Emulator Development Talk

[Exophase]

Well I know the PSP emulator runs on different code but lets just say it crackles a lot, and headphones or no you can tell something is not right. Sooo if I contribute enough donation money will you fix all the problems to ensure PandaSNES does not crackle lol?

I'm pretty sure it won't crackle. But if it does pay someone else to fix it, not me, it's not my project.

 

[crade]

So what would be the verdict on "bit perfect" emulation for Pandora?

Poor. Pandora isn't fast enough to start using mainline SNES9x, much less bsnes. I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over it until you find you have specific audio complaints.

Yikes, I didn't even consider snes9x could stress out the pandora.. It must be way more hw intensive than I thought.. Does this mean rock & roll racing isn't going to play well?

edit: (it sucks terribly on zsnes)
edit: quote fixes

 

[gruso]

This is also why people that insist on running the graphics at their "native" resolution, without any of the smoothing filters bother me. Only when they claim to be going for the "original" experience, of course. Unless you're passing it through a "cruddy DAC TV scalar" filter, it won't look like it did on your TV.

My view on this (ok, let's call it my retort) is that there was a period in console evolution where the abilities of pixel artists, and the consoles they were targeting, were leaps ahead of the home technology they were being displayed on. Here you had people creating beautiful, intricate worlds like Sonic and Metal Slug, only to be pumped out through an RF adaptor to a fuzzy Rank Arena. Granted, it was common for developers to use some of the flaws of these displays to their advantage, but I don't think any of those artists would have complained if every home had an arcade quality non-interlaced RGB monitor.

Now we have the ability to see these things as they were created, on relatively cheap handhelds no less. And it's turned me into a bit of a rabid purist. I'd much rather see this:

Spoiler

Than this:

Spoiler

The more I think about it though, it's really only the 8bit/16bit era stuff I'm fussy about. It's great to see the really early stuff in its natural form as well, but alot of it made heavy use of CRT quirks to look good. There are some cool filters around that reproduce that. And from the 32bit era onwards, well, most of that stuff can use all the help it can get now. I can't wait to see how PSX looks with Tinnus' video plugins.

 

[Pleng]

Yea. What a bunch of b*stards. If only they realized how much you had personally contributed to the emulation scene in general, then maybe they'd realize how important your opinion was...

*sigh* now this isn't cool. I already apologised. And any good software development team knows one of the greatest resources is feedback. If this weren't the case, then why do people beta test, ever? I'm sure none of Google's millions (see, I can italicise too) of beta testers have ever contributed to their various projects in any way. Feedback is contribution, wouldn't you agree?

Maybe but the attitude of your 'feedback', and the attitude of your apology, frankly, stunk.

 

[WhiteFalcon]

I'd much rather see this:
Than this:

Exactly how I see it, no filtering for me thank you, I love the pixels as they are

 

[Pleng]

I don't get it, what's the difference? They look identical to me!

At first I thought it was one of those passtimes you see in magazines where you have to spot ten differences between the two pictures! You know, like somebody has 6 fingers on 1 hand, they're wearing a odd socks etc...

 

[gruso]

All I did was resize the first image (Metal Slug running at native res on GP2X) to be slightly less tall and slightly wider. Similar to what will happen if you set your emulators to fill Pandora's wide screen. The pixel art loses definition, and the image looks squashed. I understand it doesn't bother everyone, but it bothers me a fair bit.

Here are some magnified versions demonstrating the loss of definition (with some exaggeration):

Original art: http://i39.tinypic.com/20fdjcm.png

Blurred after stretch/scale: http://i41.tinypic.com/1427uhz.png

(Make sure you view them full size, ie don't let your browser scale them to the screen).

 

[Pleng]

All I did was resize the first image (Metal Slug running at native res on GP2X) to be slightly less tall and slightly wider. Similar to what will happen if you set your emulators to fill Pandora's wide screen. The pixel art loses definition, and the image looks squashed. I understand it doesn't bother everyone, but it bothers me a fair bit.

Here are some magnified versions demonstrating the loss of definition (with some exaggeration):

Original art: http://i39.tinypic.com/20fdjcm.png

Blurred after stretch/scale: http://i41.tinypic.com/1427uhz.png

(Make sure you view them full size, ie don't let your browser scale them to the screen).

Ah I see now. Yea I'd much rather have the blurry version, to be honest. Makes those rough edges look a lot smoother.

 

[elwing]

All I did was resize the first image (Metal Slug running at native res on GP2X) to be slightly less tall and slightly wider. Similar to what will happen if you set your emulators to fill Pandora's wide screen. The pixel art loses definition, and the image looks squashed. I understand it doesn't bother everyone, but it bothers me a fair bit.

Here are some magnified versions demonstrating the loss of definition (with some exaggeration):

Original art: http://i39.tinypic.com/20fdjcm.png

Blurred after stretch/scale: http://i41.tinypic.com/1427uhz.png

(Make sure you view them full size, ie don't let your browser scale them to the screen).

Ah I see now. Yea I'd much rather have the blurry version, to be honest. Makes those rough edges look a lot smoother.

good pixel art is better without blur... bad one on an other hand...

 

[Polossatik]

All I did was resize the first image (Metal Slug running at native res on GP2X) to be slightly less tall and slightly wider. Similar to what will happen if you set your emulators to fill Pandora's wide screen. The pixel art loses definition, and the image looks squashed. I understand it doesn't bother everyone, but it bothers me a fair bit.

Here are some magnified versions demonstrating the loss of definition (with some exaggeration):

Original art: http://i39.tinypic.com/20fdjcm.png

Blurred after stretch/scale: http://i41.tinypic.com/1427uhz.png

(Make sure you view them full size, ie don't let your browser scale them to the screen).

Ah I see now. Yea I'd much rather have the blurry version, to be honest. Makes those rough edges look a lot smoother.

good pixel art is better without blur... bad one on an other hand...

not necessarily, it's a matter of taste/opnion but you need to realize that when you played an actual 8bit console on a CRT tv the image was "blurred" anyway.
No CRT tv can display the "square look" of an LCD screen simply by how it works(Sony trinitron style come a bit closer because they use "rectangle pixels" not round ones but there is still "blur")
So if you want the "old feeling" you need some less "perfect" pixels...

 

[NeoG]

All I did was resize the first image (Metal Slug running at native res on GP2X) to be slightly less tall and slightly wider. Similar to what will happen if you set your emulators to fill Pandora's wide screen. The pixel art loses definition, and the image looks squashed. I understand it doesn't bother everyone, but it bothers me a fair bit.

Here are some magnified versions demonstrating the loss of definition (with some exaggeration):

Original art: http://i39.tinypic.com/20fdjcm.png

Blurred after stretch/scale: http://i41.tinypic.com/1427uhz.png

(Make sure you view them full size, ie don't let your browser scale them to the screen).

Ah I see now. Yea I'd much rather have the blurry version, to be honest. Makes those rough edges look a lot smoother.

good pixel art is better without blur... bad one on an other hand...

not necessarily, it's a matter of taste/opnion but you need to realize that when you played an actual 8bit console on a CRT tv the image was "blurred" anyway.
No CRT tv can display the "square look" of an LCD screen simply by how it works(Sony trinitron style come a bit closer because they use "rectangle pixels" not round ones but there is still "blur")
So if you want the "old feeling" you need some less "perfect" pixels...

Averyone has their own tastes, I like to apply some filters so that it looks smoother even if its not like the original.
What I dont understand is how can 16 bit games not work properly in a system as powerfull as Pandora?, while there are people working with Ps1/N64 emulators.
I thought Pandora would play 16 bit SNES and NEOGEO games perfectly with full speed and sound, at least is what I hope.

 

[WizardStan]

Now we have the ability to see these things as they were created, on relatively cheap handhelds no less. And it's turned me into a bit of a rabid purist. I'd much rather see this:

Spoiler

Than this:

Spoiler

Oh, I agree (mostly. A lot of games do look better when put through the right filter. Chrono Trigger with 2xSAI looks quite beautiful, but I digress.) I wasn't talking about whether you preferred filter vs unfiltered from an aesthetic point of view, I meant people that claim to be against filters because they want to play the games as they remember them from their youth, because they don't understand how TVs work.

 

[crade]

I'm not sure about snes era, but I'm pretty sure in the 8 bit era the developers were developing specifically for the crappy televisions available at the time. They even abuse some of the quirks of the old technology quite often.

 

[Prometheus]

They did that in the 16-bit times, too. A number of Mega Drive games take advantage of it to create the appearance of more colours on-screen or for neat waterfall effects, for example - and look at how "narrow" the SNES Street Fighter II sprites look when they're not being displayed on a CRT television.

 

[Exophase]

Now we have the ability to see these things as they were created, on relatively cheap handhelds no less. And it's turned me into a bit of a rabid purist. I'd much rather see this:

Spoiler

Than this:

Spoiler

The more I think about it though, it's really only the 8bit/16bit era stuff I'm fussy about. It's great to see the really early stuff in its natural form as well, but alot of it made heavy use of CRT quirks to look good. There are some cool filters around that reproduce that. And from the 32bit era onwards, well, most of that stuff can use all the help it can get now. I can't wait to see how PSX looks with Tinnus' video plugins.

Incorrect aspect ratio is more pure? Really? I think the ideal would be to use a really high resolution display and a high quality filter to stretch horizontally just to get the aspect ratio right. With 640 pixels for this Pandora will at least be able to give a sharper aspect-correct image than GP2X and Wiz can (although the approximate bilinear filtering used in horizontal stretching looks pretty decent even at 320 width.. even DaveC thinks so)

 

[Prometheus]

but I don't think any of those artists would have complained if every home had an arcade quality non-interlaced RGB monitor.

They took advantage of some of the same things with CRT arcade monitors, though. Just look at the CPS1 and CPS2 libraries - whilst many people make the mistake of thinking that these games were originally meant to be displayed widescreen, their graphics were really meant for 4:3 CRTs.

 

[fusion_power]

but I don't think any of those artists would have complained if every home had an arcade quality non-interlaced RGB monitor.

They took advantage of some of the same things with CRT arcade monitors, though. Just look at the CPS1 and CPS2 libraries - whilst many people make the mistake of thinking that these games were originally meant to be displayed widescreen, their graphics were really meant for 4:3 CRTs.

Yupp. I also had trouble with this to understand until I learned that the CRTs meant to use onto CPS(2) Machines have no square Pixels but vertical longer, rectangle "Pixels". So it appears 4:3 onto the Screens even if the pure Pixel Aspect Ratio onto normal LCDs would be widescreen.
I think because of the higher Res and the higher Power of the Pandora, the CPS Games should look fine with the "Wrong/right" Aspect ratio in 4:3.
I always prefer the correct aspect Ratio a game was meant to be played. So I want to play a 4:3 game in 4:3 onto the Pandora. Except 3D Games where you can switch to widescreen without stretching the image (Quake Series). I really hope this also works for N64 or PSX so we could play Mario on "real" Widescreen without stretching the image to an unnatural aspect Ratio. If this is not possible, I would play it in 4:3, I never had problems with black bars left and right

 

[1magus]

Now we have the ability to see these things as they were created, on relatively cheap handhelds no less. And it's turned me into a bit of a rabid purist. I'd much rather see this:

Spoiler

Than this:

Spoiler

The more I think about it though, it's really only the 8bit/16bit era stuff I'm fussy about. It's great to see the really early stuff in its natural form as well, but alot of it made heavy use of CRT quirks to look good. There are some cool filters around that reproduce that. And from the 32bit era onwards, well, most of that stuff can use all the help it can get now. I can't wait to see how PSX looks with Tinnus' video plugins.

Incorrect aspect ratio is more pure? Really? I think the ideal would be to use a really high resolution display and a high quality filter to stretch horizontally just to get the aspect ratio right. With 640 pixels for this Pandora will at least be able to give a sharper aspect-correct image than GP2X and Wiz can (although the approximate bilinear filtering used in horizontal stretching looks pretty decent even at 320 width.. even DaveC thinks so)

I would rather have the correct Aspect Ratio the game was meant to be in. 4:3 on full-screen 16:9 or 10 bugs the crap out of me!

 

[grasshoppir]

EDIT: Okay, so... what's the deal, grasshoppir? I don't see many other threads started by him, at the top anyway, wtf? And the XXX obviously meant "insert word here." I'm pretty sure everyone knows what it means out of context. And to the OP, why'd you edit out your post? Now I look like someone who needs mental help for talking to themselves :/

EDIT2: OFFICIAL STATEMENT: this board is now a Wiki

EDIT3: struck out blatant asshattery

Yes maybe you're right, thank you for caring.

 

[EvilDragon]

Poor. Pandora isn't fast enough to start using mainline SNES9x, much less bsnes. I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep over it until you find you have specific audio complaints.

Hm, SNES9x 1.39 simply recompiled without using any ASM cores yet runs normal NTSC games (no special chips) fullspeed with 500MHz.
Framelimiting disabled, Super Mario World runs 80fps.

With assembler-cores added, I guess there is a lot that can be done.