For all the people saying PSP ghosts terribly, you should hear this (especially you, DaveC)
In gpSP around version 0.8 I was testing Breath of Fire 2, on the overworld near the beginning (when it's night time and raining) there are a lot of dark colors. When scrolling the screen ghosted so terribly that it basically looked to be about half intensity because the black outlines were blending with everything else. I had witnessed the same effect in NES and PCEngine emulators. Since the beginning I had been complaining about this defect in PSP's screens.
Then, after implementing vsync in 0.9, I was testing the game again. Now when I scrolled outside I could only barely notice ghosting; it was incredibly faint (that is, the screen appeared to become very slightly darker). I'm not sure I would have ever noticed it if I didn't know to look for it.
So it seems to me that adding vsync greatly diminished the problem (in addition to removing tearing). But for vsync to make sense the emulator can't be skipping any frames, so I'm sure that any sensible emulator that implements it (if it implements it correctly at all) will only do so when frameskip is off, including auto frameskip.
You can argue with me on this, I could be wrong, but I checked pretty carefully, even going back to look at an older version to confirm this. I don't see what other explanation there could be. Since this is an LCD refresh delay issue it'd make sense that writing during vertical retrace could improve it. So if I'm right then that means stop complaining about PSP's screen and complain about the people doing shoddy ports without paying attention to these things.
And seriously DaveC, everyone knows you hate filtering and think it makes games unplayable. And yet most of us have played these games (sans the handheld ones) on murderously blurry old TVs from ages past. You don't understand how bilinear filtering can improve screen quality? Some games have limited color spaces and thus suffer from very harsh contrast, it's why NES games look blockier than SNES ones despite being the same resolution (generally). Filtering can improve this harshness, giving the same effect seen on TVs; I personally couldn't ever stand how blocky NES emulators look on PCs when fullscreen without any kind of filtering. On the other hand, bilinear filtering diminishes contrast and saturation when you do want it, and makes the entire thing look significantly more washed out. It'd be great if there was bicubic filtering instead. And I think it's amazing that you talk about PS1 and Genesis being too small when 1:1 on PSP, when it probably uses more screen real estate (in actual inch measurement) than GBA does 1:1 on GP2X, and you've never complained about that.
To those people asking about gpSP and GBA emulation in this thread: as you can see zodttd is working on the dynarec now. I wanted to, but I've been having trouble with my GP2X because the SD slot is broken. As you all know, this is a known common defect in the latest batch and I didn't contact the (very kind) individual who donated it to me about it because I was flat out told that GPH wouldn't replace it. Frankly, this kind of treatment from the company who makes this hardware makes me somewhat less willing to work on it. So I got the tools to open it and bend the pin back, but it still doesn't work. Nonetheless, I was resigned to try developing within the NAND space, but I still lacked a mini-USB B cable (yes, even for PSP dev, which I haven't done any of recently either). I have the cable now, but what I don't have is an AC adapter; sorry, there's no way I'm going to fiddle with batteries with something I have no intentions of ever using as an actual portable (I don't care what any of you say about AA's being superior, I think you're out of your minds). That and I'm not looking forward to fiddling with devkitarm (which I have for GBA dev) to convince it to build for GP2X. Sadly I really have no time, at all, my course/work load is getting me down, plus trying to get work and other big real life issues makes me a much busier person than I was a few months ago. The days just keep passing by and I'm not able to focus much, although I really wanted to work on this.
But of course, zodttd decided to pick it up (albiet without contacting me until now, shame shame
) so I'll try to help him get that rolled out smoothly.
Chances are pretty likely that it can run most games well on GP2X when it's all said and done.
messiah; I think you're using the wrong BIOS, which is why Yoshi's Island wouldn't work for you. *wink* But, who says ARM gives much more power per clock than MIPS? The instructions are more powerful, yes, but you pay for that power with extra cycles when you use it (not always, but often). And MIPS has over twice the number of useable registers. ARM is probably a little better for some tasks (especially with a lot of shifts or array indexing), for others they're probably about the same.
Mudi; PSP doesn't have the same problems GP2X has with its two cores. The second core has much more cache on PSP (the normal 16/16KB) and it has a dedicated 2MB of eDRAM on top of that....
