Mupen64Plus

[Adventus]

Oh, I can't see it exactly onto the video, is the aspect ratio correct in 800x480 or is the original 4:3 Resolution of the N64 just strechted over the widescreen Pandora LCD (resulting in an even fatter Mario )?

Its rendered at 800x480, no upscaling is occuring.

How is the compatibility so far? Only 3 games are running at the moment... is the problem the graphics plugin?

I don't think its the graphics plugin, i've had it run alot of games well on pc (i posted them a little while back). Heres the games i've test that appear to work (through there intros anyway): Super Mario 64, Mario Kart, 1080 Snowboarding, Wave Race, Star Fox, Ridge Racer 64 & Ogre Battle 64.

Compatibility is something that takes time.

 

[fusion_power]

Its rendered at 800x480, no upscaling is occuring.

Ah, nice. Does this mean the ingame view-area (left and right) is actual wider onto the Pandora than the original one from the Console? I don't know the exact N64 Standard-res but I think it was around 640x480 or so.

 

[PokeParadox]

Its rendered at 800x480, no upscaling is occuring.

Ah, nice. Does this mean the ingame view-area (left and right) is actual wider onto the Pandora than the original one from the Console? I don't know the exact N64 Standard-res but I think it was around 640x480 or so.

I think it was 320x240 for most games... 640x480 with the expansion pak.

 

[giovanni]

First of all, thank you for the awesome work you're doing to get that emulator working.

(That was already pointed out before but there were not answers) Now, I think 600 Mhz should be the standard clocking to run Mupen64Plus... There is the possibility to get the emulator faster than it is now?
I can't code so I really don't understand what you mean with "optimization" and I don't know how much a software can get optimized... I (and probably everybody here) hope we will get 30 fps in game, instead of 16... But is that possible?

P.S: Thank you for the patience, that's a very important question

 

[fusion_power]

I think it was 320x240 for most games... 640x480 with the expansion pak.

Only 320x240? Well, I remember not to see Aliasing onto bigger TV Screens, had the N64 Anti Aliasing? Well, at least the PAL N64 Image onto the TV was incredible misty and foggy, you always thoucht you are in a Sauna or in a Bathroom. Maybe this was the reason why the image doesn't looked so low res.
Maybe the Emulator can gain an huge speed up if the Games are rendered in 400x240 and then simply scaled up in Hardware? I don't know if a lower res makes an noticable Speed-boost but our devs sureley know more.

 

[juniorm33]

I think it was 320x240 for most games... 640x480 with the expansion pak.

Only 320x240? Well, I remember not to see Aliasing onto bigger TV Screens, had the N64 Anti Aliasing? Well, at least the PAL N64 Image onto the TV was incredible misty and foggy, you always thoucht you are in a Sauna or in a Bathroom. Maybe this was the reason why the image doesn't looked so low res.
Maybe the Emulator can gain an huge speed up if the Games are rendered in 400x240 and then simply scaled up in Hardware? I don't know if a lower res makes an noticable Speed-boost but our devs sureley know more.

I believe it was mentioned that the SGX (the graphics gpu) wasn't the bottle neck so far. So it probably wouldn't make any/massive difference in rendering it at a lower resolution than scaling it in this case.
If rendering isn't such a big bottleneck I'm not sure how much benefit you would get from frame skip either? I'm pretty sure a dev was asking about that, any particular reason dev or am I far out of the ball park in this?
Is it simply not using the cpu cycles to tell the gpu to render?

 

[craigix]

Optimisation over a lot of areas will speed things up. The emulator has only been around on the Pandora for a few weeks

The SGX and lower resolutions is a bit more mysterious, it seems, from admittedly limited experiments, it has the grunt to render at 800*480 just as fast as it does at, say, 320*240. If there is a difference in speed it's <2-3fps. So we might as well use 800*480 all the time - and when you see how damned good that looks you will want to too.

 

[Exophase]

Does no one else care about aspect ratio? I'd much rather have it render at 640x480 personally, regardless of whether or not it can do 800x480 with the same performance..

 

[PokeParadox]

Is there a way to do an aspect tweak so that more geometry is shown to give a proper widescreen view is displayed?

 

[Exophase]

Is there a way to do an aspect tweak so that more geometry is shown to give a proper widescreen view is displayed?

Given the nature of N64 emulation, maybe. I know that it was possible to hack UltraHLE to change the camera entirely. So it depends on whether or not the RSP is responsible for clipping and if it can be overridden to use a wider view region. But this is sure to glitch up the display in various things since the games weren't designed for it.

 

[dflemstr]

Is there a way to do an aspect tweak so that more geometry is shown to give a proper widescreen view is displayed?

That would break a lot of games that use GUI overlays (like health bars, menus etc) most probably, because if you change the ortho projection, but don't move the overlays, you'll get a rectangle "in the middle" consisting of the overlays, and two bars on the side with the additional geometry.

 

[silver]

Does no one else care about aspect ratio? I'd much rather have it render at 640x480 personally, regardless of whether or not it can do 800x480 with the same performance..

Yes, I'd always for resolutions scaled from the original - 640x480 in this case. But I figured I minor point at this stage - surely it's just a setting in the video plugin?

Also: Interesting that there now is a significant speed increase with clock speed increase, which was reported as not being present when the pre-neon optimised plugin. (Unless there are also core changes I missed). Presumably suggesting that most of time was spent waiting on the video plugin.... is there much more (easy) neon-ising of plugin to do, or have the easy win's been picked off?

 

[MDave]

Some games have the option of changing the aspect ratio to widescreen (like Goldeneye and Perfect Dark). So 800 x 480 would still be a useful option to have

 

[PokeParadox]

Is there a way to do an aspect tweak so that more geometry is shown to give a proper widescreen view is displayed?

Given the nature of N64 emulation, maybe. I know that it was possible to hack UltraHLE to change the camera entirely. So it depends on whether or not the RSP is responsible for clipping and if it can be overridden to use a wider view region. But this is sure to glitch up the display in various things since the games weren't designed for it.

Of course some things would not work, but I know that a similar hack was done to the Dolphin GC/Wii emulator and many (4:3)Game cube games looked fantastic at 720p 16:9 ratios...
e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaI0mloymyg

 

[juniorm33]

Also: Interesting that there now is a significant speed increase with clock speed increase, which was reported as not being present when the pre-neon optimised plugin. (Unless there are also core changes I missed). Presumably suggesting that most of time was spent waiting on the video plugin.... is there much more (easy) neon-ising of plugin to do, or have the easy win's been picked off?

Not sure if you've seen this....

In the newest build the framerate scales almost linearly with CPU speed. This is a very good thing, it means the SGX and RAM are not the bottleneck... so there's more scope for ARM/NEON optimization. From memory most the sm64 ingame stuff is about 15-17 fps @500mhz, if you enable frameskip so every 2nd frame is skipped then it looks very playable.

 

[silver]

Not sure if you've seen this....

Thanks, no I hadn't - not from this thread, it seems.

So it's cpu bound. Roll on profiling...

Probably worth noting that a big rewrite of Mupen64plus kicked off this month, re-structuring the project for v2. Probably worth avoiding any work optimising anything that isn't part of the ARM dynrec or Adventus' gles wrapper. This should make is easier to merge with Mupen64plus in the future, once Ari64 is happy enough to submit his work to the original project....

 

[Luftwaffles]

Ari64, you are truly a god among men(devs). I've read countless posts asking if N64 will be emulated and most of the answers were that it may be possible, but someone will have to start. You, sir, have taken the leap and I admire your initiative. I know my empty praise doesn't help, but I would like you to know that I admire you and your work as well as those that helped you after liftoff. Thanks again.

Sincerely
Luftwaffles

 

[juniorm33]

@silver - nah it's from one of the threads in general, from top of my head I think it was called "any updates" I believe. Sorry if wrong, I'll edit this post if I come across it again for you

 

[atomicthumbs]

Does no one else care about aspect ratio? I'd much rather have it render at 640x480 personally, regardless of whether or not it can do 800x480 with the same performance..

I'm having flashbacks to when my brother insisted on playing every game boy color game on my game boy advance with the image scaled to fill the entire screen

 

[craigix]

But being scaled to 800*480 with 3D won't give the blurry look that scaling pixel based games does. It will look exactly as sharp as the original, well, even more so as the resolution is higher.