This should be a fairly easy merge, assuming I didn’t mess anything up. TL:DR no one uses it and it’s not great.
Boot from DVD Backup is an ancient feature with origins in the Megacommit. Back then, GameCube and Wii games were quite large relative to drives of the time. For example, in 2008, the most common hard drive sizes were 320GB and 512GB. On the 320GB drive I personally had at the time, as little as 42 Wii ISOs could have filled it entirely! And that’s ignoring any other files one might want to put onto a drive. Backup DVDs allowed users to burn relatively cheap DVD media and store their GameCube and Wii dumps in a Dolphin accessible way that didn’t eat into their precious HDD space. It had compromises, even then, but in 2008… I mean honestly users probably wouldn’t even notice those compromises with how Dolphin barely even worked at all back then.
Obviously, today the storage space concerns are not as big of an issue. According to seagate the average hard drive it sells today is 8TB. For typical laptops purchased now, the -minimum- selection for storage is usually 1TB. You can even buy a name brand 4TB external hard drive for $100. GC and Wii ISOs are not as big as they once were, relatively anyway. Plus flash drives and SD cards are super cheap and way faster than disc drives ever were. For anyone that has limited drive space, removable flash media can fulfill this offloading role far better than backup DVD media ever could.
Also no one has DVD drives anymore. That’s kind of an important detail.
But to see if Booting from DVD Backup even still worked, I decided to give it a try. I have an ASUS BW-16D1HT, a badass Bluray XL reading and burning drive, connected to my Windows 11 Threadripper 5975WX machine. A super fast drive on a super fast machine is as good as it possibly can get for this feature. So I bought a spindle of DVD-Rs, burned a couple of discs and gave it a try. Surprisingly, it does still work. However, as expected, it introduces a lot of stuttering. Testing Prime 1 and Prime 3, in both games stuttering was introduced whenever the DVD Drive had to suddenly seek. Spikes of 50ms occurred constantly, but I observed 150ms and even over 1000ms stutters! The worst was a three second stutter, when loading Elysia in Prime 3. I could even hear the stutters - any time the drive suddenly made a harsh seeking noise, the game would have a hard stutter. It worked but, it has some serious compromises.
Boot from DVD Backup isn’t great, using removable flash media or external hard drives is a FAR better option for anyone with limited storage space today, and no one can even use this feature anymore because their computers don’t even have disc drives. It’s time for Boot from DVD Backup to go!
So I did my best on the cleanup but I’m bound to have left some bits. Especially in translation - I didn’t get any warnings or anything there that could help point me to where to clean that up. Please review!
Before, it was also compiled on ARM builds, but since it was unused it wasn't linked (and thus its dependency on the nonexistent x64Emitter didn't cause any link issues).
Texture dumping can already be done using VideoCommon's system (and in fact the same setting already enabled *both* of these). Dumping objects/TEV stages/texture fetches doesn't currently have an equivalent, but could be added to the FIFO player instead.
For a few years now, I've been thinking it would be nice to make Dolphin
support reading Wii games in the format they come in when you download
them from the Wii U eShop. The Wii U eShop has some good deals on Wii
games (Metroid Prime Trilogy especially is rather expensive if you try
to buy it physically!), and it's the only place right now where you can
buy Wii games digitally.
Of course, Nintendo being Nintendo, next year they're going to shut down
this only place where you can buy Wii games digitally. I kind of wish I
had implemented this feature earlier so that people would've had ample
time to buy the games they want, but... better late than never, right?
I used MIT-licensed code from the NOD library as a reference when
implementing this. None of the code has been directly copied, but
you may notice that the names of the struct members are very similar.
c1635245b8/lib/DiscIONFS.cpp
HRWrap now allows HRESULT to be formatted, giving useful information beyond "it failed" or a hex code that isn't obvious to most users. This commit does not add any uses of it, though.
This moves the only direct call to zlib’s crc32() into its own
translation unit, but that operation is cold enough that this won’t
matter in the slightest. crc32_z() would be more appropriate, but
Android has an older zlib version…
Now works with games that deliberately avoid invalidating TMEM because
they know textures are too large to fit:
* Sonic Riders
* Metal Arms: Glitch in the System
* Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee
* NHL Slapshot
* Tak and the Power of Juju
* Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
* 428: Fūsa Sareta Shibuya de
When I added the software FMA path in 2c38d64 and made us use
it when determinism is enabled, I was assuming that either the
performance impact of software FMA wouldn't be too large or CPUs
that were too old to have FMA instructions were too slow to run
Dolphin well anyway. This was wrong. To give an example, the
netplay performance went from 60 FPS to 30 FPS in one case.
This change makes netplay clients negotiate whether FMA should
be used. If all clients use an x64 CPU that supports FMA, or
AArch64, then FMA is enabled, and otherwise FMA is disabled.
In other words, we sacrifice accuracy if needed to avoid massive
slowdown, but not otherwise. When not using netplay, whether to
enable FMA is simply based on whether the host CPU supports it.
The only remaining case where the software FMA path gets used
under normal circumstances is when an input recording is created
on a CPU with FMA support and then played back on a CPU without.
This is not an especially common scenario (though it can happen),
and TASers are generally less picky about performance and more
picky about accuracy than other users anyway.
With this change, FMA desyncs are avoided between AArch64 and
modern x64 CPUs (unlike before 2c38d64), but we do get FMA
desyncs between AArch64 and old x64 CPUs (like before 2c38d64).
This desync can be avoided by adding a non-FMA path to JitArm64 as
an option, which I will wait with for another pull request so that
we can get the performance regression fixed as quickly as possible.
https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/12542
The STL has everything we need nowadays.
I have tried to not alter any behavior or semantics with this
change wherever possible. In particular, WriteLow and WriteHigh
in CommandProcessor retain the ability to accidentally undo
another thread's write to the upper half or lower half
respectively. If that should be fixed, it should be done in a
separate commit for clarity. One thing did change: The places
where we were using += on a volatile variable (not an atomic
operation) are now using fetch_add (actually an atomic operation).
Tested with single core and dual core on x86-64 and AArch64.
MayImilae