Beta Snes9X4D4P - Another New Build, Now With Hi Res And New Rom Picker

[quartercast]

Yes, pickle launcher is awesome, great job w/ that! What do you mean by internal zip support?

 

[HackModford]

Just noticed the nice comments about picklelauncher, thanks. Very glad everyone seems to like it.

Ive got some updates coming for it (hopefully done soon).
1. External commands i.e set the cpu speed type scripts
2. In-menu selectable options
3. Internal zip support

1 ans 2 are basically done and 3/4 of the way there.

Does that mean I would be able to set specific clock speeds for specific roms?

 

[Pickle]

internal zip support mean the launcher will detect a zip extract it and pass the location of the extracted file to the target application.

yes all options can have custom selections that are the common default. So custom clock speed options for each item is possible.

 

[ivanovic]

So, in keeping with my "can't keep focused on one project at a time" ( ) I added hq2x style antialiasing to the renderer. New PND here, modified source files (because I never did figure out how to create diff files) here. Ivanovic or Science or Skeezix or whomever, feel free to do with the code as you wish. It was mostly pulled from the hqx project which was in turn based on Maxim Stepin's work, and then modified to work entirely with 16 bit colour data.
Enhancements: hq2x blending, obviously. Activate it in the menu. Also added 's' as a hotkey: press it during gameplay to switch between smooth and jagged. If I get around to it, I'll see if I can combine the hq2x and hq3x into an hq2/3x for smoothed stretch play. Now that there's three options to choose from, I also modified the menu slightly to allow you to scroll forward and backward between the options. Not that it was obvious, what with only two options, but previously it only scrolled forward.
You will need to turn on auto frame skipping: the anti-aliasing effectively cuts the framerate to 1/3, which is very unfortunate. Even overclocked to 800 I was still barely getting 30fps. I suspect there's room to use the DSP here, though I don't know how.
Most people probably won't use this; the effect is incredibly subtle at only 2x magnification. I remember 3x and 4x being a lot more pronounced, a lot better looking, but you can still see some improvements in places. There may be some tweaking that can be done to produce even better output but I wouldn't count on it.

Okay, I added your work into the svn repo after some tiny whitespace changes. Beside this I also made the scaler not quit with a "mode not found" error when selecting smooth scaling for hires games. Since it is not relevant for those anyway the same mode as for 1to2_double will be used.

I uploaded the new pnd into the archive though the only change to your version is that the game will not exit when "scrolling" through the list of modes in a hires game. You can use the download link below to get this version once ED approves it in the archive.

Changes in v20101106:
* Added smooth scaling support for LowRes games. This currently requires massive overclocking (>=800MHz) to run rather smooth. Thanks to WizardStan for implementing this.

Download:
http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,71,63

 

[Pleng]

Could it please be possible to make it save your screen stretching preference?

 

[ivanovic]

Could it please be possible to make it save your screen stretching preference?

Patches are welcome!

 

[Pleng]

yes?

 

[ivanovic]

Another new version. Thanks to pickle there is now some scale2x support that does some slight smoothing without using too much CPU power. Beside this I fixed some issue with some texts in HiRes games looking bad (doh, made some bad mistake and was using some low res mode though in a HiRes game...). Beside this the other changes are there to make things more readable in the sources...

Some things that I would love to see added to the emulator that neither SiENcE nor I found the time to implement yet (patches are welcome/wanted! For the sources just give SiENcE or me a ping):
* Support for storing config settings (frameskip, scaler, ...) and automatically loading them upon restart.
* "Smoothed" scaling for the 3x2 mode. Pickle mentioned that there is some 2x3 mode already available in the scaling files he found and added, but we need 3x2, not 2x3...
* Add more filters in general. Possibly relying on the hardware filters the pandora does provide.
* ASM cores for anything. So far everything is still plain C-Cores and not likely to change until "someone else" has a look. I had a quick look if it would be possible to easily drop in the PocketSNES parts, but that one is too different to easily reuse it.


Changes in v20101111:
* Added Scale2x support for LoRes games. This is basically the "normal" mode with some slight smoothing, speed is close to "2x2 no-AA" mode. Thanks to Pickle for implementing this.
* Fixed display of HiRes games in 2x2 mode, now *real* HiRes is used there (meaning that fonts should look decent now!).


Download:
http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,71,63

 

[Jumpman]

Thanks for the update Ivanovic, all of the work you guys have put in is greatly appreciated.

I was wondering if anyone has made any progress on improving Stunt Race FX? It functions and runs great until you try and start a race, and then complete chaos!

Chris

 

[HackModford]

I'm absolutely digging the scale2x

Awesome work guys!

 

[Loon]

Many thanks for the update, looking really good with the slightly smoothed scaling. I'm not really a fan of non integer scaling but this looks superb, like the sprites were made for the Pandora screen.

Runs well at the recommended 600Mhz with the Scale 2X method.

 

[Gurumeditation]

Great job

 

[Blue Protoman]

Will we ever see SuperFX games run at full speed?

 

[Prometheus]

Well, technically they already run too fast. It's just that they're choppy at the standard clock speed. Overclocking means that they run too quickly to be correctly playable (Star Fox is a great example of this, even ) - it's something that's true of the version of Snes9x that it's based on, too.

 

[HackModford]

Isn't there anyone that knows how to patch the emulator so that it saves the settings on a per game basis?

 

[Blue Protoman]

@Prometheus: Ah, so it's basically just a matter of polishing a few things to make Star Fox run perfect? Sounds good to me!

 

[Prometheus]

^ I would suspect so, although what, I don't know.

Current versions of Snes9x run it more-or-less properly, but it was stuck in that runs-too-fast state that we see here for quite a number of years. (Bizarrely, even in the current versions, Star Fox 2 still runs a touch too quickly, and also frequently cuts off parts of its own audio in the process in ways that were obviously not intended. )

 

[pupnik]

The unmodified snes9x4p_20101111.pnd binary running on archos 7.0 internet tablet:

The Archos has an OMAP3640 @ 1GHz running Angstrom. Any guesses how many fps it runs on 'auto'? (besides Ivanovic)

[edit 11-13 fps with 2x2 simple scaler and no-sound!]

 

[SiENcE]

so Pandora and Archos are binary compatible?

 

[mcobit]

so Pandora and Archos are binary compatible?

Only when you run angstrom on the archos.