Gpsp 0.9-2xa

[DaveC]

Has anyone had any games that work continuously? The games I have tried froze at some point, either right away or after a few minutes. How long have some of you been able to play without a lock-up? Maybe I am just lucky and picking the wrong games.

When the games are running they are pretty fast and autoframeskip seems to work very well. Impresive.

 

[Rivroner]

I have been playing for an hour with Winning Eleven and no problems.
I am OC to 275 and not using ram tweaks.

 

[Jaguarandine]

Nice! Great release Exophase!

Sonic Advance is broken for me; as people have been saying there dseems to be less compatibility. Sound is virtually perfect in many games now. I'm playing without ram timings right now btw with 285 OC on my girlfriend's GP2X ( ).

Circle of the Moon, which I've been playing since the first beta, runs great. Some observations:

-there is slight lag in the sound when the buffer is set higher than 4096; actions happen, then the sound effect kicks in.
-game hasn't crashed yet for me
-close to fullspeed. imo auto framskip 3 works best.
-savestates are kind of flaky. Glad my 7 hour game is still safe h34r:

Great work though, thanks again!!

 

[Exophase]

Nice! Great release Exophase!

Sonic Advance is broken for me; as people have been saying there dseems to be less compatibility. Sound is virtually perfect in many games now. I'm playing without ram timings right now btw with 285 OC on my girlfriend's GP2X ( ).

Circle of the Moon, which I've been playing since the first beta, runs great. Some observations:[

-there is slight lag in the sound when the buffer is set higher than 4096; actions happen, then the sound effect kicks in.

Yeah, that's the idea. (higher sound buffer size gives better performance, better auto frameskip behavior, more delay)

-game hasn't crashed yet for me
-close to fullspeed. imo auto framskip 3 works best.
-savestates are kind of flaky. Glad my 7 hour game is still safe h34r:

Yes, there's a little reg caching issue that'll prevent them from working over half the time (should be fixed now? Haven't tested)

 

[slaanesh]

The new version gpSP 0.9-2xa works well for me. A few games don't work but that's par for the course.

My favourite Mario Kart has seen a nice increase in performance. I'm running at 240Mhz w/ optimized Ram Timings. It seems quite playable to me and I can win races fairly easily. I'd played this for 15 minutes without any problem. Looking forward to give this a better workout.

The amazing thing is that Mario Kart plays better under GBA emulation than SNES emulation... :blink:

I also noticed that the gamma settings are now working which is nice.

The menu fix-up is also appreciated.

Assuming compatibility can be fixed I'm wondering if there is any chance of eeking out some more speed?
Or is the GP2X going "flatstick" now with the current build?

 

[Exophase]

I updated my blog with some profiling information.

I think there's still room for speed to be improved, hence why I'm bothering with profiling.

Naturally compatability should be improved, I see no reason why it shouldn't be as compatable as the PSP version (which including all the fixes since last time could be as high as 95% or so now)

 

[Rivroner]

Thank you Exophase.I´ll take a look to the blog.

 

[slaanesh]

Again your blog entry is a good read.

Your profiling method is handy information to other developers who may not have considered this type of approach to profiling the components of an emulator.

A couple questions:

Was your profiling conducted with the current public beta build or is it your own current build?

You mentioned earlier that your ASM ARM code for blending is just over half the size of the GCC compiled version; does this mean that the alpha blending components of your profiling will see a speedup in inverse proportion to the size difference of the code? Or have these improvements already been included in this profiling?

 

[kardasan]

Has anyone had any games that work continuously? The games I have tried froze at some point, either right away or after a few minutes. How long have some of you been able to play without a lock-up? Maybe I am just lucky and picking the wrong games.

Yep, I get lock ups too. Maybe it's my batteries but I don't think so. So far I got a lockup on Baldur's Gate (E). I don't have (U) version so I can't check if it's the bad rom

 

[pjprijs]

Tried to download the files from http://exophase.devzero.co.uk/gpsp09-2Xa.zip but I get a 403:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /gpsp09-2Xa.zip on this server.

Are the permissions changed?

 

[Exophase]

Again your blog entry is a good read.

Your profiling method is handy information to other developers who may not have considered this type of approach to profiling the components of an emulator.

A couple questions:

Was your profiling conducted with the current public beta build or is it your own current build?

You mentioned earlier that your ASM ARM code for blending is just over half the size of the GCC compiled version; does this mean that the alpha blending components of your profiling will see a speedup in inverse proportion to the size difference of the code? Or have these improvements already been included in this profiling?

Profiling is done on something close to the current build.

It's difficult to tell how much something can be sped up by change in instruction count, because that doesn't account for cache, pipeline stalls, varying instruction cycles, etc.. but on ARM one half the instructions should be at least significantly faster, if not two times the speed (would be different if memory were accessed a lot more in the smaller version, but in my case it's accessed a lot less).

No improvements have been done yet. I want to see how much they actually do help. Note that I'd only be optimizing the final pass of the blending, where the actual color operations are done. The rendering itself would still be significantly more expensive, so the "alpha cost" might not go down too much.

 

[Exophase]

(I could swear I posted this somewhere already, if it turns out I did sorry for the double post >_<)

I got Sonic Advance working. It actually runs quite well at 200MHz, as far as I can tell - maintains fullspeed, in levels the drawn frames is around 35-45 (so better than constant fs1), except where heavy alpha is used or there are fancy bosses, then it drops to around 15-30, but still maintains fullspeed. Moving to Linux timing instead of SDL timing might have helped tighten up auto frameskip.

I need (a) betatester(s) now (just a couple) to go through the games listed in this thread. Course I already have one.. think I'll shoot him a PM.

 

[A_SN]

I haven't tested this release, but since the emu probably still crashes at random times, maybe it would be a good thing to make a script launches GPSP and that checks the return value of GPSP and that if the value isn't 0 (if the emu crashed) it would relaunch GPSP. Can't do it cause I couldn't test or anything (my USB port has broke off) but it would be good since it would avoid you to reboot.

And anyone with apps that can crash should do that too ;-).

 

[Rivroner]

I have a lot of free time Exo, if you need another betatester i am available.

 

[ryosaeba]

I haven't tested this release, but since the emu probably still crashes at random times, maybe it would be a good thing to make a script launches GPSP and that checks the return value of GPSP and that if the value isn't 0 (if the emu crashed) it would relaunch GPSP.

I made a patch for an earlier version that I sent to zodttd that removed the launch of the interface from the code and that used a script to do that (and a couple other changes), but it's not being used anymore.
The obvious advantage was that if the emu crashed it would relaunch the main menu anyway.
It's the same concept of the wrapper function of gmenu2x.

The script would look something like this:
CODE

#!/bin/sh
./gpsp2x
cd /usr/gp2x
exec ./gp2xmenu

 

[Tobriand]

I need (a) betatester(s) now (just a couple) to go through the games listed in this thread. Course I already have one.. think I'll shoot him a PM.

I'd be more than happy to throw some games through a few of their paces if you'd like. I'm not the fastest tester ever, though.

 

[sam fisher]

(I could swear I posted this somewhere already, if it turns out I did sorry for the double post >_<)

I got Sonic Advance working. It actually runs quite well at 200MHz, as far as I can tell - maintains fullspeed, in levels the drawn frames is around 35-45 (so better than constant fs1), except where heavy alpha is used or there are fancy bosses, then it drops to around 15-30, but still maintains fullspeed. Moving to Linux timing instead of SDL timing might have helped tighten up auto frameskip.

I need (a) betatester(s) now (just a couple) to go through the games listed in this thread. Course I already have one.. think I'll shoot him a PM.

Don't forget to ask them to test Mario Vs Donkey Kong I love that game, and I cannot complete it till it works again. SUre I could complete it on my GBA, but im better at on GP2x

 

[Jaguarandine]

Nice! Great release Exophase!

Sonic Advance is broken for me; as people have been saying there dseems to be less compatibility. Sound is virtually perfect in many games now. I'm playing without ram timings right now btw with 285 OC on my girlfriend's GP2X ( ).

Circle of the Moon, which I've been playing since the first beta, runs great. Some observations:[

-there is slight lag in the sound when the buffer is set higher than 4096; actions happen, then the sound effect kicks in.

Yeah, that's the idea. (higher sound buffer size gives better performance, better auto frameskip behavior, more delay)

-game hasn't crashed yet for me
-close to fullspeed. imo auto framskip 3 works best.
-savestates are kind of flaky. Glad my 7 hour game is still safe h34r:

Yes, there's a little reg caching issue that'll prevent them from working over half the time (should be fixed now? Haven't tested)


My bad! I automatically assumed the higher numbers meant better audio quality. I should've read the readme more carefully.

Also, I thought I'd mention that Circle of the Moon crashed on me , after about 2-3 hours of play spread over about 7-8 sessions. The time it did crash, I was playing for about 20 min. I do have RAM timings on now though

 

[techFreak]

It locks up on Winning Eleven 2002 too.

 

[fusion_power]

Exophases Blog is interesting, even for me. ^^ Yes, I think this Alpha Blending is a big Performance killer in Metroid Fusion. ( bigger than "video speed" I would say ) Sector 4 and 5 - underwater eats frames without end. With Alpha blending over the whole screen on these places, I think it's one of the biggest performance-killing 2D GBA Games ^^ So if Exo can manage to improve the speed for Alpha effects to normal ingame speed I think the 2D games will run incredible fast in areas without heavy gfx effects (like they do so yet here and there )