Joined: 8/16/2013
Posts: 20
Location: Vire, France
Hi,
With rewind disabled, BizHawk only runs at about 40fps on a laptop with a core2duo @2Ghz while playing my movie (Movie that I made on a Fix PC with an AMD FX 8120 and it run as slow as 55fps without rewind, realy bad for a so recent PC...)
Even if runing at 40fps, the movie still stay synched but it's realy too slow and thus, dont see the TAS potential. I wanted to show it to my mother while not at home (because I wont see her for at least 1 week) but I couldn't due to this (Yes, I wonder why I forgot to take a copy of the video mp4 file I sent to youtube...)
What I see is that seting speed 50% to 200% are not effective (on my fix PC too), the emulator run the 32bit core but my PC is running 64bit OS and I think frame skip isn't working too.
Using performance instead of compatibility core work at almost 60fps on the core2duo, but the movie don't sync :\ (And lagframe counter says all frames as lag...)
I wonder why Bizhawk SNES emulation is so demanding? snes9x runs too fast even at 0 frame skip (must be on auto for normal speed). I belive snes9x is able to play SNES games on a pentium II :o
Redoing my Sim City TAS (New faster way to build Zones)
Bizhawk SNES is based off of BSNES's SNES emulator core, which makes it very accurate compared to some of the other SNES emulators available. That accuracy though makes the emulator rather resource intensive for computers.
My user name is rather long, feel free to call me by htwt or tape.
Joined: 8/16/2013
Posts: 20
Location: Vire, France
I downloaded higan (I saw that it's the new name of bsnes) v0.93, and...
Bizhawk run at least faster :o (And higan have no TAS tools)
Probably the PC is not powerfull enouth, but that's wired for emulating a game which is more than 20 years old :\
Redoing my Sim City TAS (New faster way to build Zones)
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
That's your misconception right there. It isn't emulating a 20 year old game, it is emulating the hardware from which the game runs, via software. The hardware requirements to emulate other hardware requires many orders of magnitude more power than the original hardware. Bsnes is insanely accurate, and that is a tradeoff with speed. However, bsnes is also written with accuracy and code clarity being more important than speed, and has no tradeoffs there. Also, bsnes is written rather insanely where even low hanging fruit for speed optimizations were not taken.
The SNES scene is such that you have poor accuracy or a very slow near perfect emulation written by an insane man (I mean that both positively and negatively).
It is what it is. With Bizhawk, we chose accuracy over speed. But not really. We chose the SNES emulator that comes with a core separated and already made into a .dll, so it was super easy to integrate compared to something like SNES9x. (Very much so actually, had we chosen SNES9x for integration it probably still wouldn't be done). But currently, I find all SNES emulators less than ideal for TASVideos use.
Also, with your machine, I wouldn't use bsnes, it just won't be fast enough. If you were to TAS, I would reluctantly recommend snes9x 1.51 instead. Unfortunately. However, newer CPUs run bsnes significantly faster.
Kinda disappointing I can't use this emulator do to really low fps.....
hopefully i get a new pc soon...
wanted to watch a few TAS's in this emulator on the emulator is self but... owell I guess..
(fixed)
Is that the 64-bit version (if you have a 64-bit CPU)?
For the record, on the SimCity title screen I get 143 fps with higan-balanced.exe (higan-performance.exe is not recommended, and higan-accuracy.exe is only required by one or two games) when I disable all synchronization.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Bizhawk doesn't use the accuracy core, it uses the compatibility core by default, performance isn't allowed for movie recording. Performance core is an option in the SNES settings (when in non-movie mode)
The main advantage of the accuracy core is that the video renderer can properly emulate games that change video parameters in the middle of a scanline (which is probably only Air Strike Patrol). The game itself is unaffected by the increased rendering accuracy.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3570)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4754
Location: Tennessee
Also, for the record, it is easy to set up bizhawk to do it in a per game basis (using the game database it already has). Are there any games in which the performance core is just as good as the compatibility core? If so, we could have a system of performance, compatibility, accuracy depending on the needs of the game. However, we would need some good users to compile a list of games and what cores they are best suited for.
This would need trial and error - create a TAS on one core and test it on the other. Although you risk wasting a lot of time when the TAS is created on the performance core.
(Performance core contains speed fixes, and after a while byuu got fed up with maintaining it so emulation fixes weren't added.)
Joined: 8/16/2013
Posts: 20
Location: Vire, France
The 20fps are with compatibility, not balanced since compatibility is what bizhawk uses I gess. Bizhawk Performance core seams able to run SimCity game fine but the movie file don't sync on that, and some emulator fonctions like frame lag counter don't works (seeing all frames as lag), so it seams performance core is not usable for TASsing
About snes9x, this is not a deprecated emulator?
Redoing my Sim City TAS (New faster way to build Zones)
For SNES games I prefer the SNES 9X 1.52 rr, is a very good accurately emulator and not deprecated... for SNES core in Bizhawk i prefer wait to new versions (the cores of PC Engine, NES, Master System, Game Gear and all cores works perfectly, the SnesHawk needs more improvements)