Release VisualBoyAdvance port

[gruso]

Gruso, do you also have StreaK's VBA? If yes, can you tell me whether they differ in performance?

No, I don't have that version. As vadsamoht isn't getting the choppy audio I reported, maybe it's firmware related (as I'm running the latest Super Zaxxon beta). I'll test your port on an earlier firmware to compare. If there's a difference I'll have to report that in the Super Zaxxon thread.

 

[Exophase]

I am curious what your opinion is on how much the VBA renderer could be improved. Would utilizing NEON possibly have a big impact?

You could probably obtain at least a 4x speedup of that part rewriting it w/o using NEON. You'd probably get much better results this way than trying to vectorize the existing approach in a naive/straightforward manner. NEON could increase things a lot more on top of a solid base design, but by that point it wouldn't make much of a difference.


What was going on in the screen where you were testing Minish Cap? It probably wasn't representing a really heavy load for the hardware. Mode 1 or 2 with all layers active, lots of blending and lots of sprites with rotation/scaling will really give it a workout. Minish Cap doesn't have a high CPU load either. Let's just say that it wasn't one of the games I was more interested in profiling on PSP and GP2X.

 

[Zink]

You can use for example picklelauncher, a frontend especially written for this task on Pandora.


http://pandorawiki.org/PickleLauncher


Also as said, for scaling you should use notaz hardware accelerated sdlversion, what gives scaling for free, instead of resourcecostly softwarescaling.

Thanks, I will use that.


It's worrying what you are saying. One of the games I eagerly want to play when I have Pandora, is the Minish Cap. I see I won't be able to use VBA for this one (at least there is another emulator, that runs it smoothly). I don't know if my skills are good enough to optimize a third-party program. Although I will try it, and the new SDL, when I have time (but as I said, it won't be soon).

 

[vadsamoht]

Gruso, do you also have StreaK's VBA? If yes, can you tell me whether they differ in performance?

No, I don't have that version. As vadsamoht isn't getting the choppy audio I reported, maybe it's firmware related (as I'm running the latest Super Zaxxon beta). I'll test your port on an earlier firmware to compare. If there's a difference I'll have to report that in the Super Zaxxon thread.

That may explain it. I am using HF6 atm.

 

[diligentcircle]

As vadsamoht isn't getting the choppy audio I reported, maybe it's firmware related (as I'm running the latest Super Zaxxon beta). I'll test your port on an earlier firmware to compare. If there's a difference I'll have to report that in the Super Zaxxon thread.

"Choppy audio" sounds to me like the emulator is just lagging. It's normal behavior for the audio to sound like crap in these situations. Did you look into that?

 

[gruso]

Not much I can look into personally. This is not one of my strong areas - when it comes to emus I generally just enjoy the fruits of other people's feedback. On another look though, it is definitely an overall performance issue, not just sound.


I just tested under Hotfix 7 beta 2. Interestingly it ran quite smoothly for about a minute (including clean sound), then started outputting the ALSA underrun error and went all choppy again. I don't have an earlier firmware on hand to test with.


Trivia: Also works under Linux-SWAT's Slackware. Same performance issues of course.

 

[vadsamoht]

I just tested under Hotfix 7 beta 2. Interestingly it ran quite smoothly for about a minute (including clean sound), then started outputting the ALSA underrun error and went all choppy again. I don't have an earlier firmware on hand to test with.

I also got the ALSA buffer underrun errors, particularly if I was playing in windowed mode and the window either lost focus or I happened to move the mouse.

 

[Zink]

I got the same choppy sound and buffer underruns under Linux box, where I compiled VBA, which was also indicated by the performance percentage in the window title (was around 80% max). So it's probably normal to occur on Pandy too.

 

[ZXDunny]

gpSP has issues with some games (GTA Advance doesn't work at all, and problems are also quite bad with Mario & Luigi RPG and Mario Party Advance). Personally, I would very much like a VBA port that runs at a decent speed with GBA games.

Okay, but why do you assume optimizing VBA to be fast enough on Pandora w/o frameskip is necessarily an easier problem than improving gpSP for some games? Both of these things represent real amounts of work..

I kind of got the feeling that gpSP wasn't going to get any bugs in the emulation fixed, as they served as a "fingerprint" for detecting if others had ripped the code off? Can't recall if it was you or notaz said that though - in response to my questioning if certain bugs might be fixed in my favourite game. I'll try and find the post.


Edit: http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/60219-gba-emulator-that-you-can-adjust-the-screen-size/page__view__findpost__p__957194


D.

 

[Exophase]

I kind of got the feeling that gpSP wasn't going to get any bugs in the emulation fixed, as they served as a "fingerprint" for detecting if others had ripped the code off? Can't recall if it was you or notaz said that though - in response to my questioning if certain bugs might be fixed in my favourite game. I'll try and find the post.

D.

The bugs HAVE served to out copies of it but they were definitely not there deliberately and I wouldn't have ever deliberately kept them there either.. I actually spent a lot of time on at least a few of them, to no real avail. yongzh (who does the Android port) did fix some things, though. I'd never discourage people from making these kinds of fixes, but I'm not about to do them myself either.

 

[retroDude]

It dosnt run on mine (SuperZaxxon Beta 2)

 

[vadsamoht]

It dosnt run on mine (SuperZaxxon Beta 2)

How are you trying to run it? I've had no problem using a command like

./VisualBoyAdvance romName.gbc

 

[retroDude]

It dosnt run on mine (SuperZaxxon Beta 2)

How are you trying to run it? I've had no problem using a command like

./VisualBoyAdvance romName.gbc

Never mind i was using a pnd from somwere.


I get flooded with alsa error. Tested only lufia: the ruins of lore.


Setting sound quality to 1 seems to get rid of the error flood. but emulation gets slow, and buggy sound

 

[retroDude]

it works nice without sound tho, looking forward to next update!

 

[Zink]

I recently had some time to work on this, and I'm now trying to make a PND with the program. However, I'm having trouble with PickleLauncher. I managed to compile it, but haven't found much about configuration (the extension settings). There are only examples showing how to set up multiple choice parameters for the program (like '-param=value'), but nothing about switch parameters (which don't take any values), like '--fullscreen'. And what about one-of-many parameters which also don't take values? In VBA you can set the scaling factor by passing one of the parameters: '-1', '-2', '-3' or '-4'. How can that be coded into PickleLauncher (preferably to appear as a combo box)?

 

[Zink]

(doubling the post because the previous one somehow hasn't been noticed by the forum engine - the topic didn't move to the top of list, and the list showed that the last post has been made by Retrodude)


I recently had some time to work on this, and I'm now trying to make a PND with the program. However, I'm having trouble with PickleLauncher. I managed to compile it, but haven't found much about configuration (the extension settings). There are only examples showing how to set up multiple choice parameters for the program (like '-param=value'), but nothing about switch parameters (which don't take any values), like '--fullscreen'. And what about one-of-many parameters which also don't take values? In VBA you can set the scaling factor by passing one of the parameters: '-1', '-2', '-3' or '-4'. How can that be coded into PickleLauncher (preferably to appear as a combo box)?

 

[Pickle]

(doubling the post because the previous one somehow hasn't been noticed by the forum engine - the topic didn't move to the top of list, and the list showed that the last post has been made by Retrodude)


I recently had some time to work on this, and I'm now trying to make a PND with the program. However, I'm having trouble with PickleLauncher. I managed to compile it, but haven't found much about configuration (the extension settings). There are only examples showing how to set up multiple choice parameters for the program (like '-param=value'), but nothing about switch parameters (which don't take any values), like '--fullscreen'. And what about one-of-many parameters which also don't take values? In VBA you can set the scaling factor by passing one of the parameters: '-1', '-2', '-3' or '-4'. How can that be coded into PickleLauncher (preferably to appear as a combo box)?

Check out the wiki or readme if you havnt already http://pandorawiki.org/PickleLauncher#Global_Settings


Comboboxes are not supported


Im not sure if this will work, but leaving some of the options blank may work:


extarg=;0;Fullscreen Mode;--fullscreen;Window Mode;;


I think you can manage the scaling with this:


extarg=-;0;Scale 1x;1;Scale 2x;2;Scale 3x;3;Scale 4x;4

 

[Zink]

Alright, thank you for the answer. I haven't hit upon that it could be done this way.


Th PND is here: http://kazekr.net/pnd/VisualBoyAdvance.pnd


But be careful, as it's still beta, and I don't have a Pandora yet, so I don't even know if it works at all

 

[Pickle]

Since PL is cross platform you can easily test if those entries work.

 

[Zink]

Right. I suppose I need more sleep


Okay, the previous pnd was totally broken, so here is the fixed one (yes, the link is exactly the same, I just switched the file):


Link removed, look at the first post for the newest version.


It should at least run, I don't know about configuring, because I couldn't get PickleLauncher controls to work (mouse didn't work, I could only select the rom file and press Enter to launch). What is the normal way of operating PL?


And another problem: within PL I could only browse to one sub-directory inside the root directory (configured in profile.txt), and then PL was showing "no files found" though the dir contained another sub-dir where the files were. Is this intentional behaviour?


Oh, and the wiki was the first thing I've checked, but it looks like it is horribly incomplete and misleading (or just outdated). It needs some serious review to be useful (maybe I will do it when I'm finally sure how to configure that thing properly ).