Release REICAST - Dreamcast Emulator

[Askarus]

When I disable then re-enable the sound in Grandia 2 while in a battle, the BGM is missing.

So pressing s has an effect for you?

I'll redownload the PND then.

EDIT:

Doesn't help.

Also sonic is slower than in Ingo's video.

I'm using Driver 4.10 and overclockes to sysspeed 460/1,2 GHz

 

[ptitSeb]

@Askarus: I don't understand. Just pressing the s key on the keyboard should have an immediate effect of cutting sound. That's very odd. You are sure you don't have a "reicast.elf" file in your appdata/reicast that can supersede the one in the PND?

@Zero3K: yes, the current "NoSound" code skip many things, and that may lead to unsynchronised BGM for example. Because it doesn't seems to change much, maybe I can make the NoSound code less agressive...

 

[ingoreis]

Here Videos from the new Build:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/YDCGDUpHGR0?feature=oembed

Tips to getting more speed:

- 1200MHZ

- Syspeed to 464

- SGX Driver 4.10

- Used a fast USB Stick

- run the PND from Mini Menu,not from XFCE

- used the 50 HZ not 60 HZ option

- startet Reicast one Time,closed it and in Appdata in the File Emu.cfg the Option

Dynarec.unstable-opt=1

- in Reicast Bios Settings choosed i Mono Sound :rolleyes:

On the other Options found i no real speed Improvement.

Once i disabled the Sound in Sonic and Sonic was toooo fast to play :lol:

A little whish from me to PtitSeb:

Sonic is very difficult to play with Nubs,maybe you can decrase the Nub Sensitivy a bit?

Or should i do this?

Cool work from you,thanks for porting so much for us

 

[ptitSeb]

@Ingoreis

Don't choose mono, it add some operation to convert from stereo to mono and it play in stereo anyway.

Lower (left) Nub sentivity? Hum, I can try.

 

[ingoreis]

@Ingoreis

Don't choose mono, it add some operation to convert from stereo to mono and it play in stereo anyway.

Lower (left) Nub sentivity? Hum, I can try.

Oh then use i Stereo @now

With the Nubs was it only a Idea but maybe its more playable then because they react now very strong ^_^

 

[rohezal]

Soul Calibur seems to me like almost full speed in the first stage. In the second it is a bit slow. Thank you for the video. It is sad that 3do canceled heroes of might and magic 3 for the dreamcast.

 

[ptitSeb]

2 New builds. The build 05 had non-working left nub, build 06 corrected that.

I finally added some OSD font and print facility.

So now, you have feedback on screen when pressing f, s or n.

Also, using "c", you can have some perf counters on OSD. There are 3 zones. CPU show the Relative Speed of the emulated CPU (in %), than the V show the Virtual Video, and the R show the Render FPS, in the form of Rendered+Skipped

As you can see, most of the time, the CPU is not 100%, so the stuter...

build 06

-----------

• Now with some OSD messages
• Use "c" to have some perf counter on screen
• Try to make the Left nub less sensitive

 

[rohezal]

Sorry I did not restart after the upgrade of reicast, now it works. The problem is solved.

Obsolete:
 

The latest version crashes for me with a segfault.

EGL Error: eglInitialize failed

Fatal Error: rend->init() failed

in rend_thread -> //..//..core/hw/pvr/Renderer_if.cpp 86

SIGSEV ... -> was not in vram

 

[PokeParadox]

As you can see, most of the time, the CPU is not 100%, so the stuter...

I'm fairly sure that the CPU percentage is the percentage of realtime and not Pandora cpu usage. IT makes sense from what I observe with Sonic Adventure and Soul Calibur being almost fullspeed.

EDIT: Misinterpreted ptitSeb's statement - I originally thought he meant that the Pandora still had some CPU cycles left so it didn't explain the stutter.

 

[ptitSeb]

As you can see, most of the time, the CPU is not 100%, so the stuter...

I'm fairly sure that the CPU percentage is the percentage of realtime and not Pandora cpu usage. IT makes sense from what I observe with Sonic Adventure and Soul Calibur being almost fullspeed.

Yes it is. It's percentage realtime. 100% = fullspeed (cpu wise), less than 100% is too slow.

*EDIT*, hum, Right nub mode has no effect in the previous build... I guess a build 07 will appear soon

 

[rohezal]

The Dreamcast page of wikipedia said something about texture compression. In modern gpu the needed pixels of the texture are transfered in compressed format to the texture cache. During the storage in the texture cache the pixels are on the fly decompressed by special hardware. This way you get more textures into the ram and the needed pixels faster into the texture cache.

Does the Pandora support this texture decompression in hardware? Probably not. I am not sure how big such a dreamcast texture is and how much performance is needed to decompress the needed blocks of the texture on the fly. But if this is happen and done via the cpu, would it possible to use the dsp for on the fly texture decompression? Sounds like the perfect job for it.

 

[ptitSeb]

Build 07 is on the repo, fixing the Right Nub (that never worked on the PND).

build 07

-----------

• Fixed Right Nub. "n" has an effect now.

 

[Abaddon666]

The Dreamcast page of wikipedia said something about texture compression. In modern gpu the needed pixels of the texture are transfered in compressed format to the texture cache. During the storage in the texture cache the pixels are on the fly decompressed by special hardware. This way you get more textures into the ram and the needed pixels faster into the texture cache.

Does the Pandora support this texture decompression in hardware? Probably not. I am not sure how big such a dreamcast texture is and how much performance is needed to decompress the needed blocks of the texture on the fly. But if this is happen and done via the cpu, would it possible to use the dsp for on the fly texture decompression? Sounds like the perfect job for it.

In principal OpenGLES2.0 supports texture compression. Thats is, it supports API calls to upload and configure compressed texture data. What kind of compression format can be used depends on the device/vendor (as extensions?). I take it that ETC is broadly supported, but I'm not too familiar with texture compression so I don't know if this information is of any potential use :lol:

I wonder if the relationship between Pandora's PowerVR SGX530 and the PowerVR Graphics chip of the Dreamcast can be made use of somehow. There might be some room for optimization that Dark Raziel didn't think of originally, since he didn't mean to make reicast on PowerVR-Hardware only I guess.

 

[Abaddon666]

build 04

-----------

• In synch with r6 release

Hi ptitSeb, does this mean an r6 version exists? I couldn't find it on the play store and would love to test it on my shield (since I'm stuck in D2 in a situation I can get past with your latest build but not with the old android version).

Thx so much for your great work!

Here Videos from the new Build:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/YDCGDUpHGR0?feature=oembed

Hi Ingo, can you tell me how you set this "Syspeed" parameter?

 

[ptitSeb]

@Abaddon: r6 is what I can find in the sources, so I bumped the version of the PND port. I think only "release" version are push to GooglePlay, when I compile intermediates version.

 

[rohezal]

Hi Ingo, can you tell me how you set this "Syspeed" parameter?

http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/12478-overclocking-gpuram-lets-get-the-facts/

 

[Rockthesmurf]

In terms of texture compression, the Pandora supports ETC1 and PVR if I remember correctly. Of the two, PVR is probably going to be the more interesting one, threads like this have some information about the compression used and how it compared to PVR. Using compressed textures has multiple wins:

• Firstly it typically improves loading times (you don't have to CPU decode the textures like when using a PNG/JPG for example, you can just mmap and then push straight into GFX memory)
• Secondly the texture cache on the GPU typically stored the texture in its compressed form, so if you are compressing your texture 8X then you can fit 8X more in the texture cache (which is obviously a lot faster to read from)
• Thirdly you can get more texture into memory, with the memory architecture used by the Pandora I believe this basically means there is a smaller memory foot print for the application overall
• Finally compressed formats will typically be uncompressed (by the hardware) into an optimal format/layout, thus reducing unswizzling/padding/etc.

I have no idea what is currently being done with reicast, although presumably DC games will be using the VQ texture compression, so it must be either decompressing these textures into uncompressed textures, or changing/loading them as PVR compressed textures.

 

[Askarus]

I finally solved my problem.

I also know why my Sonic was slower than Ingo's.

There was some reicast_ptitseb.pnd on my SD-card.

I did not remember that the test version you uploaded before the repo release was named differently.

It only showed one menu entry that's why I didn't check my Pandora > menu folder.

Now I've deleted the old PND and everything works fine.

Also I did ask my self why Sonic doesn't save my game.

Was pretty surprised, as the new version asked me which Memory Card I want to choose.

It's years ago since I last played Sonic so I didn't remember how saving works.

Now everything is fine for me .

 

[ptitSeb]

I finally solved my problem.

I also know why my Sonic was slower than Ingo's.

There was some reicast_ptitseb.pnd on my SD-card.

I did not remember that the test version you uploaded before the repo release was named differently.

It only showed one menu entry that's why I didn't check my Pandora > menu folder.

Now I've deleted the old PND and everything works fine.

Also I did ask my self why Sonic doesn't save my game.

Was pretty surprised, as the new version asked me which Memory Card I want to choose.

It's years ago since I last played Sonic so I didn't remember how saving works.

Now everything is fine for me .

Ah Good to know. Enjoy some Dreamcast memory now

 

[Abaddon666]

I played D2 now until the end of disc one. I can't get any further because the current builds lack the option to change discs in game. Do you see any way this feature could be added some time soon? Until then I guess I won't be able to continue...