Gpsp 0.9-2xb


reiboul said:
Rivroner said:
I have not played much (maybe 2 stages) but i have not suffered that problem.
Do you have the correct BIOS?
I always supposed so, because I err... *found* it in a file, with roms, on an infamous GP2X site :ph34r: How do I check?


on windows: use md5sums or md5check
 
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Tobriand said:
Not sure, but I imagine picodrive's software scaling only works horizontally. Leastways, the way it's designed would only work horizontally... it's also scaling a very specific ammount to create an illusion of wider pixels (as opposed to a larger space). That's not necessarily a problem, but you'd need to work out what factor scaling was worth doing - and it would still be horizontal only. At least, it would if the algorithm was to remain trivial.

Or maybe I'm wrong - insert not a coder disclaimer here :)
From what I remember of notaz's explanation of the algorithm, it doesn't seem overly difficult to apply the same thing vertically.

notaz said:
Strange, the algorithm is very trivial:
It basically takes 4 pixels and makes 5. Repeating this 64 times you get 256->320 enlargement.

pixels before:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
pixels after:
| 1 | (3/4 * 1) + (1/4 * 2) | (1/2 * 2) + (1/2 * 3) | (1/4 * 3) + (3/4 * 4) | 4 |

Have no idea what it could be called, probably just trivial pixel averaging, I thought of it myself :)
The 1/2, 1/4 and 3/4 multiplications can be achieved without float arithmetic by simply shifting, so they are very cheap.
This can be easily applied for the SNES emus, but it would be slower there, because it would need to be done after the whole image is rendered, not while it is being rendered (what I do in PD).

Edit: oops, I messed the formula, the one actually used is which ledro wrote below
Edit:
So... let's see how far my understanding goes.
The GBA width is 240.
So 320:240 = 4:3 so we're trying to stretch groups of three pixels across four, in thirds.

Pixels a b c would become...
3/3a | 1/3a + 2/3b | 2/3b + 1/3c | 3/3c
Yeah?

And for the height
240:160 = 3:2
Pixels a b would become...
2/2a | 1/2a + 1/2b | 2/2b

This is just my understanding of it though.

Edit2:I'm thinking the reason PicoDrive didn't scale vertically is because 240:224 does not make for a pretty ratio.
 
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Rivroner said:
Don´t use manual, auto frameskipping is working pertfecly.
Can someone confirm this? In previous versions I almost always had to switch to manual for good performance.
 
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Tobriand said:
Edit2:I'm thinking the reason PicoDrive didn't scale vertically is because 240:224 does not make for a pretty ratio.
Scaling vertically is much more expensive than scaling horizontally because these kinds of renderers usually work a scanline at a time, which go in the horizontal direction. Even if they didn't, you'd be increasing the workload by a good 4x anyway performing an algorithm like this over a square instead of a line. And while it's not that computationally expensive to generate these intermediate colors it's far from free.
 
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What do you do if your game is not in that gamelist that contains the speed hacks? I noticed if the name is not exactly the same the performance will not be as good.

Will that list always be needed or could the emu eventually run all roms at full speed without it?

Also do you know what causes the regular speed fluctuations? The good test is the title screen with wavy background in Pac-man collection. It seems to run smooth then after 5 seconds it will slow down, skip a bunch of frames ,then continue normal speed. It repeats this cycle even though nothing is changing in game. other games do this when scrolling etc too. Kind of weird. I an running with autoframeskip 3 at 240 MHz.
 
DaveC said:
What do you do if your game is not in that gamelist that contains the speed hacks? I noticed if the name is not exactly the same the performance will not be as good.
Not all games can benefit from those, in fact, less than half probably. The name has to be the same as the one in the ROM's header, it has nothing to do with the filename if that's what you mean.

DaveC said:
Will that list always be needed or could the emu eventually run all roms at full speed without it?
Games with idle loops will always run better with them marked. This may range from a little better to a lot better. Whether or not a game can run fullspeed with them disabled is another story altogether.

DaveC said:
Also do you know what causes the regular speed fluctuations? The good test is the title screen with wavy background in Pac-man collection. It seems to run smooth then after 5 seconds it will slow down, skip a bunch of frames ,then continue normal speed. It repeats this cycle even though nothing is changing in game. other games do this when scrolling etc too. Kind of weird. I an running with autoframeskip 3 at 240 MHz.
It could be bugs in the autoframeskip. Try manual and see what happens, or try lowering the skip tolerance on the autoframeskip. It's possible that the game is actually doing something though.
 
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Exophase said:
DaveC said:
Also do you know what causes the regular speed fluctuations? The good test is the title screen with wavy background in Pac-man collection. It seems to run smooth then after 5 seconds it will slow down, skip a bunch of frames ,then continue normal speed. It repeats this cycle even though nothing is changing in game. other games do this when scrolling etc too. Kind of weird. I an running with autoframeskip 3 at 240 MHz.
It could be bugs in the autoframeskip. Try manual and see what happens, or try lowering the skip tolerance on the autoframeskip. It's possible that the game is actually doing something though.


I have noticed this too. Playing Castlevania and Mario Kart I think it was. I am running autoframeskip:2.
I will try it with fixed frameskip:1. I don't I'd want to framekskip more than this anyway.

EDIT: Actually I have the "crappy" bios, I wonder if this has anything to do with it?
 
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rokdcasbah said:
reiboul said:
Rivroner said:
I have not played much (maybe 2 stages) but i have not suffered that problem.
Do you have the correct BIOS?
I always supposed so, because I err... *found* it in a file, with roms, on an infamous GP2X site :ph34r: How do I check?


on windows: use md5sums or md5check

I use filealyzer http://www.safer-networking.org/en/filealyzer/index.html

It lets you right-click on any file and "analyze" it, including an MD5 hash SHA1 and CRC-32 all at once, besides letting you see what the program gets its hooks in when it runs :). And it gives you a breakdown of included files and a hex editor. I think it is awesome.

Sorry for the OT.
 
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Exophase said:
It could be bugs in the autoframeskip. Try manual and see what happens, or try lowering the skip tolerance on the autoframeskip. It's possible that the game is actually doing something though.
I tried the manual FS it doesn't skip then. It could be that the game is doing something but it doesn't seem so. In my test game Pacman collection I test it at the part where you select the type of game. There is nothing going on except for a sinus scroll in the background with music playing. It doesn't seem related to the music (does it in-game too). It will skip a frame or two, then a couple more then get worse before going back to normal. Seems to look like below where periods are skipped frames. It seems pretty rhythmatic.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx....x..x.xx.......x.........x.....x..xx.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx..x..xx......x........x.....x..xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A few other bugs I noticed. Everytime you start the emu it shows an unscaled screen in the upper left. I go into the menu and it says "scaled" but it is not. I change to "unscaled" and it centers it. It doesn't save my settings either, I have to do it every time.

There is also an option for "screen filtering" Remove it? it doesn't do anything on the GP2X, I assume this is left over from the PSP version. Same with "fullscreen 16:9" in the scaling menu, "configure analog input" that doesn't apply either. The CPU speed options in the "cheats and other options" menu seems to correspond to PSP speeds, does that actually effect the GP2X clock?
 
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imhotep said:
Rivroner said:
Don´t use manual, auto frameskipping is working pertfecly.
Can someone confirm this? In previous versions I almost always had to switch to manual for good performance.


It seems to be working alright, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll get good performance from when playing.

After reading some earlier threads in response to my posting about the speed of Mario Kart, I decided to try out autoframeskip, with a maximum value of 2. When I started playing the game, the game was awful to play - it seemed to slightly jerk forward at a steady pace instead of the smooth play I was used to. So I set it to manual frameskip 2, and sure enough, while I was supposedly running fullspeed, the same jerkiness appeared.

Quite simply, if it needs to run at frameskip 2 to reach the same speed that fs1 reached in the previous version, then this is proof that THIS VERSION RUNS MARIO KART SLOWER THAN THE PREVIOUS VERSION.

And auto framskip still sucks IMO.
 
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That's a load of cobblers. The latest version of gpSP works great for Mario Kart.
Make sure that you have the mmuhack.o in the same directory as the gpsp.gpe!

I'm running @ 250Mhz with optimized RAM Timings and it runs great. If you play the Time Trial (ie no opponents ) it's really amazingly smooth.


Don't use manual frameskip, the auto frameskip should work just fine.

Manual frameskip:2 means you are only going to see 1 in every 3 frames. ie. 20 drawn frames per second.

Auto framekskip:2 means it will at most skip 2 frames and less if it can get away with it. In game I typically see > 30FPS ie. 30 drawn frames per second which is much smoother.
 
Slaanesh: I've done extensive testing with Mario Kart on this version and the previous version, so nothing's gonna change the fact that I've proved it runs a bit slower.

I'm running at 260mhz and have got the mmuhack file in (it wasn't in the zip, so I copied it over from the previous version), and after putting in the ram timings now, they made no apparent difference to the speed whatsoever.

But the auto frameskip is a strange one. When I said above that it still sucks, I was playing Star Cup, Snow Land circuit, and believe me, on that track it DID suck - the visual difference between auto fs2 and manual fs2 was negligible. After some more playing with the auto on however, I played the rest of the Star Cup tournament and it didn't act jerkily on the other tracks like it did on the Snow Land circuit.

I guess it's just something that has to be looked at on a per game basis, as I would still prefer to play without it where possible.

Nothing's gonna change my findings on Driver 2 Advance though, as that looks totally awful on anything above fs2.
 
I am usng Mario Kart US and have no that problems.Set clock speed and ram timigs then press y and then select.
Have you erased all the configs of every game?
Go to roms folder and erase them if you have not did it.
Erase all the *.cfg files inside and outside the roms folder.

Or maybe the problem is other o_o
 
Finally installed the latest release after running with 9008 up until now... wow! good work guys, I'm really loving this emulator right now. Well, more specifically, I'm loving Advance Wars on this emulator right now.. I started testing on games starting with A a couple of weeks ago, and got a bit stuck here. :)

However, I can confirm that it is running like a dream! Save games now work, and performance it noticable better at lower clock speeds on the latest revision.

I still seem to be getting the problem with the game freezing randomly though-- I have deleted all config files, etc... is anyone else still experiencing this with the latest revision? It doesn't seem to happen as soon or as frequent as previously, but still bites me in the ass sometimes...?
 
Yeah I was just playing Baldur's Gate last night, and encountered random seeming crashes, even at 200mhz with no ram tweaks or anything. It did seem to occur at more or less the same instance though - I think an umberhulk was about to thwack me. Could be co-incidence - but it definitely crashed with little provokation.

Only thing that might cause unforeseen problems is that I copied all my savestates from 9008 - I had saved over it though since loading it up.

So I think stability isn't quite there in this release, though it could be the savestates...

Edit; having said that about stability, this release does demonstrate a fullspeed GBA emulator.
 
@ White Demon:

Mario Kart Super Circuit (U) @ 250 Mhz & Ram Timings & mmuhack.o & Auto-Frameskip:2

Title screen: 53-60FPS
Selection screen: 40-44FPS
Character Selection screen: 35-37FPS
Race Start (rotate): 60FPS
Race: 33-37FPS
Race Finish/Placing Review: 45-54FPS

I don't see how these values seem to indicate anything but highly playable and also very enjoyable.
Granted the race is the slowest bit but the average FPS here was 35-36FPS which is my opinion is sufficiently smooth.
 
i'll just confirm what people are saying about random freezing. i can only play for about 15-25 minutes at a time. at first i thought it was the ram tweaker but now i'm bypassing it and it still freezes. mk1, fw 2.0.
 
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