Emulation Benchmarks?

[SoleGrave]

Well, I have to ask, what do you folks think are the best games to benchmark with for 16 and 32bit systems? Most PCmag reviews use Far Cry and Crysis(though those are a bit old). Its hard to remember which NES titles to stress. Now that I think of it, how is the GBA emu?

 

[Masterfurbix]

It's still a port-in-progress, Though I think I saw a post by Exophase saying that he is considering building one from the ground up.

 

[gruso]

Exophase said that if he worked on GBA emulation again, he'd probably do it from the ground up. He also implied elsewhere that he has something in the pipeline for Pandora. My feeling is that the if and the something are two different things.

 

[Esn]

seconding a video of lylatwars aka starfox

Lylat Wars is not Star Fox - Lylat Wars is Star Fox 64's PAL name. If you're in a PAL region, Star Fox is Starwing.

But that said, I second that, too. Star Fox is one of my all-time favourite SNES games.

(I won't ask about any others, namely all of the Mega Man titles, as I'm certain they'll run fine. :lol: )

A bit OT, but did you know that there's a Star Fox 2?
http://agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=starfox2

I wonder if that will work... h34r:

 

[SoleGrave]

Is it true the GP2x Wiz doesnt run F-Zero at full speed? If so, what about the Pandora?

 

[Fzero]

Fzero is one of the games i hope to rinse straight away, so i hope it is at least very playable, if not full speed.

Im not sure if i would notice if a game was full speed or not, unless it was really obviously slow.

Im a bit confused as i hear that iphone and pandora are pretty similar spec.
For me, the snes4iphone and genesis4iphone run fine, i dont know if they are full speed or not, but certainly fast enough for me to enjoy.
But the n64iphone i find a bit 'skippy', maybe this is an issue due to it not running at full speed?
But then looking at Craig playing Mario on the n64 on pandora, it looked sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet! looked fast as it should be, and certainly looked like it was running better than on the iphone.

 

[SNESFAN]

I'm no expert at this stuff, but the benefit of linux as opposed to the iphone os is something like native code or something like that. Dingoo running linux at 400mhz runs snes roms better then an ipod touch, and it doesn't have nearly as much power behind it.

I've read a bit about it, but don't fully understand it enough to explain it correctly, but the advantage of not having iphone os or android or whatever getting in your way, gives you a significant speed boost to apps like this that need that extra umph in processor power. So even on almost identical hardware emulators are probably going to run much faster on the pandora.

someone feel like explaining this one better?

 

[WizardStan]

But the n64iphone i find a bit 'skippy', maybe this is an issue due to it not running at full speed?
But then looking at Craig playing Mario on the n64 on pandora, it looked sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet! looked fast as it should be, and certainly looked like it was running better than on the iphone.

Emulation is sped up a little by doing a certain memory mapping. Suffice to say, by putting stuff in a specific location in memory, it makes translation a lot faster. This memory location is locked down on the iPhone. It is impossible to write to it, so it doesn't benefit from the direct access this would allow, it has to translate memory addresses first. Makes it a little slower, at least.
I believe the iPhone also doesn't have direct frame buffer access: everything has to be drawn via the OS which is slower than drawing directly into video memory. I could be mistaken about that part though.

 

[SNESFAN]

Emulation is sped up a little by doing a certain memory mapping. Suffice to say, by putting stuff in a specific location in memory, it makes translation a lot faster. This memory location is locked down on the iPhone. It is impossible to write to it, so it doesn't benefit from the direct access this would allow, it has to translate memory addresses first. Makes it a little slower, at least.
I believe the iPhone also doesn't have direct frame buffer access: everything has to be drawn via the OS which is slower than drawing directly into video memory. I could be mistaken about that part though.

that's actually exactly what I read, but I'm not smart enough to remember that stuff verbatim ZoddTTD had a blog about it I think

I heard similar things about android, but google is said to be working on making it better, ability to use apps written in C or something like that.

EDIT: with some kinda sandboxing voodoo so hackers can't get into your system.

EDIT2: some technobable
http://www.zodttd.com/wp/2009/11/giving-thanks-framebuffer-style/
http://www.zodttd.com/wp/2009/11/iphones-framebuffer-secrets-revealed/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#Native_code

 

[craigix]

so um... about that snes emulator... how much we looking at without frameskip.... 30, 50, 60, 200, 2 billion? Anyone with firsthand knowledge with begalboard or pandora try out snes9x???

Nothing fancy, just mario or zelda or some random game other than starfox, mariorpg or something... I'm pretty curious

EDIT: opps... I meant fps... in case anyone was wondering.

There have been videos on youtube of faster than full speed snes emulation for some time.

SNES does not tax the Pandora. Now N64 emulation, that's where the taxing starts!

 

[Poem58]

A bit OT, but did you know that there's a Star Fox 2?
http://agtp.romhack....php?id=starfox2

I wonder if that will work... h34r:

I managed to find the translated version and I refuse to play it until I receive my Pandora. So I hope it does. I love the thought of experiencing what would be a new Star Fox for me on my new hand held system. I guess time will tell. Knowing me though, I'll never find where I put the game...lol

 

[SNESFAN]

@craig
I seen some videos, but it's hard to tell full speed on youtube.

so 60+ fps with sound transparency no frameskip? That's hot!

ooooooooohhh I can't wait =D

 

[Exophase]

I'm no expert at this stuff, but the benefit of linux as opposed to the iphone os is something like native code or something like that. Dingoo running linux at 400mhz runs snes roms better then an ipod touch, and it doesn't have nearly as much power behind it.

I disagree that a Dingoo doesn't have nearly as much power at 400MHz than an iPod Touch that's not at core parity with an iPhone 3GS. Its ARM11 w/o L2 cache is probably only somewhat better performing. I would expect the non-3D performance of the original iPhone to be similar to or even inferior to the Wiz's.

You gave some links earlier, but emulators on iPhone were extremely gimped by a really slow framebuffer update that took at least a third of CPU time. In an ideal situation there would be no blit in CPU time and you'd be drawing to a surface that's either flipped or copied straight to the framebuffer by hardware.

3D on iPhone has an extra expense due to even it not having direct framebuffer access, forcing render to texture which is then used in compositing the screen. But this should all be happening in 3D hardware, so it should just take away from fillrate, rather than CPU time. N64 emulation generally shouldn't be fillrate limited on iPhone.

The memory translation benefit happens if the OS can map the emulated N64 RDRAM to the same location it's at on N64 (0x80000000). If it can't then 1-4 instructions are needed to adjust it, depending on how close things can get. This stipulation doesn't apply to most things emulated because memory accesses don't usually go to one contiguous location almost all of the time. The actual overhead on iPhone shouldn't be that big of a deal if it's handled well, I would imagine no more than a few percent difference over the alternative. So if the iPhone port is much slower then there are probably other factors.

 

[Masterfurbix]

...and I refuse to play it until I receive my Pandora...

Hahaha, I can totally connect with this. I've been ripping images of all my old PSX games, and downloading copies of my (extensive) N64, SNES and GBA collections, but even though I have the emulators on my PC, I'm not touching them until my Pandora gets here

 

[Fzero]

Think I understand now, basics anyway, pandora Linux basically can allow more memory to the emu, where iPhone or android os use it on itself.
ZodTTD does great stuff, my iPhone is blessed with his work

 

[WizardStan]

Think I understand now, basics anyway, pandora Linux basically can allow more memory to the emu, where iPhone or android os use it on itself.
ZodTTD does great stuff, my iPhone is blessed with his work

Not so much more or less memory, but where that memory can go.
It's possible to have physical memory at location ABC, but you can map it to location XYZ. A program can then request memory at address XYZ and they can get it, even if it doesn't actually exist, it just points to a different physical memory block. This kind of translation is done automatically and very quickly. The N64 emulator does such a thing. N64 roms expect a certain memory location, and if they can just use it, then there's no need to translate it in any way.
However, not all memory addresses are available to all OSs. On the iPhone, for instance, you can't create a map to the memory location the emulator is looking for, so you need to add extra instructions that will take that memory lookup and translate it to a memory address that it does have access to.

edit: I should also mention that, while ZodTTD does do some pretty good stuff and is responsible for a lot of work, the recompiler (the part of the emulator that takes an N64 rom and turns it into something that can run on a different processor) was written by Ari64. The recompiler is quite possibly the most important part of an emulator. Or at least the most important part of a good emulator.

 

[SNESFAN]

You're so smart exophase I love reading and having no clue what you're talking about half the time, only really sorta understanding the half I did catch. But confident that it's right in more ways than I could probably ever verify. much love my man... nohomo

 

[Vlynndar]

Video of craigix playing N64 games. F zero x shown not working in-game at 2:07. Also Star Fox.

Yes! The original survival horror classic!

Spoiler

Beware, Pandorians, the witch will send you home at once!

Her mouth looks like a science fiction type blaster.

 

[kingoddball]

...and I refuse to play it until I receive my Pandora...

Hahaha, I can totally connect with this. I've been ripping images of all my old PSX games, and downloading copies of my (extensive) N64, SNES and GBA collections, but even though I have the emulators on my PC, I'm not touching them until my Pandora gets here

How are you ripping your PSX games? I have a stack of my favourite games (I can't even play them - Only have PS3) which I have been waiting for my Pandora...

What file system are they being ripped to?

When I tried to make an .ISO I get two files and the .ISO did not work anyhow...

I'm using OSX, but have a copy of Win XPro running under Parallels (Works well, fast and awesome).
Also have a copy of Mint Linux (7) if you use linux to rip.

THANKS!

 

[Prometheus]

I can't speak for anyone else, kingoddball, but myself I just use cdrdao on Linux to rip my discs to bin/toc format. The only thing is that it's not so useful for games that use redbook audio (that is, standard CD audio tracks), as fewer emulators seem to support TOC files for this (and also the program to convert TOC to CUE doesn't work properly, resulting in converted files giving the same static noise as ever). But, if you want to know how it's done, I'll outline my method below.

I'm assuming you have cdrdao installed. If you don't, run this in a terminal window and hit enter;

sudo aptitude install cdrdao

Once that's done with, put the disc in the drive, and run this in the terminal window;

cdrdao copy --keepimage

It'll then rip the disc to your home directory, along with a corresponding TOC (Table of Contents) file, and prompt you to insert a burnable disc - ignore this request for now.

Rename the image and the TOC file to your liking (they must have the same name - so, Game.bin and Game.toc, for example), and open the TOC file (it's just a normal text file) and edit it so that the .bin file it refers to there has the name you gave yours, and move them to wherever you're keeping your rips.

After that, just choose the kill-task option in your terminal emulator of choice (this is probably not the cleanest way of stopping cdrdao from asking for a blank disc to copy to, I admit, but it's worked for me so far ).

I've used this method for every PSX game I own (including my most recent acquisition), and each rip works perfectly in every emulator I've thrown them at.