About Previous

Version	Changes
Version 2.6	Previous v2.6 does not include many changes, but it improves behaviour on high DPI displays. It also improves window resizing. Last but not least it makes it possible to netboot Plan9 by adding a system register address alias.
Version 2.5	Previous v2.5 concentrates on UI improvements and fixes problems with the NeXTdimension board. In detail: Windows are now resizable. This should make it more convenient to use Previous on large or small screens and screens with high resolution. There is a new shortcut (b) to hide the statusbar. Dual instruction mode traps on the i860 have been fixed. This fixes display errors and crashes on the NeXTdimension board. The translation look-aside buffer of the i860 is now properly simulated. This fixes another kind of crashes and display errors on the NeXTdimension board. ditool is now able to extract images with multiple partitions and raw images of magneto-optical disks.
Version 2.4	Previous v2.4 contains a lot of improvements. The most significant new feature is netboot support. You can extract raw disk images with NeXTstep installed to some directory (must be on a case sensitive file system) and use it as root directory for booting (Network > NFS shared directory). The extraction can be done with the command line utility "ditool", which comes with Previous. All versions of NeXTstep except 0.8 can be netbooted, although 0.9 is a bit buggy. Instructions on how to use this new feature are in the source repository and are included with the binary. Many thanks go to Simon Schubiger for adding this great feature! I would not have been able to do this. Another highlight is the new internal NetInfo server, which makes networking configuration much easier. The shared directory should now be mounted automatically in /Net/nfs after boot without the need of any setup. The new version of Previous also includes improved full screen handling, especially when using multiple screens. It is now possible to dynamically switch between multiple window mode and single window mode. The most noticeable bug fixes are improved disk performance when running Mac OS, corrected time and volume adjustment, more reliable network connection, sound recording, NMI and optical disk drive. Less noticeable fixes include fully accurate system control register simulation, SCC and floppy drive passing diagnostic tests and more accurate FSINCOS FPU instruction. You might also notice some changes in mouse movement handling. I hope it is an improvement for those having issues with the mouse. Last but not least Previous comes with some improved networking and file sharing instructions. We now have step by step instructions to set up networking and file sharing for all versions of NeXTstep from 0.8 to (OPENSTEP) 4.2!
Version 2.3	This version includes an internal NFS server (many thanks to Simon Schubiger for that!). You can now select a shared folder from the GUI. There is no more setup required on the host side. Setup on the guest side is still required but has become a bit simpler. New instructions are included (networking.howto.txt and filesharing.howto.txt). There is also a new command line tool (ditool) included that can be used to extract files from raw NeXT formatted disk images. Other improvements include refined CPU, FPU and DSP accuracy. The stability of network connections has also been improved. The new version includes two significant bug fixes: Previous now works with SDL2 v2.0.13 and later and does no longer randomly crash the guest system when booting 68030 guests.
Version 2.2	This version fixes a bug that was introduced with v2.1 and prevented the reset warning from showing up. Furthermore it improves DSP ROM data tables with accurate values. Finally it adds a new feature: You can now select what MAC address your emulated machine should have.
Version 2.1	This version improves emulation efficiency and fixes some bugs in FPU and DSP emulation. You should notice quite some improvement in emulation speed or host CPU usage. Thanks go again to Simon Schubiger for these refinements.
Version 2.0	Adds support for adding multiple (up to 3) NeXTdimension boards to your emulated Cube (thanks to Simon Schubiger for adding this). It also slows down NeXTdimesion a bit to reduce host CPU load.
Version 1.9	PCAP networking support Improved CPU emulation accuracy (from WinUAE)
Version 1.8	Removed a useless option from the keyboard menu that only caused problems (host keyboard repeat) Fixed a bug that caused FPU ROM constants to be slightly off and adds some undocumented constants Fixed a bug in the timing system that could cause Previous to get stuck in variable speed mode
Version 1.7	This release concentrates mainly on improving accuracy and reliability. There are not much new features, but it adds the ability to choose between thin wire or twisted pair ethernet connection. This is mostly for the sake of completeness. More noticeable changes include faster devices in variable speed mode and more realistic device timings in normal speed mode. Host CPU usage is now almost zero while Previous is paused, which should make it much more "battery friendly". Ethernet connection stability has been improved. There should be no more lost connections in regular use. Sound no longer causes lags in responsiveness under certain very important use cases (PacMan). Wink Probably the most important improvement is a fix of a long standing 68040 MMU bug that caused kernel panics with the message "Unexpected kernel page fault failure: MMU invalid descriptor during table walk" and some hangs and weird behavior, especially during network transfers. Furthermore FPU stability has been improved. It now runs FPSP without any known problem. There are also changes that are not visible for the user: Previous no longer needs floating point data types. This means it is completely independent from the host's floating point format, which not only improves portability, but also makes it possible to emulate the FPU bit perfect (except for transcendental 68882 instructions, like FSIN, FLOGN, FETOX, which match FPSP results). Previous now has full support for floating point exceptions! This is probably the world's most advanced 68k FPU emulation, by far! Many thanks go to Toni Wilen (WinUAE) for doing lots of FPU tests for me on his Amiga hardware. The changes are also available in the latest version of WinUAE (v2.5). There are also some minor improvements. For example Previous no longer crashes, if you run it with write protected disk images.
Version 1.6	Added SoftFloat FPU emulation (fixes FPU on non-x86 host platforms). Added emulation of FPU arithmetic exceptions. Added support for a second MO-disk drive Improved emulation of dummy RAMDAC. Fix for a bug which caused a crash when writing to an NFS server. Fix for a bug which prevented sound input under NeXTstep 0.8. Fix for a bug which caused temporary speed anomalies after pausing. Fix for a bug which prevented NeXTdimension from stopping in rare cases. Fix for a bug which caused external i860 interrupts to be delayed.