This new releases has several improvements.

Better joystick support

Important code reorganisation has been done, so that USB controllers and joysticks are detected in a more predictable way.

Different joysticks are now assigned to the ST joysticks in detection order. This means the two joysticks will remain in the same order from one time to the other.

Some peripherals will not be incorrectly detected as joysticks anymore, and a basic detection heuristic is used to identify how peripherals reports their events, as this may differ between devices.

On the orignal hardware, the second joystick (Joystick 0) and mouse share the same port, so you had to unplug the mouse to allow a second player. This is implemented the same on zeST at the low level, but it is made transparent when two USB controllers are plugged in along with the mouse. In that case, provided you do not move the mouse at the same time as the second player uses their controller, everything should be working smoothly.

Also, as an experimental feature, if you are using a PS4 controller as the joystick, you will also be able to control the mouse cursor using the integrated touchpad.

Another experimental feature is the integration of the Bluetooth utilities on the embedded Linux system. This would allow you to set up a Bluetooth device, provided you connected a USB Bluetooth dongle to the zeST board. Unfortunately, for the moment, any bluetooth settings are lost when rebooting the board. This is due to the fact the Linux system runs on a ramdisk and all modifications of that ramdisk are lost when rebooting. We are investigating about a way to secure the Bluetooth configuration in a future release. The ultimate goal would be to enable the configuration of BT devices directly from the zeST OSD setup menu.

New GLUE implementation

The part of the GLUE chip implementation responsible for the generation of the video signals has been rewritten. This is done in an attempt to obtain a more faithful reproduction of the original hardware, and potentially fix some incompatibilities with some video tricking code. For instance, it fixed a bug that was occurring with the sync scroller of the main menu of the Phaleon GigaDemo by NeXT.

I will write an article about this new GLUE implementation. It should be published on this website in a few days.

That’s all folks!

Thank you for reading this release report.

As usual, download and installation instructions are available on the getting started page.