byuu says:
This moves toward a profile-selection mode. Right now, it is incomplete.
There are three binaries, one for each profile. The GUI selection
doesn't actually do anything yet. There will be a launcher in a future
release that loads each profile's respective binary.
I reverted away from blargg's SMP library for the time being, in favor
of my own. This will fix most of the csnes/bsnes-performance bugs. This
causes a 10% speed hit on 64-bit platforms, and a 15% speed hit on
32-bit platforms. I hope to be able to regain that speed in the future,
I may also experiment with creating my own fast-SMP core which drops bus
hold delays and TEST register support (never used by anything, ever.)
Save states now work in all three cores, but they are not
cross-compatible. The profile name is stored in the description field of
the save states, and it won't load a state if the profile name doesn't
match.
The debugger only works on the research target for now. Give it time and
it will return for the other targets.
Other than that, let's please resume testing on all three once again.
See how far we get this time :)
I can confirm the following games have issues on the performance
profile:
- Armored Police Metal Jacket (minor logo flickering, not a big deal)
- Chou Aniki (won't start, so obviously unplayable)
- Robocop vs The Terminator (major in-game flickering, unplayable)
Anyone still have that gigantic bsnes thread archive from the ZSNES
forum? Maybe I posted about how to fix those two broken games in there,
heh.
I really want to release this as v1.0, but my better judgment says we
need to give it another week. Damn.
byuu says:
Since we're now talking about three splits, that's getting a bit out of
hand.
This WIP combines everything back into one project again. Added the
src/fast folder that has all the speed-oriented cores.
A slight slowdown to csnes from what it was before, I'm using blargg's
accurate DSP. I just don't like the idea of releasing a less accurate
DSP core than Snes9X v1.52 has. Plus the fast DSP core doesn't serialize
yet.
I moved back to snes_spc 0.9.0 because I care more about Tales and Star
Ocean than I do about Earthworm Jim 2. So if you try EWJ2 on csnes,
expect it to sound like it does on Snes9X. In other words, don't wear
headphones if you value your hearing.
The middle-of-the-road bsnes core uses blargg's accurate DSP, because
it's about 3% faster than mine which removes all of blargg's
optimizations. There is absolutely no accuracy loss here. bsnes v067.20
that is included should be equal to v067 official.
Performance:
Code:
asnes = 58fps
bsnes = 172fps +2.97x
csnes = 274fps +1.59x +4.72x
The binaries are not profiled, so that's an additional 15% slower from
the previous builds.
Save states only work on asnes, as I don't know how to serialize
blargg's cores yet. The copy_func thing is very confusing to me for some
reason. The debugger won't work anywhere.
Outside of that, please go ahead and bug test. Once I get the debugger
and save states working, I'll build some profiled v1.0 releases for all
three, and we can test that for a bit and then release.
byuu says:
12-15% faster than v067.10, and my Atom never goes below 58fps for
normal lo-res games at this point. Just a little more and I can leave
Async on. That's pretty much it though for the low hanging fruit.
Everything else will be a lot of work for a little gain. Speedups are
from range testing across scanline boundaries and from using blargg's
fast DSP core.
Snes9X is now only 1.93x faster than bsnes, and bsnes is now faster than
Super Sleuth.
I also fixed the Circuit USA menus (HDMA timing adjustment), Wild Guns
flickering (IRQ lock) and Jumpin' Derby (external IRQ triggering.)
There's definitely a lot of troublesome games, mostly the same ones we
had in the past (Koushien 2, Robocop vs The Terminator, etc.) I'm
definitely going to debug Starfox, but I may not bother with some of the
more obscure ones.
byuu says:
I wrote a new CPU core from scratch. It has range-based IRQs, and is
good enough even to run F-1 Grand Prix and Sink or Swim. It also uses
a binary min-heap array for the timing priority queue. This resulted in
a ~40% speedup.
I also added in blargg's snes_spc library, which is an S-SMP + S-DSP
emulator. I am still using his accurate DSP core, and not the fast one.
This gives an additional ~10% speedup.
THIS IS NOT PERFECT, THERE WILL BE BUGS!
I already know that Tales of Phantasia and Star Ocean are hitting some
edge cases. Now that it's fast enough, hopefully blargg can take a look
at it. Something he couldn't test before because you can't rip SPCs of
these games, so it's probably something simple.
My CPU core also doesn't nail every last possible edge case. So things
like Wild Guns and the two or three games that rely on NMI/IRQ hold
aren't going to work ... yet. Be patient.
The SuperFX and SA-1 cores are still cycle-accurate. It wouldn't hurt
compatibility to reduce their precision a bit.
End result is that you can now get well over 60fps in normal games even
n a first-generation Intel Atom.
byuu says:
This adds some sync.sh improvements to make it handle errors more
gracefully.
It also updates asnes a good bit. All of the four base processors now
have all publicly accessible functions right at the top of the main
headers, and everything else is private. This is to allow these headers
to essentially take the place of the previous base classes in the old
bsnes-merged format. So if there's something public there, you need to
implement that exact function to make your own module.
I removed the frame counter from the PPU, as it has nothing to do with
emulation. That now resides inside the Qt -> SNES interface code. Quite
amazing, I was actually saving the frame counter into the save state
files before, yuck.
Removed some baggage in the System class: it was friending a bunch of
long-dead functions and classes.
Forgot to re-add the CHEAT_SYSTEM define to info.hpp, so that's been put
back.
byuu says:
This fixes libsnes and debugger builds, and collapses bsnes/ppu/bppu to
bsnes/ppu and bsnes/dsp/sdsp to bsnes/dsp. It also introduces
bsnes/sync.sh, which will synchronize all of asnes/ with bsnes/,
excepting the custom speed-focused modules. So far, that's bsnes/ppu
(scanline renderer) and bsnes/dsp (state machine.)
Should make keeping the two ports in sync much, much easier. It's
basically the same thing as before, only you run sync.sh and have a few
duplicated folders now. May make it clearer by creating a stub/ or src/
folder inside bsnes to do all of the copying, so that you only see the
custom folders in bsnes/' root directory.
Tim Allen