Temper Bugs/suggestions/compatibility Issues


Would using MP3 audio instead of uncompressed be faster or slower for the emu to handle?

In one case using raw music tracks means you don't need to use cycles running an MP3 decoder, but you also have a relatively large amount of data pumping through the memory. MP3s are much smaller but you have to process them.

Which would use less overhead?
 
DaveC said:
Would using MP3 audio instead of uncompressed be faster or slower for the emu to handle?

In one case using raw music tracks means you don't need to use cycles running an MP3 decoder, but you also have a relatively large amount of data pumping through the memory. MP3s are much smaller but you have to process them.

Which would use less overhead?
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I don't know (I wouldn't use mp3, btw, I'd use ogg). The thing with compressed music is that I would absolutely insist that they're still streamed in, because I don't want there to be load times that are additional to what there'd already have been in the original game, and I don't want to have such dynamic memory requirements.

But I don't know if ogg940 supports this is any form.
 
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Duddyroar said:
When might we be seeing the public release of this, Exophase?

It's keeping me up at night waiting for this! :D
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Yeah it's still coming. I wanted to have it out by mid March, then end of March, now mid April, but it'll probably be more late April at the earliest. I'm really pushing for a substantial release.

I'm not going back to the GP2X build until I have over 90% of my tester's 200 PCE-CD games working perfectly on the PC build (perfectly means no little glitches anywhere). Right now it's like 89.5% without any emulated seek time - putting in seek time fixes glitches in some 5 games but it's just an average approximation that's nothing like what you'd wait on a real machine (and if I'm going to make people wait I'd hate for it to be even more than they would on the real thing).

If it helps tide you over anymore, I do have SF2 support, six button pad, and Arcade Card support. Unfortunately I need to do more big changes to the ARM CPU core because of the last one. SF2 was the last thing I played on my GP2X.
 
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Sounds great. If it ran Gate of Thunder, the Ys series, and Drac-x well I would be happy with just that. Anything else is bonus. I hope it isn't too much trouble for the arcade card, most of those games are NeoGeo re-makes.

Thanks for all of the great work :)
 
Dave - good point about the Arcade Card, still, I'd like to play the PCE version of Strider again, even if it does look terrible compared to the MD port. The music is fantastic!

And let's not forget Sapphire is an arcade card game...
 
Duddyroar said:
Dave - good point about the Arcade Card, still, I'd like to play the PCE version of Strider again, even if it does look terrible compared to the MD port. The music is fantastic!

And let's not forget Sapphire is an arcade card game...
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You could play arcade Strider or SF2 on FBA. I think it runs pretty much full speed.

In my opinion I think MP3 or OGG support for CD would get more use but anything will be great.
 
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Exophase said:
Charles MacDonald is going to be doing more hardware tests so hopefully we can get more accurate PCE information :> Although I don't know if this will improve emulation for anything.
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I have several hundred real PCE games - many of which are rare CD games. If you need anything tested/compared on real hardware I can also assist.
 
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DaveC said:
You could play arcade Strider or SF2 on FBA. I think it runs pretty much full speed.
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I already do, as well as the excellent Megadrive version. But the PCE port, whilst being a pretty poor piece of programming, has a lovely anime intro and some brilliant music. I love Strider so I wanna have all the versions I possibly can at my fingertips. :)
 
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I spent the last few days trying to cobble together some tests to emulate CD-ROM seek time to be somewhat close to what it was on a real machine (rationale - some games need it or suffer glitches, but I don't want to shove a stock value in there that'll make people wait longer than they have to). The end results are.. probably not really that great, but I'm tired of dealing with it so I'll go with it.

Since I don't have a PCE to test with I've actually resorted to getting my tester to burn CDs to test for me (yes, he is pretty great). The whole VDC timing issue is actually really bothering me still. There are a number of games that are quite sensitive to when the scroll registers are latched in a scanline. I had some preliminary numbers, but I didn't really do anything with them; I need more specific tests that I have control of. So I'll write up one today and hopefully will be able to get my tester to take a stab at it.

Right now I believe I have just over 90% of games working w/o issue, and a number of the broken ones are due to VDC glitches (or something otherwise minor). There are two that I consider major concerns right now, that seem to be bothering all emulators - Steam Hearts and Popful Mail. Steam Hearts doesn't play audio because of repeatedly issued start/end pos commands, but I have a kludge that makes it work okay and I don't think breaks anything else (how it actually works on real hardware, I have no idea. I'd possibly test if I could do so myself..) Popful Mail has totally broken cinematics, and I have no idea what this is really about. Ootake fixes it with a very elaborate game-specific hack that emulates it in a way that's certifiably nothing like the hardware. I refuse to resort to something like this (besides, Ootake's method requires a huge amount of CPU power). I'd really love to see someone fix this correctly.. since it plagues even Magic Engine I figure David Michel has a better chance of figuring it out at this point than I do. It is my goal to have no game-specific hacks in Temper, and I think I'm doing pretty decently without them.

So, once I get the final numbers sorted out so I'm happy enough with VDC timing I should be ready to get back to touching up things for release. This is what I need to do:

- Fix up some savestate stuff
- ACD support in savestates
- OGG support (this one could be tricky, may or may not do it for first release)
- Fix ARM CPU core to handle the changes I've made to things, this shouldn't be too bad... hopefully.
 
Can't wait for this one! About the audio compression, any chance of supporting a lossless codec? When RIGG was archiving PCE CDs, they would use an iso/wav format and then compress the wavs with the monkeysaudio codec. That was years ago, and it seems flac is the better lossless codec these days. My point is, they were compressing a 600mb game down to ~350mb without any quality loss. Would it be possible to support iso/flac? I'm not sure if that would pose too much stress on the processor. Just a thought. Thanks! Looking forward to playing the english translation of Ys IV on a handheld!
 
Exophase said:
So, once I get the final numbers sorted out so I'm happy enough with VDC timing I should be ready to get back to touching up things for release. This is what I need to do:

- Fix up some savestate stuff
- ACD support in savestates
- OGG support (this one could be tricky, may or may not do it for first release)
- Fix ARM CPU core to handle the changes I've made to things, this shouldn't be too bad... hopefully.
Click to expand...
It is sounding like it is shaping up to be a great release.

Thanks for all of the great and hard work on this.

I am looking forward to trying it :)
 
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Temper is such a kick ass turbo emulator!! thanks for making it play the turbo cds. I cant wait to try the Y's games.
 
Good news: I got iso/ogg/cue support working on the PC version of Temper, using Tremor. I intend to use Tremolo on GP2X. I don't know what kind of speed hit this takes, but if it's bad I might try to put it on the second CPU.

This is what Temper supports for CD images:

cue sheet: You must have this (in CDRWin cue format), as it says where the tracks start and what files to use for each of them.

Tracks files: You may group together as many tracks as you want arbitrarily into a track file - separated by a "FILE" listing in the cue sheet. The typical way to do this would be to either have one bin file or a file per track.

Data track files: Must be in raw binary format, but can be either 2352 bytes per sector or 2048 bytes per sector. 2048 is fine, so the former is really just wasting space. By convention "bin" uses 2352 bytes (as a more low level, accurate representation) and "iso" uses 2048 bytes, but in reality this is defined by the cue file.

Audio track files: Can be in raw format (.bin, 2352 bytes per sector), .wav format (16-bit signed 44.1KHz only!), or .ogg format (must also be encoded as 16-bit signed 44.1KHz). The only benefit in having .wav over .bin is that you can easily listen to the files in WAV players, but since it only costs 44 bytes for the header you'd may as well. OGG obviously gives a substantial size benefit (1/5th the size or less)

I've got a little conversion program to handle things: I'll still highly recommend you get or rip bin/cue files and then use this to convert so it's sure that it'll work. I can release the source too, it requires oggenc though.
 
Sounding good. I am getting anxious to try it. Thanks again for the good work and the update to progress :)
 
Good work... it's definitely going to be an outstanding release. Thank you very much, and I'm looking forward to trying it out. :)
 
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