Dolphin 1.03 Final Shots

[RockmanForte]

Originally Posted by Chrono Archangel

play it, then you can say its cheesy
WW is an excellent Zelda game

I have to agreed with Chrono, ChankastRules. You didnt played it then you do not know what you are missing. Play it and you will said..wow..very nice, really.

I hate this comic too but it is an excellent game, seriously.

[CKemu]

Baten Kaitos (Disc 01) [GKBP 0042] (EUR)
Voices and sound effects all sound gorgeous, even the birds in the village sound delightful. Various graphical issues in places, but in the main looks gorgeous, runs at reasonable speeds, sadly though I encountered some errors (CPU Reset / directcommand) after fighting off two bats in the first dungeon, thus it can't be played beyoond that point

I haven't updated my page yet, but will do tomorrow with this and a few other games

Part 01 of 02

[CKemu]

Part 02 of 02

[Luptatorul]

DO you know if it will be faster the next version, mainly for Soul Calibur 2?

[CKemu]

You mant more speed, get a faster machine, it's as simple as that, emulating the gamecube is an extremely complex process, and current modern machines simply are not powerfull enough.

Certainly improvements can be made to the code in terms of optimisation and the Dynamic Recompiler, but thats not going to make it run anywhere near full speed, and as for the next version, who knows, currently it's not much different to 1.03

[Luptatorul]

Originally Posted by CKemu

You mant more speed, get a faster machine, it's as simple as that, emulating the gamecube is an extremely complex process, and current modern machines simply are not powerfull enough.

Certainly improvements can be made to the code in terms of optimisation and the Dynamic Recompiler, but thats not going to make it run anywhere near full speed, and as for the next version, who knows, currently it's not much different to 1.03

Nobody said anything about full speed , but 70 % could be achieved with proper coding , when psemu was back in 1998 was running psx games at full speed and even faster on a pII at 350mhz and nvidia tnt 16 mb , the human mind has no bounderies when it comes to imagination...
Miracles has been seen before ....

[CKemu]

right...

I really can't be arsed to get into this debate again, about a billion n00bs have said that before, and you just made 1,000,000,001st

Comparing the PSX to a GC is like comparing a mole hill with Mt. Everest....go learn to code, go study 'how' emulation works, then come back with some magic emulator that can achieve this...

[CKemu]

Bomberman Generation [GBGE 67DB] (USA)
Playable, but missing many graphical overlays, thankfully the game instructions have voice overs, so you can progress ..... if you'd actually want to

[Luptatorul]

Originally Posted by CKemu

Bomberman Generation [GBGE 67DB] (USA)
Playable, but missing many graphical overlays, thankfully the game instructions have voice overs, so you can progress ..... if you'd actually want to

I guess is like beetween geforce 6600 gt on athlon 64 3200 and a pII at 350 with tnt 64 mb.
WHo knows...

[cooliscool]

While I agree with most of what you say CK, there's much room for code optimization. A few FPS between a 3+GHz CPU and a less than 1GHz CPU (read: my own tests, P3 933 vs my CPU), obviously leaves a lot open to alternative methods of achieving speed. I guarantee you Gamecube emulation hasn't hit a PC speed wall yet.

The best way to go about it, efficiency wise, would definitely be multithreading (being the biggest change.. compiler optimizations being the next), even over 64-bit. Parallelism really is the best way to gain computing speed, especially with emulating systems with multiple processors/DSPs, etc.

[CKemu]

I have been talking to variious devs on the subject of multi-threading, there is debate as to how much of an improvement it really would offer. General consensus was 'very little'.

Whilst it will offer some improvement, if you have say 4 cpus being emulated on 2 cores, core1 may get it's tasks done faster because it's not having to deal with the heavy processes on core2, but it's still got to wait for core2 to complete it's task, due to all the sync something like the PS2 requires.

The speed comes, because it's not having to emulate cpu1,cpu2,cpu3,cpu4,cpu1,cpu2,cpu3,cpu4...on core1, thus doing more than one task at a time, but due to the requirements of sync, alot of this benefit will be lost.

I am really not qualified to discuss this matter further, but most devs working on next gen systems tend to feel that x86-64 offers the highest 'value' in terms of speed, along with refining the code, PCSX2 is experimenting with threads, so we shall have the proof of the pudding (or so they say) soon

Now on with some shots, a rather sexy RPG, good speeds to

Fire Emblem - Path of Radiance [GFEE 308C] (USA)
'Fully' playable game, with sound, graphics glitches, which are noticable through out the game, but do not hinder gameplay, solid 7-23 FPS ingame. However from the options menu you must turn off character animations, otherwise the game will crash on a repeating error READ: Cache address out of bounds.

You will also not that when you start the game you get a error dialog CPU Reset, just press 'OK', and the game will continue fine

[refraction]

Originally Posted by CKemu

I have been talking to variious devs on the subject of multi-threading, there is debate as to how much of an improvement it really would offer. General consensus was 'very little'.

Whilst it will offer some improvement, if you have say 4 cpus being emulated on 2 cores, core1 may get it's tasks done faster because it's not having to deal with the heavy processes on core2, but it's still got to wait for core2 to complete it's task, due to all the sync something like the PS2 requires.

The speed comes, because it's not having to emulate cpu1,cpu2,cpu3,cpu4,cpu1,cpu2,cpu3,cpu4...on core1, thus doing more than one task at a time, but due to the requirements of sync, alot of this benefit will be lost.

I am really not qualified to discuss this matter further, but most devs working on next gen systems tend to feel that x86-64 offers the highest 'value' in terms of speed, along with refining the code, PCSX2 is experimenting with threads, so we shall have the proof of the pudding (or so they say) soon

You are right there, single core would have to do every process one after the other as you say, on the PS2 it usually works on how long another core is going to take while one works on something else, which is really the ps2's version of multithreading.

Personally i think on the newer generation of Dual core processors like the X2 (not P4's with HT, dont believe this provides a true multi tasking environment, seems more of splitting 1 core into 2 virtual processors) we will see an advantage.



Consoles that have several cores have status flags to say when the core is ready for more data, which the other cores check at intervals, plus we have interrupt processing to control these.

AFAIK it is impossible to run 1 thread over 2 processors, so say you have a dual core processor both cores running at 3.6Ghz and you run 1 thread, you will only get 3.6Ghz effective out of that processor, but split the work into 2 threads, you can then run 1 on one core and 1 on the other, getting you a 7.2Ghz effective speed, so the processing time will be greatly reduced.

When emulating consoles that run off 1 processor (aka everything done on the cpu) you will more than likely run into problems, as itll be expecting the last bit of processing to be complete, so you could run into errors or wrong data being processed, but when emulating things like the playstation they run in parrallel anyway, so the emulation of this would be at least a bit more accurate to how it would really run, and in theory, a lot quicker than running on a single thread

Ok cover up for posting off topic, some shots

Sonic Adventure 2 Battle ;p

[CKemu]

Phantasy Star Online ep I & II [GPOP 43BF] (EUR)
Playable ingame, but only in interpreter mode thus FPS isn't exactly 'blistering'

[Viper_Viper]

While I am a complete n00b about everything being discussed here, I want to voice my opinion / ask questions with basically no knowledge before hand. Please skip to last sentence of post to get to the question.

In my high school computer science class (AP AB), we learn java. Two years ago the AP tests were based on C++, but now they are on java. I would have rather learned C++, but that is just because I hear it’s more powerful, I really have no idea what is better (mini question: what do you guys use more?) . The class is going _way_ to slow for me, but that’s not what I'm here to talk about.

My teacher is drilling that we divide all the tasks up into smaller tasks. We have classes to run things, change things, display things, and they all operate separate but affect each other.

Now... I'm assuming that all new generation emulators divide their code up into difference "classes". I’m getting this from there being the core emulation and then the video emulation on the side. I really am stretching this but, could you just run the main emulation on one core of a multithreading processor and the video/display part on the other?