Commit Graph

2 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tim Allen f5e5bf1772 Update to v100r16 release.
byuu says:

(Windows users may need to include <sys/time.h> at the top of
nall/chrono.hpp, not sure.)

Unchangelog:
- forgot to add the Scheduler clock=0 fix because I have the memory of
  a goldfish

Changelog:
- new icarus database with nine additional games
- hiro(GTK,Qt) won't constantly write its settings.bml file to disk
  anymore
- added latency simulator for fun (settings.bml => Input/Latency in
  milliseconds)

So the last one ... I wanted to test out nall::chrono, and I was also
thinking that by polling every emulated frame, it's pretty wasteful when
you are using Fast Forward and hitting 200+fps. As I've said before,
calls to ruby::input::poll are not cheap.

So to get around this, I added a limiter so that if you called the
hardware poll function within N milliseconds, it'll return without
doing any actual work. And indeed, that increases my framerate of Zelda
3 uncapped from 133fps to 142fps. Yay. But it's not a "real" speedup,
as it only helps you when you exceed 100% speed (theoretically, you'd
need to crack 300% speed since the game itself will poll at 16ms at 100%
speed, but yet it sped up Zelda 3, so who am I to complain?)

I threw the latency value into the settings file. It should be 16,
but I set it to 5 since that was the lowest before it started negatively
impacting uncapped speeds. You're wasting your time and CPU cycles setting
it lower than 5, but if people like placebo effects it might work. Maybe
I should let it be a signed integer so people can set it to -16 and think
it's actually faster :P (I'm only joking. I took out the 96000hz audio
placebo effect as well. Not really into psychological tricks anymore.)

But yeah seriously, I didn't do this to start this discussion again for
the billionth time. Please don't go there. And please don't tell me this
WIP has higher/lower latency than before. I don't want to hear it.

The only reason I bring it up is for the fun part that is worth
discussing: put up or shut up time on how sensitive you are to
latency! You can set the value above 5 to see how games feel.

I personally can't really tell a difference until about 50. And I can't
be 100% confident it's worse until about 75. But ... when I set it to
150, games become "extra difficult" ... the higher it goes, the worse
it gets :D

For this WIP, I've left no upper limit cap. I'll probably set a cap of
something like 500ms or 1000ms for the official release. Need to balance
user error/trolling with enjoyability. I'll think about it.

[...]

Now, what I worry about is stupid people seeing it and thinking it's an
"added latency" setting, as if anyone would intentionally make things
worse by default. This is a limiter. So if 5ms have passed since the
game last polled, and that will be the case 99.9% of the time in games,
the next poll will happen just in time, immediately when the game polls
the inputs. Thus, a value below 1/<framerate>ms is not only pointless,
if you go too low it will ruin your fast forward max speeds.

I did say I didn't want to resort to placebo tricks, but I also don't
want to spark up public discussion on this again either. So it might
be best to default Input/Latency to 0ms, and internally have a max(5,
latency) wrapper around the value.
2016-08-03 22:32:40 +10:00
Tim Allen 4344b916b6 Update to v094r40 release.
byuu says:

Changelog:
- updated to newest hiro API
- SFC performance profile builds once again
- hiro: Qt port completed

Errata 1: the hiro/Qt target won't run tomoko just yet. Starts by
crashing inside InputSettings because hiro/Qt isn't forcefully selecting
the first item added to a ComboButton just yet. Even with a monkey patch
to get around that, the UI is incredibly unstable. Lots of geometry
calculation bugs, and a crash when you try and access certain folders in
the browser dialog. Lots of work left to be done there, sadly.

Errata 2: the hiro/Windows port has black backgrounds on all ListView
items. It's because I need to test for unassigned colors and grab the
default Windows brush colors in those cases.

Note: alternating row colors on multi-column ListView widgets is gone
now. Not a bug. May add it back later, but I'm not sure. It doesn't
interact nicely with per-cell background colors.

Things left to do:

First, I have to fix the Windows and Qt target bugs.

Next, I need to go through and revise the hiro API even more (nothing
too major.)

Next, I need to update icarus to use the new hiro API, and add support
for the SFC games database.

Next, I have to rewrite my TSV->BML cheat code tool.

Next, I need to post a final WIP of higan+icarus publicly and wait a few
days.

Next, I need to fix any bugs reported from the final WIP that I can.

Finally, I should be able to release v095.
2015-08-18 20:18:00 +10:00