Psx4gp2x Dynarec Status Update

[dabarratt]

I've had my gp2x for about a month and it has really been great.
The community surrounding this handheld is vibrant and it is really exciting to be a new-comer at this particular moment.
DaveC, I'm just joking around. I've been lurking for a while and you are a true asset to the scene and an interesting poster (I've found myself skipping to your responses sometimes . but I've read the backlog on this forum and you seem to be the obligatory doomsayer. I believe that you even doubted the possibility of good quality snes on the gp2x so I always find it funny when gains are made on a project previously believed to be impossible.
The utmost respect to community leaders like DaveC and the amazing developers who make it all possible.
Cheers!

 

[prairiefire]

Great to see you still at it Zodttd and Unai. Man I love this scene!

 

[cowai]

GO GO GO!

 

[Vimacs]

DaveC, I'm just joking around. I've been lurking for a while and you are a true asset to the scene and an interesting poster (I've found myself skipping to your responses sometimes .

I tend to skip over his responses

 

[sehs33]

Zodttd and Unai:
Thank you

 

[Zeladin]

DaveC, I'm just joking around. I've been lurking for a while and you are a true asset to the scene and an interesting poster (I've found myself skipping to your responses sometimes .

I tend to skip over his responses

Mostly only in threads about psx4gp2x... I still agree on the subject of aspect ratio. We know its going to be a long hard slog to get psx up and running decent. I should point out we didn't even have to touch the second core for Gba, and its now running fairly well at stock speeds, and improvements in the works! Wasn't Unai saying he was doing his own psx specific gpu for the 940 rather than using gpu940? We have a bunch of dsp chips too that might be put to some use - though I imagine its not too easy to use them.

 

[Vimacs]

well, i think of it this way,
We may get a not fullspeed but well optimized and playable version now and one day, maybe in year or something when the next "gp2x" model comes out we may have a fullspeed psx emu right after launch.
So its good to do as much work as possible now, cause we benefit now and double benefit later.
Also I guess/hope its a fun and challenging project for all people involved, and it also improves their knowledge.

 

[cowai]

Unai has to post something!

Seriously, this is awsome.. Now we get to play more playable PSX and some what perfect GBA! That is something that will make the scene grow...

Thanks, Exophase (makes Zodttd some more time for psx), Zodttd, (Tinnus?) and Unai! This is great!






ps: Next post by Zodttd will make the post count to 666 h34r:

 

[una-i]

Unai has to post something!

Ok I'll do

Well, when I joined the project I already told every body this was going to be a more than a year project, and it will be.

On the gp2x native 3d performance, I thing that depending on the content and effects it can beat psx.

About gpu940, its a great project advancing nice and very useful for the whole community, for psx4all sadly it isn't, as psx has very strange blending modes, texture addressing, and rasterization rules, not easily emuled in a full featured opengl, last time I look to gpu940 it missed many blending and renderstates...

I'm quite happy with the graphical compatibility we have now.... I only know of one feature missed in my gpu that is sprite mirroring...

Other graphical issues are mostly gte or cpu emulation related, tony hawks as example is a gte bug, and abbey's Oddisey is a cpu bug, but we will irron them also dont worry.

I have some more minnor asm optimization pending for the rasterizer once I finish al the mirror and bugs....

What I have been done mostly was fixing and optimizing timings emulations, now we can underclock to less than 15% in some games and the rum FAST, now we dont miss input when undeclocking and its much more stable and accurate.

I allso have been thinking in some dynarec optimizations, but ther all credit goes to zottd.

I'm my opinion after tins iteration (not current build) may be we are in the place we are able to emulate the full psx cpu with gp2x cpu, and if so it will be the time to move the gpu to the other core.

I would like to find the gte pending bugs as they are very "difficult" to separate from rendering artifacts first, the good think id that float gte works ok so I'm about to execute both on parallel and see what happens.

I hope to be able to "prototype" also some kind of iddle loop detection, I talked with zottd about, that probably would help in some games a lot and probably in videos also.

Thats more or lees all...
Well I got another codder onboard, that made agrat job with sound that now seems to be much faster... I'll ask him if we wants to be "creditted" or preffers to remaing unknown

 

[sehs33]

Everyone (even those who don't care about the PSX as a console) should wish we get a reasonable Psx4gp2x, else, GPH will be very lame and will release a GP3X that is only as powerful as emulating PSX and N64, we want the GP3X to be a monster, not a slight upgrade to the GP2X, and for them to be able to do so, I guess they shoould wait for 2009 to release something with good specifications and competitive price, and this will give us more time to have playable PSX on our GP2Xs

 

[Vimacs]

what i always wondered about is if it would be possible to automatically detect the "best" under clock,
maybe by letting the emulator run a specific part of the game multiple times and increasing the underclock each time to find the sweet spot?
I think that that would be a pretty interesting feature.

 

[Tobriand]

What, so a built in benchmarker that when run
a) saves state
B) benchmarks
c) loads state
d) increases underclock
e) re-benchmarks
f) compare to previous
g) repeat until comparisson is worse on that later iteration.


Sounds like it could be a rather cool feature

 

[ninja_sauce]

Ah, this is nice news - i was actually looking at PSPs on ebay yesterday for emulation as i have a hankering to play star ocean: 2nd story and dragon warrior vii - now i guess i will wait a while longer and see how this develops.

 

[zodttd]

ninja sauce: Right now the PSP will handle things much better. I won't make any promises of fullspeed, at least not yet.

First I must say tht FF7 seems to be a game that only needs 30 FPS to be considered fullspeed, and hence can be underclocked heavily, which it was in this test. I also used a high overclock of 266MHz.
My tests with my last build of psx4gp2x with FF7 when in-game were:
- Jumping off the train in the starting of in-game got about 20 Frames Drawn Per Second (FR - Framerate). The VSync was at about 65.
- The first battle was still slow, but faster than before. I got 9 FR.
- When walking outside to the plant's entrance I got about 17 FR.
- When going into the power plant I got a definite fullspeed of 32 FR.
- The running through the power plant was slightly slower than fullspeed.
- The elevator scene was fullspeed.
- Battles seem to be stuck at that 9 FR.

This game has a lot of potential of becoming fullspeed on psx4gp2x, when given some good work on the dynarec. I'm working on improving it's performance now.

So no high expectations should be set yet for psx4gp2x, but it is improving daily.

 

[Julius]

Sounds great!

Now you just need to get Notaz on board for his sweet dual cpu coding skills (talk about dream team )!

 

[paxl13]

Ohh my Lord !!!,

The incredible ZodTTD has done it !!! Thanks you for the works you put
into all gp2x stuff...

This is completly insane ... Final Fantasy VII and Tactic on my '2x !!!..

Thanks for you GREAT GREAT job
paxl13

ps : Now I realy need to buy a 4gb sd card

 

[DaveC]

Sounds great!

Now you just need to get Notaz on board for his sweet dual cpu coding skills (talk about dream team )!

And have every developer tied up doing PSX?. Since only the few that can overclock super high (not everyone can do 266 MHz, some are stuck at 240 MHz) can have something that runs at 10 FPS many times, the rest of us will be left out. Plus what kind of battery life are you getting at 266 or more? Too bad all of this hard work wasn't directed to something that could actually be fullspeed. I wonder why all of this obsession with PSX? The PSP does it fullspeed already.

 

[fusion_power]

ninja sauce: Right now the PSP will handle things much better. I won't make any promises of fullspeed, at least not yet.

First I must say tht FF7 seems to be a game that only needs 30 FPS to be considered fullspeed, and hence can be underclocked heavily, which it was in this test. I also used a high overclock of 266MHz.
My tests with my last build of psx4gp2x with FF7 when in-game were:
- Jumping off the train in the starting of in-game got about 20 Frames Drawn Per Second (FR - Framerate). The VSync was at about 65.
- The first battle was still slow, but faster than before. I got 9 FR.
- When walking outside to the plant's entrance I got about 17 FR.
- When going into the power plant I got a definite fullspeed of 32 FR.
- The running through the power plant was slightly slower than fullspeed.
- The elevator scene was fullspeed.
- Battles seem to be stuck at that 9 FR.

This game has a lot of potential of becoming fullspeed on psx4gp2x, when given some good work on the dynarec. I'm working on improving it's performance now.

So no high expectations should be set yet for psx4gp2x, but it is improving daily.

With some kind of Auto-Frameskip? I think Full FPS are not needed if there will be a GOOD Auto-FS Option in the Emulator (like in the CPS2 Emu )

I had tested the last official Version of the PSX emulator. Sadly with an 3D Fighting Game (DBGT Final Bout) and it was just one big slow motion Orgy.
I hope with the new Coding-Power such games will be full playable (more: exactly controllable ) in the Future.

P.S.: The horrible Menu of the old Emulator should be rewritten completely :lol:

 

[KingCheese]

I won't make any promises of fullspeed, at least not yet.

Oh man that sounds great! Just heard about this and it would be very cool to play MGS on the go !!
But I think that optimizations could be done with a few games (just like sb already said). I could kick some ass, if I show a fullspeed FF on my GP to my friends. So keep on doing miracles ......

thx KingCheese

 

[Julius]

And have every developer tied up doing PSX?. Since only the few that can overclock super high (not everyone can do 266 MHz, some are stuck at 240 MHz) can have something that runs at 10 FPS many times, the rest of us will be left out. Plus what kind of battery life are you getting at 266 or more? Too bad all of this hard work wasn't directed to something that could actually be fullspeed. I wonder why all of this obsession with PSX? The PSP does it fullspeed already.

Lighten up a little, will ya?
Not everyone has a PSP and there will be probably *some* games quite playable guessing from what ZodTTD said in this thread.

Besides... have you got a better idea for a system that could be emulated? PCEngine and NES sure could need some polishing, but if a coder was actually interested it would have been done already! Keep in mind that they ("the coders") might actually want to work on something that is a challenge, and from which they can actually learn something or that is at least fun to program (at least I guess so, especially since quite a few of the better ones have already said that they don't actually play on the gp2x all that much).