Future Drmd Release?

[Horscht]

I didn't think of giving it to him just so he has it! I thought he could help me making a compatibility list, but I won't give it to him, if you don't feel comfortable with it. I already told him to donate, but I'm not sure if he already did

EDIT: come to think about it: No, i wouldn't want him to have a beta just to test it for its compatibility. There are plenty of others with a "legit" beta who can test, too. so no need for him.

 

[devlkore]

I think someone mentioned that landstalker works in the latest beta.

Anyway some good news for the beta testers, I've just had a blinding idea on how to make the rendering routines sooo much faster.  I'm going to get started on this tonight so by the end of the weekend you should have a new *super* fast beta well hopefully if all goes to plan.

I'm not sure at the moment how much faster it will be, but at a rough guess its maybe twice as fast. Its all to do with the way I currently deal with transparencys which I thought I was doing pretty quickly but if this idea pans out it will open a can of whoop ass on my last effort

Later

Reesy

​

I can't wait

I love being able to play Ranger-X, Gley Lancer and so many other awesome games.

I'll be writing up a compatibility list over the weekend, should be around 100-160 games.

BYEEEEE!!

edit: I'd just like to mention one game, Panorama Cotton runs fairly smoothly, but on the first level there are lines down the left side of the screen, which eventually go away. Also you can't see the bottom display and the graphics glitch when you take an alternate route through a level. It sounds really bad, but it's actually playable and the frame rate is good at 164 or 144 (I don't remember), if this was fixed it would be amazing. I'm using beta 5 BTW.

 

[MaDsk8tard]

thanks for your answer mister reesy
i'm happy to know that landstallker work^^
(i will work much for crocodingus )

 

[look]

Ehup,

this new rendering business.

If it takes the weight off the CPU then games might not slow down with SFX and music on.

cool.

I'm thinkin my tracker will come into play once Reesy is happy with the emu core and interface.

After that he can pick and choose games from the list and each compatibility fix should take 3 or 4 games off the list as many suffer from the same things.

This will hopefully be the same for Castaway and any other emu's folks want to stick on it.

 

[Horscht]

hey look. Did you consider making the database goodgen or genren based? I think it would make the work for reesy a lot easier.

 

[look]

hey look. Did you consider making the database goodgen or genren based? I think it would make the work for reesy a lot easier.

​

Thought about it......but

I don't have a database of all the goodgen/genren games.

I don't know enough about the mantis DB structure to go fiddling.

I'd like to keep it generic so maybe other emu's can use it.

I'm restricted by time as I work, I have a wife and young kid and I like playing games too much.

I'm still open to suggestions though.

EDIT

Landstalker loads up ok and music sounds good.

When you go to create a new game slot and start is reboots.

This is typical of games that are likely to use on cart memory methinks

 

[Horscht]

I don't have a database of all the goodgen/genren games.

Well, that would be the smallest problem, as I could give you my genhave textfile which contains all the games.

I don't know enough about the mantis DB structure to go fiddling.

Well, I thought about it like that one person has the right to ADD games to the database. That person would name the games after the goodgen/genren database.

I'd like to keep it generic so maybe other emu's can use it.

well, If we would just name it in the proper way, there should be nothing keeping us from using it for other consoles

I'm restricted by time as I work, I have a wife and young kid and I like playing games too much.

This is for sure the biggest problem. We need to find a person that has the time to create that database. As im in 12th grade now, I don't have much freetime (and even less in the next few days).

but I just had an Idea. It has to do with the database for DrSMS 6.0. I don't remember what the name of the guy was, but he made a database according to the goodSMS names (http://www.webpersona.com/drsms/games_list_index.php). maybe we can somehow contact that guy. Or perhaps there is some database already lying around somewhere.

 

[look]

The important thing is to list the ROM versions you tested and the emulator version you've tested them on.

DrMD has great compatibility already and I'm sure there are just a few common issues effecting some games.

How about I just stick a custom field in so people can enter the ROM they used?

 

[Horscht]

Hm, I guess this is the most easy way. It would help Reesy a lot I guess, as he can clearly see what ROM version doesn't work.

 

[look]

There you go.

A nice big field.

might make it mandatory but dont want to put too much presure on people.

 

[bast525]

.... okay I'm uh... trying not to get TOO excited here :blink: *wiping up drool* as I uh... dont' quite understand exactly what all this means, but I see the words "twice as fast" and I can't help but uh... get a little excited.


SO... the rendering code would work twice as fast... but you only see it upping FPS at 'lower' clockspeeds. Well, considering your emu supports up to 200-something MHZ... what exactly are we considering 'lower'? I usually run mine at 164mhz... the highest my GP will suport w/o locking up. Would I see a noticeable increase in frame rate (even 1-2fps)? Or, alternately, would I be able to turn the mhz down, thus extending battery life a bit, but still get the same performance?


Also, would the changes you're talking about have any effect on those pesky transparencies and raster effects? I saw you mention it had something to do with the way you are currently rendering transparencies, that's why I ask. And, not to beat a dead, packed up and already relocated horse, but this thought just occured to me. How would this doubling of the rendering speed have effected the now-gone 16 bit graphics mode if at all? Since 16 bit emulates more accurately, but slower, if this new rendering process sped it up to be even close to the current performance, maybe it would be worth bringing it back to perfectly emulate games like Sonic with the transparent water effects? Just curious.

 

[Reesy]

Well twice as fast is only an estimate, I haven't finished the code yet so I cant give a more actuate idea.

By lower clock speeds i mean 133 and 144. The hope is to get the fsp upto around 30fps, ie a frameskip of 1.

No this speed up will not effect "those pesky transparencies and raster effects".

I'll finish the code and *if* it is significantly faster I *may* consider putting 16bit rendering back in.

 

[bast525]

cool deal... though I'm no coder, intuition tells me that the speed increase probably wouldn't be enough to be worth your time bothering to put 16bit back in, but I thought I'd ask.


Well, either way, ANY speed increase is a good speed increase!

 

[DaveC]

hey look. Did you consider making the database goodgen or genren based? I think it would make the work for reesy a lot easier.

​

EDIT

Landstalker loads up ok and music sounds good.

When you go to create a new game slot and start is reboots.

This is typical of games that are likely to use on cart memory methinks

​

Landstalker is effected by the Cyclone bugs. It works perfectly (but slow) with the Mushashi core.

 

[look]

Landstalker is effected by the Cyclone bugs. It works perfectly (but slow) with the Mushashi core.

​

Ah the Mushashi core. I've not catered for that in the compatibility tracker.

Do you think an extra field something like.

> Same problems in Mushashi core? Y/N

would be useful?

 

[Reesy]

cool deal... though I'm no coder, intuition tells me that the speed increase probably wouldn't be enough to be worth your time bothering to put 16bit back in, but I thought I'd ask.


Well, either way, ANY speed increase is a good speed increase!

​

Well I finally got my idea to work late last night only to find that it runs 10fps slower than my current code which I thought was weird. It should defininately run faster or at least at the same speed.

I then decided to make a modification to the original code. I unwrapped a looped section of code, this saved quite a few opcodes at the expense of memory. Now this code should be faster than the old code but when I ran this code I found that it too run 10fps slower than when the original code.

I have no idea whats causing this slow down, maybe its to do with cpu memory caching. I'll have to investigate further and see where the bottleneck is.

Later

Reesy

 

[look]

@Reesy

is it the same with sound?

 

[Reesy]

I never tried it without the sound, could there be a memory issue there then?

 

[bast525]

boooo... and here I've been rabidly checking my emails every five minutes for Beta 6 j/k dude j/k well no actually I WAS checking the hell outta my emails, but j/k on the booo part Well damn tis a shame it didn't work as planned, I'm sure we all know how much it sux to spend a lot of time on something only to have it not turn out as we planned/hoped.

Ah well, at least I can give my inbox a rest now :lol:

 

[Billy Lee]

Reesy, I've always wondered why there are black borders along the top and bottom of the screen. The GP32 screen is already widescreen and the borders make it even wider. As the Megadrive didn't use widescreen, doesn't this mean the picture on DrMD is squashed? Would it be possible to add proper full screen in the next release of DrMD?

Good luck sorting out the speed problem.