Gpsp2x Goes Public With V9008!

[DaveC]

If so gpSP's current layout is similar, in fact, even the general ordering of things are almost the same. There are submenus, but gpSP overall has far more options to worry about (and a more indepth savestate system, etc). I've tried to put the most common options on the main menu, and there's help explaining what every option does.

I'm not sure what you're referring to by the "default", but if you mean what gpSP already has could you explain what is unintuitive about it? Because I think that most of the complaints with the GP2X GUI are centered around the fact that it's not formatted for the screen, that the screen capture is being overwritten (and perhaps doesn't have a lot of business being there for this version), that a lot of options flat out don't work or haven't been tailored for the GP2X version (or even reffer to the PSP directly), the button layout (which I don't really like either), or the lack of proper autorepeat (this is a big killer, IMO).

Well you would kind of have to mess with Picodrive or PocketSNES to see as it is a bit hard to explain. If your GP2X is busted it is kind of hard to do I know

A few things that I don't like in gpSP is when you press something too long it just backs you out instead of making a selection. This means you have to time it right to get it to work or is gives unexpected results. It should just register it as one press no matter how long you hold the button. To press again it should wait until you release the button and not do anything until is sees a second press afterwards. It should actually have NO autorepeat, that just makes it confusing.

Also the way you select roms is a bit weird. You go into a directory, then have to press left or right to get to the rom list or it just sits there it is kind of weird. It took a bit of fiddling to figure that out. In the beginning I was trying to think why my cursor wasn't moving down the ROM list until I started thrashing the pad around and it popped to the list. It isn't that hard once you do it but it is not intuitive, you just need to remember to do it as it doesn't make sense why it is like that. In most other emus the ".." is just at the top of the list if you need to go up a dir. Most emus let you save the ROM path once so it just defaults there after you set it. Hitting left-right on the pad will move up/down by pages rather than entries one by one. Menus also have scrollwrap. Meaning if you are at the "a"s and want to get to a game that starts with "z" instead of pressing down a hundred times when at the first entry "a" you can just press "up" one time and it flips to the "z"s and continues up from there. Alot of these things are only important if you have lots of roms, but many of us do h34r:

None of these things are major but enough little oddities and it just gets to feel awkward.

 

[quartercast]

Personally I'm all for a sleek, no-frills but stable menu system a la Picodrive. In particular, I would like to see:

• the death of the laggy/cumbersome CPU/LCD tweaker screen and instead have the relevant settings embedded into the settings menu
• saving of settings on a global and per-game basis
• a rom loading screen which scrolls and refreshes properly
• a page-by-page refresh of the rom loading screen

Thanks a lot for an awesome emu, and I think the save screen preview is a very cool feature! :lol: As stated earlier on in the thread, gp2x Picodrive menu pics are available here.

 

[Jaguarandine]

Main menu problem for me is that button presses register more than once if you hold it down, making selecting things rather tricky. Although I've gotten used to it, I still accidently select games and options I didn't mean to.

Picodrive in my opinion, has the best menu there is. Simple, plain, and easy to read white text on a black background. And the new version makes the menu slightly translucent over the game image (wow! :lol: ). No frills, but gets the the job done when you need it, and it's never in the way.

 

[LegendaryMachine]

Agh, that took me for freaking ever to figure out to use Y and B at the same time in the menus. Oh well, I got through that. It works pretty well. I love it!

 

[zodttd]

The CPU_SPEED menu is only cumbersome due to a bad timing method I used for button delays. It's set to 1 second instead of about 400ms. The opposite is true in the gpSP2X menu where it's set too fast making double presses occur. It will be fixed for the next release if Exophase is able to resolve that.

Settings ARE saved on a global AND per-game basis already. If you press Y in the file menu on BOOT, you are able to set the global settings. Once you're within a game, settings that are made are on a per-game basis. Hope this helps clear that up.

 

[PokeParadox]

lagginess of CPU_SPEED aside I do think it would be better if either CPU_SPEED is included itself and by default gpsp is started with a script, which calls it and then gpsp or simply dropped altogether so that the end user can sort out their own overclocking options. (GMenu2X, CPU_SPEED, etc)

 

[Exophase]

fatdad, zod changes the topic title with the latest release's version number, so that shouldn't be a problem.

Side note: Exophase needs an A/C adapter for testing builds -- someone have one they can donate, or even lend for a while?

Thanks, but I broke down and got one. Hoorayz. >_>

About the CPU_SPEED stuff: I believe it'd be better for the internal settings to be used because they're saved on a game by game basis, and different games may demand different overclocking.

 

[slaanesh]

About the CPU_SPEED stuff: I believe it'd be better for the internal settings to be used because they're saved on a game by game basis, and different games may demand different overclocking.

I think you should have preset optimized RAM timing values. I don't think anyone is really going to tweak the individual RAM settings per game. Most people don't care or know what they all mean anyway so predefined values would be great. You just have an option to use them or not.

What do you think?

 

[DaveC]

About the CPU_SPEED stuff: I believe it'd be better for the internal settings to be used because they're saved on a game by game basis, and different games may demand different overclocking.

I think you should have preset optimized RAM timing values. I don't think anyone is really going to tweak the individual RAM settings per game. Most people don't care or know what they all mean anyway so predefined values would be great. You just have an option to use them or not.

What do you think?

I agree. I saw all of that RAM timing crap and said to self "self, don't fuck with that, you will spend hours tweaking and in the end probably just fuck it up"

I agree that the CPU speed settings should be in the emu too. As Exophase said those could then be set on a per game basis for ones that need varying degrees of OC (plus that laggy CPU thing is annoying anyway).

 

[Blah]

Yes the emu should call the cpu_speed executable to take care of these things easily.

But the menu system should be fixed first.

 

[gaterooze]

I saw all of that RAM timing crap and said to self "self, don't fuck with that, you will spend hours tweaking and in the end probably just fuck it up"

Actually, it takes about 30 seconds to change it to the "craigix" settings, you save it once, and then performance gains a notable increase.

You can't screw anything up. If the program becomes unstable, just change the settings back to default.

 

[Jaguarandine]

If that's the case, why couldn't RAM timings just be automatically on (or off, if preferred)? There's got to be more to it than that. Maybe you could tweak them for every game?

 

[imhotep]

Settings ARE saved on a global AND per-game basis already. If you press Y in the file menu on BOOT, you are able to set the global settings.

Never knew this. That's very helpful to know. Thanks.

Edit: Just tried it and whilst it remembers that I want scaling turned on, it always defaults to 'automatic 4' frame skip even though I told it I want 'manual 1'.

 

[moxie]

I saw all of that RAM timing crap and said to self "self, don't fuck with that, you will spend hours tweaking and in the end probably just fuck it up"

Actually, it takes about 30 seconds to change it to the "craigix" settings, you save it once, and then performance gains a notable increase.

Seconded. Suddenly, I could turn on the sound in Lunar Legend. Very !/$ in terms of effectitvity versus effort.

Shift of focus:

Tactics Ogre - Knights of Lodis still runs quite slowly, despite OC 240, ram timings and manual fs 3. Sound off. Still playable, but notably sluggish. Anyone got any ideas or nice idle loops to remove?

 

[quartercast]

I saw all of that RAM timing crap and said to self "self, don't fuck with that, you will spend hours tweaking and in the end probably just fuck it up"

Actually, it takes about 30 seconds to change it to the "craigix" settings, you save it once, and then performance gains a notable increase.

You can't screw anything up. If the program becomes unstable, just change the settings back to default.

The problem is that you may not want to use craigx timings at lower clock speeds. If you have a habit in changing clock speeds frequently you have to set 7-8 values each time. Most emu's have a craigx on/off setting within the emu along with a CPU clock speed setting.

 

[Exophase]

Settings ARE saved on a global AND per-game basis already. If you press Y in the file menu on BOOT, you are able to set the global settings.

Never knew this. That's very helpful to know. Thanks.

Edit: Just tried it and whilst it remembers that I want scaling turned on, it always defaults to 'automatic 4' frame skip even though I told it I want 'manual 1'.

Frameskip is a per-game save, it'll only remember it for the game you set it on. Scaling is global, it'll always apply.

 

[fusion_power]

I have saved the faster Ram-Timings via the integrated Tweaker so I always have them enabled. And I think it brings performance plus.
Of Course dhe overall-performance depends heavy of the Game and the Effects ingame. In Metroid GFX like moving Water or Heat Effect over the whole Screen Kills Performance without end.
Strangely, the (sadly wrong scaled) Fullscreen-Mode dont cost many FPS. And turning Sound off brings somehow nothing for performance.

 

[imhotep]

Frameskip is a per-game save, it'll only remember it for the game you set it on.

Thanks for letting me know. It will be fine once auto frame skip works properly on GP2X, but at the moment I have to switch every game to manual.

 

[paulobecker]

Sorry if this has been mentioned before, but I just noticed that if you use more than one save slot the emu seems to get confused and exchanges them. I was playing Monster Rancher 2 and saved the game to slot 0, and then a little further on saved to slot 1. After I turned the GP2X off and came back to play, when I loaded slot 1 it gave me the save I had in slot 0.

 

[White Demon]

Finally I received an official AC adapter to replace my knackered one, and the first thing to do was run gpsp2x @ 260mhz.

I ran three games, and I must say, rather than the mild playability @ 200mhz, now the games were at or almost fullspeed with manual 2. Very impressive. Metroid Fusion was even better - nearly fullspeed without framekip, and at fs1 it was flawless. Very nice.

Driver 2 Advance was still shockingly slow, but hey, even the PSP can't can't run that at anything approaching playable @ 333mhz. And that's when the game's not crashing the PSP.

Now for something a little different, and this regards the PSP version too. I tried running a save state from the PSP version on the GP2X, but it wouldn't run. That's fine, I thought they might be compatible, but it turns out they're not.

But shouldn't the .sav files be compatible? I bought over the .sav file for Mario Kart from the psp to gp2x, and while it worked, for some strange reason the gp2x emulator refused to save to the file, despite the ingame saving claiming it was saving. After trying to return this file to the psp, any attempt to save to the file would crash the emulator.

This means that if I wan't to play my games on either unit with the latest saves I can't, as they both appear to be incompatible with regards to actually saving. Maybe the way the save files are written to is slightly different, I don't know, but I just found it odd that they didn't appear to be completely compatible.