
Before you run Makaron make sure you have these installed:

 - Microsoft Windows 7, Windows Vista, or Windows XP
Makaron is 32-bit application, being developed and tested on 64-bit version of Windows 7. This is recommended OS. Windows 2000 and earlier systems are not supported.

 - Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a5c84275-3b97-4ab7-a40d-3802b2af5fc2&displaylang=en

 - DirectX End-User Runtimes (June 2010 or newer)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3b170b25-abab-4bc3-ae91-50ceb6d8fa8d&displaylang=en

Don't just drop downloaded DLLs into Makaron directory. That might work for some but DirectX should be properly updated.
Makaron now uses XAudio2 rather than DirectSound. This fixes sound problems for people running Vista and Windows 7.

You will also need a decent PC, with a fast CPU (dual-core or better) and graphics card that is fully DirectX 9.0c compilant. Just because you can install DX9 runtime on your shiny new laptop doesn't mean the card inside is worth anything. At the very least it must support Shader Model 2. 



Keep T12/7 in separate folder:
 1) There is a new file in ROM folder called SH4_FSCA.bin. I can't be bothered to explain its function properly and most of you wouldn't care/undrestand anyway. All you need to know is you should keep it there (though it is optional and Makaron will work without it).
 2) Some config options were changed or removed, so it's best not to mix the new INI files with ones from previous versions. In fact you should use only the new config files and only copy the necessary changes from the old ones.

If Makaron crashes often it's probably a renderer issue. The only workaround for now it to set "multithreaded = 0" in PVR2 section. Obviously it affects performance but I guess it's better then nothing. This will be properly fixed one of these days :)
Test 12/7 version might be a bit slower on low-end systems - sorry about that but if your PC was struggling to run Makaron before it's too old anyway. On the plus side modern PCs will benefit from the changes, the emulator should run much smoother. Don't use SH4 speed alone as the main performance indicator, this value depends on many factors. As a rule of thumb it's good if SH4 speed is above 200, though some games will still run full speed at 130 or even lower.



You can now define video mode that Makaron should use for rendering. All you need to do is set "video_mode = WxH" where W is width (640 to 4096) and H is height (480 to 4096), and W must be not less then H. This works both for windowed and full-screen mode. Default it 640x480.
There is also some rudimentary aspect ratio control, you need to set "scaling_mode" to one of the following values:
 1 - Renders with Dreamcast resolution, streches to screen height, width is resized to match Dreamcast aspect ratio, bilinear filter
 2 - Renders with Dreamcast resolution, resizes by an integer factor for best screen fit while maintaing Dreamcast aspect ratio, point filter
 3 - Renders with screen resolution, streches to screen height, width is resized to match Dreamcast aspect ratio, bilinear filter
 4 - Renders with screen resolution, streches to fit the screen so no aspect ratio control, bilinear filter

Default setting is 2, for purists who want the Dreamcast feel. Right now it's a bit ugly though... I might add a scanline effect in future.
Setting 1 is for people who want to use 2 but can't bear to look at it right now :) Most will probably use 3 though as it provides extra geometry resolution. 4 is pretty much what you had in older versions but with better resolution, it's ugly squashed anyway so no point in pretending it's a Dreamcast.

This has not been very extensively tested and still has some issues (for example direct framebuffer reads will not be properly resized) but should work fine in-game. Oh, and I feel like pointing out that rendering at higher internal resolution does not improve texture quality. In other words, all bitmap-based sprites, fonts, etc. will look ugly. If you don't like it, go buy a 2010/2011 game.

D.