This
  has been fixed in this release and the palette is noticeably better.


v1.51 - March 16, 2001
New in this release...
- Updated some of the translations.
- Fixed ECS mode support.  This was accidentally broken in the last
  release.
- Fixed a few sound emulation inaccuracies.
- Fixed several other miscellaneous bugs.


v1.5  March 5, 2001
New in this release...
- Intellivoice support.  The Intellivoice ROM is required and must be
  either somewhere in your ROMs or in a file named "ivoice.bin" within
  the directory where Bliss is installed.  Once you obtain the
  Intellivoice ROM, the Intellivoice support will automatically be
  enabled.  The known games that supported the Intellivoice included
  the following:  B-17 Bomber, Bomb Squad, Space Spartans, Tron Solar
  Sailor, and World Series Major League Baseball.  Thanks to Joe
  Zbiciak for the all of the reverse engineering info and debugging
  support necessary to do this.
- Added modeling of cross-channel modulation.  This should cause many
  of the loud, modulating, or vibrating sounds to be much more
  accurate.  Thanks to Joe Zbiciak for the info necessary to do this.
- Added a complete Spanish translation as well as full French and
  German translations.  Thanks go to Juan Fernando Rivera Perna,
  Florent Basset, and Kevin Werdelmann respectively for contributing
  these translations.  Bliss now automatically detects and supports
  five different languages.
- All of the Intellivision ROMs published by Joseph Zbiciak are now
  included in this release.  These ROMs full under the GNU Public
  License (GPL) and have been included with the express permission of
  Joseph Zbiciak.
- Fixed a bug in the DirectX support that caused Bliss to send far too
  much texture data over the graphics bus (by several orders of
  magnitude).  This may finally fix the DirectX speed problems that
  plagued many users.


v1.44  February 24, 2001
New in this release...
- Added the ability to save (F5) and load (F6) a game.  You can 
finally replay those difficult levels over-and-over again.
- Finally found and fixed the bug some users experienced where double-
clicking on Bliss.exe did nothing.
- Added a partial translation to Spanish.  Thanks to Juan Fernando 
Rivera Perna for this translation!
- Added a complete translation to Portuguese.  Thanks to Leandro 
Stevanato Alves for this translation!
- Moved reset to F9.  Reset was previously documented as being on F2, 
but because of a bug, it was actually F6, which was intended to 
eventually become the "Save" button.  However, a user astutely 
pointed out that F2 was far too close to the "Pause" button (F1), so 
the final resting place for the reset button is now F9.  Note that 
all of these buttons will eventually become configurable just as the 
input is configurable now.


v1.43  February 21, 2001
New in this release...
- Added an option to adjust the accuracy of the sound chip emulation.  
The sound chip is the largest consumer of CPU time, and adjusting 
this option allows Bliss to "fudge the numbers" a bit. At the 
highest setting, Bliss retains the cycle-exact timings that have 
always been used prior to this release.  At the lowest setting, 
there is a very noticeable boost in performance at the cost of a 
loss of sound accuracy that is barely noticeable to most users in 
most games.
- Added the ability to pause with the F1 key.
- Added the ability to reset the Intellivision with the F2 key.
- Added the ability to take screenshots with the F12 key.  Screenshot 
files are saved in 320x192 PNG format.  (I love open standards!)
- Added a troubleshooting document detailing the most common problems 
discovered with using Bliss.
- Added instructions for translating Bliss to another language.  Moved 
the internationalization files (*.properties) to a central i18n 
directory to facilitate translations.


v1.42  February 18, 2001
New in this release...
- Changed input to poll only once per frame.  Prior to this change, 
input was polled every time a game requested the memory location for 
the hand controllers, which was very inefficient since a few games 
make that request literally hundreds of times per frame.  This may 
result in a noticeable performance increase for some users in 
certain games.
- Fixed lockup that occurred with Windows 2000 after exiting a game.
- Fixed color palette bugs that appeared on some video cards.
- Re-fixed the graphics glitch that occurred when screen scrolls in 
All-Stars Major League Baseball. (Oops)
- Re-fixed the bug where you couldn't grab the sledgehammer in Donkey 
Kong. (Double-Oops)


v1.41  February 15, 2001
- Added support for Voodoo3/Voodoo2/Banshee video cards.  Note that 
these cards cannot play in a window if the desktop video mode is set 
to 32-bit color.  The drivers for these cards will report that the 
video mode is not supported and I'm afraid there's just not much 
that can be done about it. All other modes and 16-bit windowed mode 
should work fine, however.
- Added a new video option to turn on bilinear filtering.  Just right 
for that "crappy picture" feel the original Intellivision gave you.
- Added support for POVs on joysticks and gamepads
- Added support for loading unknown or new Intellivision ROMs that in 
the extended Intellicart ROM file format.
- Fixed a bug during input configuration that kept forcing some users 
to configure the same joystick movement for every input.
- Fixed the graphics glitches that would occur in All-Stars Major 
League Baseball when the screen scrolled vertically due to a ball 
flying into the outfield.
- Fixed the minor sprite bugs that were in PBA Bowling and Body Slam 
Super Pro Wrestling.  Thanks to Randy Richards for the technical 
info necessary to make this fix!
- Fixed the display bugs in Frogger.
- Fixed the emulation inaccuracy that caused Bliss to fail Test P in 
the Intellivision Test Cartridge.  Bliss now passes all tests this 
cartridge throws at it.
- Made several performance improvements.  The previous release 
actually had a performance bug in the input framework (partly 
because this part of the code is so new) and that performance bug 
more than negated the performance improvements I had made in the 
emulation core prior to that release.  That's now fixed and several 
other optimizations have been made.  I can guarantee if you were not 
already running at full speed before that you will get noticeably 
better performance from this release.



V1.4  February 11, 2001
- Added emulation of the Entertainment Computer System, an add-on 
component for the Intellivision that gave it some computer-like 
enhancements.  Some of the games required the ECS and they now work 
properly in this release.
- Added ability to configure the input controls.
- Added support for joysticks and gamepads.  Currently only three axes 
supported.  Support for POVs and most throttles is not included in 
this release and will be added in some future release, but how would 
you use these on an Intellivision anyway?
- Added support for the second Intellivision hand controller, meaning 
two people can finally play each other.
- Added support for cartridge RAM.  The two games that required it, 
Land Battle and USCF Chess, now work properly.
- Added an sample rate option for sound emulation.  Now you can choose 
a sampling rate of 11khz, 22khz, or 44khz.  Note that this does not 
affect the evaluation of the PSG chip in the Intellivision, but only 
how often the samples output from the PSG chip are averaged to fit 
into the sound output of the computer.  This is a subtle difference, 
but important for accuracy.
- Added emulation of bus isolation mode.  You can now grab the 
sledgehammer in Donkey Kong and Dracula no longer looks like he's 
emerging from his coffin twice before changing to a bat.
- Fixed a CPU bug that caused some barrels in Donkey Kong to be 
invisible.
- Fixed some sprite collision bugs.  Now you can finally kill that 
white robot in Night Stalker and you can no longer walk through 
walls in Tron Maze-a-Tron.
- Fixed some sound bugs and increased the sound accuracy.  Part of the 
long-term goal for Bliss was to model the sound accurately enough so 
that even the experienced Intellivision enthusiast would be unable 
to perceive a difference between Bliss audio and that of a real 
Intellivision.  Have I met that goal?  Let me know.
- Fixed a DirectX bug that caused Bliss to crash with video cards that 
only supported texture sizes of 256x256 or less.
- Optimized the core emulation a bit more.  It should play very well 
on a P2-300 now.  Let me know if this is not true.


V1.3  January 21, 2001
- Added DirectX 8.0 support for Win32 users, resulting in a vast 
improvement in speed and the addition of full-screen modes for Win32 
users.  Users on other operating systems are still supported through 
Pure Java video output.
- Performance of video emulation has been greatly improved and now 
uses only a comparably small percentage of CPU time.
- Sound is much more accurately emulated now.  The sound chip is now 
evaluated at the rate of the original Intellivision (~223khz) and 
averaged into the desired output rate.  As a result, all games 
should sound much more like a real Intellivision.
- Greatly improved palette.  Thanks to Joe Zbiciak for doing the 
palette research!
- Fixed certain types of sounds that were playing an octave too high.  
Night stalker now sounds more correct.
- Fixed noise bugs.  Crowd noises, for example, should sound better.
- Fixed several video rendering bugs.  Pinball title screen now looks 
correct.  Pitfall underground area now has correct colors.
- Fixed screen blanking.  Should see less of the garbage that would 
appear when games were switching scenes.
- Fixed several memory mappings.  Some carts that were not working 
before are working now.
- Fixed sprite collision bugs.  False collisions are no longer 
detected along the y axis or between invisible sprites.


V1.2  December 14, 2000
- Gigantic leap forward in cartridge compatibility.  Try Bliss with 
your favorite Intellivision game now!
- Major advancements in the emulation core.  Some video bugs squashed.  
Sound emulation is now complete with the inclusion of support for 
envelopes.  Several sound bugs fixed.  Everything no longer plays a 
whole octave too high.
- Support for .int, .bin, and .zip files.  No longer necessary to put 
exec.bin and grom.bin in the application directory.  So long as they 
are somewhere in some file in the ROMs directory, Bliss will find 
them.
- The user interface has been updated to include the ability to 
specify the location of your ROMs directory, the frame skip, the 
amount of scaling, and the sound buffer length.
- Cartridge properties updated and a cartridge properties dialog added 
to display details of the cartridge implementation.  If a cartridge 
doesn't work, and you think you know the proper memory mapping, 
check this dialog to see if my documentation is correct.
- Performance advancements in sound and video handling.


V1.01  December 9, 2000
The "Easier to Use" version.  The is the first time a front-end was 
added to Bliss.  No more command line!


V1.00  December 8, 2000
First Bliss release!

