Loongarch Improvements with Box64

Summary

Happy new year, and happy new release of Box64! The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one). While Box32 (used to run Steam) is still experimental and unstable, stability did improve. Still, expect some crashes when downloading things with steam. And it’s not all, Battle.net is also getting stable, and some games are working too. Not all unfortunately, and your success might depend on your geographical region, as program versions might differ. At least, you can try it on ARM64 & Loongarch. It’s still to be tested on RiSC-V. Highlights So, what’s new in this release? Apart from the traditionals fixes, speedups, opcodes implementation and new wrapper functions, there has been a number of refactors. Some are more groundwork for later use, like the libdl one. But some have immediate benefits. The prefix opcode decoder, now implemented on the interpreter and the 3 dynarec backend is one of those. This allows to more generically handle exotic opcode prefixes without doing hacks or adding duplicated code. This one lead to the removal of many source files, now useless, making the maintenance of box64 a bit easier. Also, this automatically added support for many rare (or less rare) occurrences of many opcodes in the Dynarec, with 0 extra coding. There has been some work on the memory footprint of box64 too. Some applications use a lot of memory once launched with box64 (Steam for example, or other things that use libcef or a variant of it). So some work was started to develop mechanisms to try to identify blocks of code that have been converted to native, but that seem to not be used anymore, so they can be deleted and the memory recycled for some fresh code. The work is still in progress on this subject, and more work will come in next ...