Version 1.8 is the performance release, and most of the speed came from removing work rather than adding it. Gekko gained an x86-64 recompiler that lifts the emulated CPU to over 150 MIPS, the periodic device threads stopped polling the time base in tight loops, and the interrupt lines of the DSP, the disk interface and the serial interface were re-derived from the hardware documentation. The last part matters more than the numbers: with the interrupt storms gone, Zelda: The Wind Waker boots to its title screen and Animal Crossing finally leaves its exception handler. The release also adds compressed RVZ disc images, a full controller-settings dialog for the SDL build, and a new application icon.

Highlights

• Gekko recompiler. A new x86-64 basic-block compiler (src/gekkojit.*) keeps the guest GPRs in host registers and shares the interpreter's decode cache for everything it does not translate. Measured on the differential harness: 39.7 MIPS for the original interpreter, 58.6 for the inlined interpreter and 155.9 with the recompiler; ALU-heavy code gains 8.6x. jit 0 / jit 1 in the debugger switches engines at run time.
• Paired-Single in SSE. Every arithmetic PS instruction and both quantised loads and stores (psq_l / psq_st) are translated to SSE/SSE2. The PS-heavy workload goes from 59 MIPS (interpreter) to 435 MIPS, the quantised-load workload from 57 to 191.
• No more busy-waiting. The VI scan-out and the serial poll now run on the CPU thread from the tick it already advances, and the CP, AI DMA and DSP threads block on events instead of spinning on Core->GetTicks(). pong.dol went from 1.47x to 3.66x real time, Ikaruga from 2.16x to 4.58x and Luigi's Mansion from 0.62x (stalled) to 4.26x.
• The aggregate interrupt lines now work. The DSP and disk-interface Processor-Interface lines ANDed the cause bits with their own mask bits, which is always zero; both now follow the OR of the latched, unmasked causes. The serial interface polls on the video line schedule instead of a fixed tick, which removes an interrupt storm that pinned titles inside their handlers.
• Games. Zelda: The Wind Waker boots to its title screen and Metroid Prime presents its title screen; Animal Crossing gets past the audio ARQ handshake, reads its disc and displays the Nintendo logo.
• RVZ disc images. Compressed GameCube images in Dolphin's RVZ container (Zstandard) can be mounted read-only, the same way an ISO or GCM is.
• SDL controller settings. The SDL build has a pad backend of its own and the full "Configure Controller N" dialog: keyboard and game controller bindings side by side, analog sticks and triggers, Clear / Default / OK / Cancel.
• New icon. The cube icon was recoloured with the blue palette of the logo and regenerated as pureikyubu.ico (16–256 px, 32 bpp); the SDL builds embed the same pixels and call SDL_SetWindowIcon.

Added

Gekko

• x86-64 recompiler for Gekko basic blocks (src/gekkojit.h, src/gekkojit.cpp). Every block records the translation state (generation counter) it was compiled under, so a write to a BAT, SDR1, HID0/HID2 or MSR, or an rfi, tlbie, icbi, dcbst or cache flush, drops all blocks in O(1). Untranslated instructions run through Interpreter::ExecuteDecoded and share the interpreter's decode cache, so both engines decode identically.
• 8192-entry decode cache keyed on the pc and the fetched instruction word, and a direct-mapped TLB of 2048 page translations instead of an unordered_map that allocated a TLBEntry per page.
• Paired-Single translation (src/gekkojit_ps.cpp, -DGEKKO_JIT_PS=0 builds it out): add, sub, mul, div, res, rsqrte, madd, msub, nmadd, nmsub, muls0/1, madds0/1, sum0/1, sel, mr, neg, abs, nabs, merge00/01/10/11 and the _d recording forms. The x86-64 encoder, host register roles and GekkoRegs offsets moved to src/gekkojit_x64.h.
• Quantised paired loads and stores (psq_l / psq_st): all eight indexed/non-indexed, update/non-update and W = 0/1 forms, with HID2[PSE], HID2[LSQE] and the RA != 0 update rule decided at compile time. The GQR is read at run time by Jit::PsqLoad / Jit::PsqStore, so writing one invalidates nothing.
• Debugger command jit 0 / jit 1; 32-bit and non-x86 hosts, and -DGEKKO_JIT_DISABLED builds, fall back to the interpreter.

Disc images

• Read-only support for Dolphin's RVZ container (src/rvz.cpp): the container header and its SHA-1 checksums, the data-entry and group tables, the None and Zstandard compression methods and the "packed" representation that regenerates runs of pseudo-random disc junk from an LFG seed. bzip2/LZMA groups and Wii images are reported as unsupported. Zstandard is bundled under thirdparty/zstd.
• .rvz is accepted everywhere a disc image was accepted: the command line, the game selector and the file dialogs.

Input and user interface

• SDL pad backend (src/padsdl.cpp): a pad can be driven by the keyboard (SDL_GetKeyboardState, SDL scancodes in VKEY_FOR_*) and by an SDL game controller (GCKEY_FOR_* button and axis identifiers) at the same time; the Nth connected controller drives the Nth port. The left stick drives the main stick, the right stick the C stick and the triggers the analog L/R (digital L/R fire at 50%); the keyboard 50%/100% keys still work, and both sources are summed and clamped instead of overflowing int8_t.
• The controller-settings dialog in the SDL UI (uisdl.cpp, ported from the Win32 PADConfigDialogProc): Options → Controllers → Port 1..4 opens "Configure Controller N" with the Buttons table on the left and the Control Stick / C Stick tables on the right, each with its own Control | Keyboard | Gamepad columns. Clicking a binding arms capture, the next key, controller button or stick/trigger deflection becomes the binding and the event is swallowed; Esc cancels and modifier keys and F1–F12 are skipped for the keyboard.
• Game controllers are opened and closed by the thread that pumps SDL events (PADUpdateControllers) and read by the emulation thread through a spin-locked snapshot; PADLoadConfig is public so the dialog can apply the bindings without restarting emulation.
• New application icon: the cube artwork recoloured to the logo palette (src/res/pureikyubu_icon.svg) and embedded in src/res/pureikyubu_icon.h for SDL_SetWindowIcon (the SDL port has no .rc resources); pureikyubu.ico regenerated at 16–256 px, 32 bpp.

Command line and tooling

• pureikyubu <file> (or --image <file>) loads and runs the image immediately instead of stopping in the game selector, and --help prints the accepted options to the console and to the report log, so EMU_LOG=<file> pureikyubu --help works too.
• --bench <file> [seconds] runs the emulator unattended and reports throughput plus Gekko::CpuStats (translated vs interpreted instructions, basic-block length, re-translations and their causes, cache-line fills and every access that leaves the cache for the PI/MEM); BENCH_PROFILE=1 adds a host cycle breakdown and BENCH_STATS=1 a guest instruction histogram.
• The Gekko differential harness gained BENCH_SPIN* modes (which reproduce and dissect the thread interference on the time base), BENCH_PS_TEST, BENCH_FUZZ_PS and the psq workload mix; build_win.bat builds the harness with MSVC so the two compilers can be compared on one workload.

Testing

• Serial-interface spec tests: 17 new cases covering the SIPOLL round trip and its independent halves, per-channel output buffers, read-only input buffers, COMCSR bit positions and TSTART, the poll interval / budget / vertical-blank anchor, per-channel enables and the read-status interrupt with its mask.
• Command Processor spec tests (testing/gfx_cp_spec_test.cpp, 19 cases) written from specs/architecture/command-processor.md: the VCD/VAT field positions, the VAT component and colour byte counts, the vertex attribute order and gx_vtxsize.
• Five aggregation tests for the DSP interrupt line (each cause raises the line only through its own mask, a real ARAM DMA completion reaches the PI, a masked cause latches without a line, an acknowledgement drops it, and the mailbox interrupt reaches the PI), plus the corrected DSP vector test and the latched CPU→DSP request test. The suite is at 367 tests.

Changed

Performance and threading

• The VI scan-out and the serial poll are executed by the CPU thread from the tick it already advances (GekkoCore::Tick / TickN call Flipper::Update), so VI timing is exact instead of sampled by a thread.
• The Command Processor thread blocks on a new portable Event (utils.h) that the CPU thread signals when a batch of FIFO entries is due (CommandProcessor::TickSync); the drain stays at the emulated tickPerFifo rate.
• The AI DMA thread is woken by DSP::AITickSync (about every 6750 ticks at 48 kHz) and parks itself with Suspend() when no DMA is armed. The DSP thread is woken by DspCore::TickSync once per DspWakeTicks and drains a batch, so the emulated DSP no longer self-throttles by re-anchoring its deadline on every poll; the mailbox hold-off is now a tick deadline (DspCore::MailboxHoldTicks).
• mtmsr and rfi drop the compiled blocks only when MSR[IR]/[DR] actually change; the OS toggles MSR[EE] around every critical section and dropping the whole cache for it cost ~85,000 needless re-translations per second.
• Address translation, the tick and the branch-condition helpers are really inlined now (GEKKO_INLINE).

Behaviour and configuration

• The Windows and SDL builds keep separate settings: DefaultSettingsWin.json / SettingsWin.json and DefaultSettingsSdl.json / SettingsSdl.json. The two ports run from the same directory and used to overwrite each other's configuration; each executable now embeds its own file names.
• The serial interface follows the documented register layout: SICnOUTBUF is the CPU-visible register with the shadow read by the transfer engine, SICOMCSR latches CHANNEL and INLNGTH on an ordinary write and TSTART reads back as a pending bit, and the poll register drives SIPoll(line) directly.
• The Flipper device threads and the emulator use the same Event abstraction, so the timing code is portable between Win32 and SDL.

Fixed

Interrupts and timers

• DSP/DI aggregate interrupt lines. Every cause in CDCR and DI_SR has its own mask bit, and the pairs are not adjacent; both re-evaluation helpers ANDed the group of causes with the group of masks, so the lines were never asserted at all. Animal Crossing hung in its ARQ wait because the ARAM DMA completion never reached the CPU. Both lines now follow the OR of (cause && its own mask) and are re-evaluated from DSPUpdateInt() / DIUpdateInt() whenever a cause or a mask changes.
• A cleared cause can drop the line. The lines were only ever dropped inside one write_cdcr / write_sr branch; clearing one cause while another was still latched left the line high with nothing left to clear it, so the CPU re-entered the external-interrupt handler on every rfi. Animal Crossing was executing ~11,500 exceptions a second.
• Serial-interface poll storm. The emulator polled on a fixed 0x10000-tick interval (about ten times the hardware frame rate) instead of the SIPOLL video-line schedule, so RDSTINT was re-raised continuously. On Animal Crossing the emulated time for a fixed wall clock went from 3.8 s to 74 s, exception entries from 165,000 to 2,213 and VI interrupts from 0 to 2,178; Zelda's exception count dropped from 49,635 to 2,157.
• DSP microcode vectors. The interrupt vector base was taken from the live CDCR use-rom bit instead of the program that is running; Zelda's microcode installs a CPU→DSP vector at 0x000E in IRAM and the loader's vectors made it bounce the command. CDCR bit 1 is now latched as a request and re-tried until the core accepts it through the TE3/ET gate, so a request that arrives while te3 is closed is no longer lost.
• DSP/AI threads. DspAIOpen cleared its state with memset, which also wiped the Event the AI thread waits on (a wait on a zeroed handle returns immediately, so the thread silently went back to spinning); the clear is now an explicit DspAIControl::Reset.

Graphics

• Presentation (issue #361). pe.cpp switched the VI output off after the first GXDrawDone/PE token, which stopped scan-out for the rest of the run in titles that keep presenting; the gate had no hardware meaning and is gone. In the SDL build the VI picture was written into the same window that carries the OpenGL context, so the two presenters alternated; the GL backend owns the window while it runs and the VI still decodes the XFB and counts frames.
• Command Processor. CP_FIFO_COUNT was a stale software register and is now the live FIFO occupancy ("the distance between the write and the read pointer"). The break-point status bit was gated on CP_ENABLE[FIFOBRKINT] instead of [FIFOBRK], so a title that armed the break point without the interrupt never saw the flag. CommandProcessor::ResetFifoProcessor() drops the CP-side command buffer so a new stream starts clean.
• VI. VI_DTV_STATUS (0xCC00206E) is implemented instead of falling through to the default case, where it returned 0 and made the SDK's VIGetTvFormat() always report NTSC.
• Texture decoder (issue #359). IA4 walked the tiles column first while the tiles of an image are stored row by row, so a map wider than one tile came out transposed (and the report encoder mirrored the same walk, which is why the gallery never showed it); the debugger's gxtexdump read the colour fields after the decoder had serialised the texels into the R,G,B,A byte order GL wants, which rotated the channels of every non-grey format; C14X2 masked its palette index with 0x3ff instead of 0x3fff; and the transparent fourth colour of the CMPR three-colour mode lost the RGB of the endpoint average.
• Texture uploads. DecodeTexture compares the description and an FNV-1a hash of the raw texture bytes (plus a TLUT generation for the palette) and keeps the GL image when nothing changed; the upload reuses the image storage with glTexSubImage2D, the sampler parameters and the mip chain are only re-applied when TX_SETMODE0/1 really change, and TX_INVTAGS (GXInvalidateTexAll) marks every map for a decode again.

Interface and platform

• File → Reopen, a dead menu entry, is wired to the last loaded image (the LASTFILE setting the selector already maintains) with F3 as its accelerator.
• Writes to the SI input buffer registers no longer halt the emulation.
• The Gekko sources are valid UTF-8 (two CP1252 comment bytes in gekko.cpp / gekkoc.cpp were normalised).
• The DSP unit tests link a counter double (testing/dsp_test_support.cpp) now that the DSP sources are built without gekko.cpp, and the mailbox hold-off tolerates the null Core the tests use.

Known issues

• Bump mapping, indirect texturing, the Z-texture environment and Cpu2Efb are not emulated yet.
• PE dither and a few SU flag fields are deliberately unimplemented and documented in wiki/gfx.md.
• Full JAudio microcode support (issue #71) is still in progress; the remaining DSP divergences from the hardware are recorded in testing/Readme.md.
• RVZ support is read-only: bzip2/LZMA groups and Wii images are not implemented.
• The recompiler needs a 64-bit x86 host; 32-bit and non-x86 builds, and GEKKO_JIT_DISABLED, fall back to the interpreter.
• The Linux build still has no sound and no input.
• Some titles still fail to render or hang; compatibility is a work in progress.

Building

Windows. Open scripts/VS2026/pureikyubu.sln in Visual Studio 2026 and build. SDL and Win32 front ends both have Debug and Release configurations.

Linux.

sudo apt install libglew-dev
git clone https://github.com/emu-russia/pureikyubu.git
cd pureikyubu
git submodule update --init
cd build && cmake .. && make
./pureikyubu pong.dol

Tests.

MSBuild scripts/VS2026/pureikyubu_test.slnx -p:Configuration=Release -p:Platform=x64
vstest.console.exe scripts/VS2026/x64/Release/pureikyubu_test.dll /Platform:x64

The previous release is still available: Release Notes 1.7 · Заметки о релизе 1.7. The long story of the work after release 1.6 is in the digest.