Star Fox in Snes9x4P - any plans to fix the excessive speed? :) (Bounty added)

[Prometheus]

The most recent update of Snes9x4P, which fixes the sound issues some games were having, makes it damn near perfect.


However, to my knowledge, one thing is still slightly off: Star Fox (and probably some other SuperFX stuff) runs too fast, no matter what the Pandora's clock speed is, as Snes9x 1.39 (which Snes9x4P is based on) was written in a time when SuperFX emulation was not as good as it is nowadays. In other words, Star Fox runs about twice as fast in-game as it actually should (the audio is perfectly normal, though), as outlined here (and as quoted in the spoiler below). This makes it very difficult to play it if you happen to be used to how it runs on a real SNES, and it also cuts things off before it should, sometimes.

Spoiler

Star Fox was released with the SuperFX coprocessor, used to draw the pseudo-3D polygons. Unfortunately, it was released with the first revision, which ran at half the clock-rate of the version used in Super Mario World 2.


This chip also has many caching mechanisms, and generally does not perform very well. But you wouldn't know that from other emulators, where Star Fox appears to run twice as fast as it should. Sure, it may be nice looking, but it isn't accurate. One should at least have the option to play Star Fox at its proper speed.

I was just wondering if there were any plans to fix this - does anyone know?

 

[diligentcircle]

However, to my knowledge, one thing is still slightly off: Star Fox (and probably some other SuperFX stuff) runs too fast, no matter what the Pandora's clock speed is, as Snes9x 1.39 (which Snes9x4P is based on) was written in a time when SuperFX emulation was not as good as it is nowadays. In other words, Star Fox runs about twice as fast in-game as it actually should (the audio is perfectly normal, though), as outlined here (and as quoted in the spoiler below). This makes it very difficult to play it if you happen to be used to how it runs on a real SNES, and it also cuts things off before it should, sometimes.

I've still got bad sound in Star Fox. Music (and some sounds) plays much more slowly than it did in the original. Actually, the "alt sample decoding" option seems to have no effect.


I don't know about you, but I'm much more bothered by the slowly-playing sounds than the slightly faster speed...

 

[Prometheus]

I haven't encountered the sounds playing wrongly, so it's only the fact it runs about twice as fast as it should (double speed isn't "slightly" ) that's bugging me.

 

[DarkCheetah]

I haven't encountered the sounds playing wrongly, so it's only the fact it runs about twice as fast as it should (double speed isn't "slightly" ) that's bugging me.

Same here. The sound is fine for me, it just runs faster than hell.

 

[diligentcircle]

I guess the problem is that frameskip defaults to "60/1" rather than "Auto", so the emulator was lagging. About as much as the Super FX does, actually. I do get the "sound fine, but fast" results when I set it to Auto.

 

[EvilDragon]

It doesn't run too fast.


You're just too slow


Just kidding


Yeah, an upgrade to a newer SNES9x would be great. Newer SNES9x versions compile and run but don't display any video on ARM systems... don't know if anyone worked on that already.

 

[diligentcircle]

bsnes!


In all seriousness, though, I do wonder how well bsnes would perform on the Pandora if it was ported. I don't tend to use it on my laptop because input is incredibly laggy, but hey.

 

[Emnasut]

Am I just imagining it or Was there once a version which had the option of stretching fullscreen while preserving 4:3, i.e. no black border at the top and bottom (even though there was no fancy filtering so it was a bit blurry) but on the left and right?


Also a turbo button would be nice (stting frameskip to 9 while pressed, or just a toggle) to skip those fights in all those rpgs where you are already good enough to win anyways but random encounters still pop up all the time...

 

[diligentcircle]

Am I just imagining it or Was there once a version which had the option of stretching fullscreen while preserving 4:3, i.e. no black border at the top and bottom (even though there was no fancy filtering so it was a bit blurry) but on the left and right?

It wouldn't be possible to perfect it; the SNES windowboxes some games (Star Fox is one of them) to fight against overscan.


Of course, it would be great if there was a "fullscreen keep aspect ratio" option...


As an aside, though, the resolution of the SNES is actually 256x224, which is an aspect ratio of 8:7 (4:3.5), so it's a little taller than 4:3.

 

[Emnasut]

^ Oh, okay I didn't know that. Oh well the black box isn't that bad, it just would be nice to use more of the display. ^^

 

[Prometheus]

Ok, I forgot to do this before, but I'd like to put a bounty on this. Unfortunately I can't put up a huge amount here, so for now it stands at $25 USD (about £16 GBP).