Gp2psx V0.34

[circus_freak]

Hey everyone (first post here)

I've just ripped Wing Commander IV and it works reasonably well, about 10 - 15 fps in game but the movies are very choppy indeed.

The frameskip seems to work ok in 0.34c but in 0.34d turning frameskip on causes the hud to flicker constantly.

Great work on the emulator zodttd, keep it up!

 

[Mudi]

Frameskip doesn't seem to do a thing in FFVII in 0.34d. I have a frameskip of 20 and it still seems to be drawing every frame. Also, I can't get the sound to toggle... anything wrong with the toggle right now? I can't turn it off... it says push down on analog stick + volume -/+, but I can't get it to work.

The graphics look perfect though. Keep up the good work.

 

[Mr Doctor]

I know this isnt on topic, but I dont want to start a new thread for it

I was just thinking about the saturn, PC finds it hard to emulate becuase it was a dual CPU machine and its hard to emulate it on a single cpu PC. How do you think the 2Xs twin CPUs would handle that? Probably not very well because the Saturn could kick the PS1s arse, but I was just wondering

 

[ruffnutts]

keep wondering the saturn was a pile of and if it was that good why did it die so quick and the psone lasted at least 8 years, sorry i just did not like that console lol

 

[subin]

iirc the saturn had a lot of helper chips, which add up to a lot to emulate.. and plus, roms are pretty hard to come by anyway, aren't they?

 

[Jarska333]

keep wondering the saturn was a pile of and if it was that good why did it die so quick and the psone lasted at least 8 years, sorry i just did not like that console lol

​

One would think, that people like you would not end up in a place like GPX32. There are no bad machines here, just less popular.

 

[Shikaku]

keep wondering the saturn was a pile of and if it was that good why did it die so quick and the psone lasted at least 8 years, sorry i just did not like that console lol

​

One would think, that people like you would not end up in a place like GPX32. There are no bad machines here, just less popular.

​

Saturn = king of RPGs and fighting games... mostly japanese though =(

 

[ruffnutts]

listen just saying i dont like the machine this about psx anyway and i do have a right to be here lets just get back on topic and start testing some games

sorry mr doctor

 

[zodttd]

Sorry about not getting that new release out so fast.
I just updated ZPSX codebase, and will be releasing that soon.
I also am in the process of testing the GP2PSX release a bit more. It won't be a huge release, but it will be a pretty good upgrade over the last one especially due to incompatibility.
I also am in the process of getting the PalmOS PSX emu of mine, PPSX updated and working for a teaser release.

Lot's of stuff to do.

Oh yeah, dual cpu support. It's not happening until I can find a use for it. Dual CPU's seem really helpful in a threaded application, but in an emulator, how can the first CPU "talk" to the second one while still keeping in sync? For instance, I did a dual-cpu blitter. It used the second CPU to do all the routine blitting/drawing to the display of the GP2X. Problem is, if first CPU doesn't wait for the second CPU to be done blitting, then things get all out of sync and graphical and other errors occur. So what's the point of the second CPU if it's a bit slower and the first CPU would have to wait for it anyways? My guess is, I'm not using it effictively. If someone can give me some usable ideas for the second processor, I will try it out.
Any other developers been able to use dual cpu's for an emulator?

 

[Paradox]

ZPSX????

so now release today?

its ok, keep up the good work zod

 

[Tinnus]

zodttd: what about doing sound generation on the second?

 

[devestation]

Good going zottd.

As for sound on the second processor, you may end up with the exact problem he was reffering to with the processors going out of sync.

This is just another idea, so take it if you think it is good. Since it does seem like emulating ps1 on two cores seems unnecessary, why not try running the menu system, or some sort of program running in the background, on the gp2x. Think x360, how it has the operating system in the background, only we could use this one for save states/screenshots, or whatnot.

Again, it probably is not a good idea, just thought I would through it out there.

 

[Mudi]

So I take it it isn't possible to have a shared memory area that informs the second processor when to move ahead and when to stay? There has to be some way to sync them...

 

[wild_eyed]

could you rewrite the clock on the 2nd processor to follow the main one or vice versa? or even have a new clock program running?

 

[zodttd]

New release out.
Grab version 0.34e at:
http://www.friggingames.com/gp2psx034e.zip

New in this version. A bunch of bug fixes, a bit of a speed increase, and a even weirder frameskip that now always skips rendering frames. Weird, because I set the frameskip to 100 and it looked like it wasn't skipping, was odd, so I need to double check the routine. If it works for you, great, if not, it'll probably be improved very soon. ;P

A new ZPSX is out as well, and I have PalmPSX in the works.


Sound generation...Hmm. Maybe, since I think there's a threaded option for the main sound loop. Might actually work, but it'd be hard to pull off. I'll check it out.

My blitter using the second cpu used shared memory to inform when a new frame was needed. But then, and for the exact reason I forgot, I think it needed to be sync'd since the framebuffer can't be read and wrote to at the same time. So in order to prevent that memory issue from happening, it would need to wait for the blit to be done before writing to the buffer. Sounds like you just sync when needed right? Well when you're doing 10+ syncs a second, it really doesnt make it worth it.

So unless someone can figure that issue out, there's no fun async blit using the second CPU. I tried though.

 

[Paradox]

yay new release!


just so you know zod, check my site in my sig, at the gp2psx page, i have about total of 50 PSX games and ill be testing them all eventually and putting info on how each one runs in detail on my site

i dont want to do it so soon though, since there will probably be about 10 releases before i even finish testing them all, so im going to wait until theres some kind of milestone release where games run at least nearly fullspeed.

 

[DuFace]

Nice update! I tested it out with Einhander, pretty good, Alot faster than .34d but WAYYY choppier. Even on FS0?

 

[Paradox]

definetly see the speed increase in this one. RE2, without sound it says Framerate: 7 with FS0-1, it seems to decrease the more i increase frameskip, what FPS is Framerate 7? i really need an FPS coutner to let me know how fast things are going cause framerate is confusing me

with sound/music it goes to Framerate 4

 

[Mr Doctor]

Haha, I love how this is one of the most often updated things ever and yet zodttd is appologising for being so slow

Grand work man!

keep wondering the saturn was a pile of and if it was that good why did it die so quick and the psone lasted at least 8 years, sorry i just did not like that console lol

​

Nah man, Saturn was the victim of really poor marketing (like the dreamcast). It was an awsome machine that really kicked the PSX on head to head battles (just like the Dreamcast kicked both the PS2 and XBox ass )

 

[zodttd]

My framerate counter will be made "normal" next release, hopefully.
Right now it's just counting the number of new frames (so a static image would have a framerate of 0) that are rendered (doesn't include skipped frames). The reason it's going down when you use frameskip, is due to the frameskip working, at least I think.

If you have a framerate of 7 with frameskip 1, you have an effective framerate of 14, since you're skipping every other frame (7*2=14). So if you have a framerate of 7 and frameskip of 2, you'd be skipping 2 out of 3 frames, which would make the effective framerate 7*3=21. So your framerate is 14, but the fps you're used to is higher than that. A good way to see if frameskip is working is to set things to frameskip 0, count the frames being drawn, then set the frameskip and check. If frameskip 0's number is larger than the (framerate*(frameskip+1)) then your frameskip is too high.

Why have I kept this weird framerate counter? Because the GPU is asked to update the screen on an interupt. If I change the timings like I was doing so earlier, the requests to update the screen might be changed. So there might be 100 requests to update that frame in one release in a certain spot in a game, and 60 in another. If I just gave that as the framerate, it would be inconsisent in terms of seeing if performance increased.

The way I'm doing the framerate now, only shows how many frames are actually being drawn to the screen, and nothing more. So if the performance of the emulator goes up, so will that number. If the performance goes down, so will that number.

So it's not really FPS, but more of a "speed indicator".

Maybe in the next release I'll include FPS as well as my current frame counter.