Posted: 7/19/2014 10:31 PM
Post subject: As of 4.0-2227, Dolphin better emulates GC Memcard speeds
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JMC47
Emulator Coder
Joined: 5/8/2014
Posts: 125
As of 4.0-2227 (https://dolphin-emu.org/download/dev/963e1a698cbeaa976a7f8e8020880a50267ecd69/) GameCube games will display much more accurate behavior when reading/writing memory cards. This will result in memory card timings to be a lot different than before the merge. Here's an example: MVP 2004 Dynasty mode Console: 32.4-32.8 seconds Old Memcard Timings: 4.2 - 4.38 seconds New Memcard Timings: 32.8 - 33 seconds This also fixes a few longstanding issues that were afflicting games, including The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (NTSC-J) softlocking on saving. That will no longer happen. As well, Gauntlet: Dark Legacy sometimes did not save as well during TAS/Netplay/SingleCore situations, and that should be remedied.
Posted: 7/19/2014 10:37 PM
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AngerFist
Active player (437)
Joined: 4/21/2004
Posts: 3517
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
First edition TAS of 2015 Innovative TAS of 2007
Much appreciated for your information my man. Let's hope Gamecube tasers sees this.
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Posted: 7/20/2014 10:01 AM
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CGF95
Joined: 5/30/2013
Posts: 44
Location: Australia
Very nice, thanks for this!
Posted: 7/21/2014 1:03 AM
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Slowking
Joined: 12/6/2008
Posts: 1193
Well to be accurate, Dolphin now properly emulate official Nintendo Memory Cards, not how a real Gamecube handles memory cards. Dolphin handled memory cards like a real Gamecube would before. For example Cosmo has a third party memory card for the Gamecube that saves insanely fast and will display an error after saving a game of TWW-J. However after resetting you can see that the game actually did save properly and you can load that save.
Posted: 7/21/2014 2:37 PM
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JMC47
Emulator Coder
Joined: 5/8/2014
Posts: 125
Actually, we were aware that certain third party cards can break saving in WW-J; the ultimate goal is to figure out how the GameCube detects memory cards so that, say, if you have a memory card that identifies itself as one of the faster ones, Dolphin will do that. The thing is that Dolphin was instantly completing Reads/Writes, which means that it WAS NOT handling like real GameCube memory cards, regardless of how it looked. It's possible that beyond a certain point the game stops working. I'd honestly like to find out how to do that. Right now, Dolphin's read speeds seem a little slow, so there will likely be a second merge to do the same thing to fix read speeds further. And then the plan would be, assuming we can get enough hardware testing, figure out how the GameCube polls memory card speed in the games that support it. According to the information we had, only late GameCube games supported the fast-read with Samsung hardware memory cards. The fact WW-J can support it is news to me. Do you know which memory card Cosmo is using? Has he ever mentioned it? It may be worth investigating. edit: I figured out through hardware testing that the stupidly fast memory card is a Max Drive Pro (64mbit.) I just happened to have one lying around from my younger days. It was totally used for memcard transfers to PC, nothing else. Really. But anyway, I decided to format it for NTSC-J, load up my Wind Waker -J on my Wii and see what happened. Yup, I reproduced the WW-J hang. Thank you for pointing it out to me. We're now going to accurately implement both average memcard read/write speeds, and likely an option to make the memcards the fastest known memcards recorded. If something stupid can happen on console, I don't see why it shouldn't happen on emulator! But seriously, this probably opens the door for a lot more testing, and if people here would like to use faster memcards and we have data supporting that console would do it, there's nothing stopping it. Before this, we were going off of in game timings and now it will be measured and tested.
Posted: 7/25/2014 11:37 AM
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jlun2
Skilled player (1743)
Joined: 9/17/2009
Posts: 4986
Location: ̶C̶a̶n̶a̶d̶a̶ "Kanatah"
GBA TASer of 2010
Is it possible to use some kind of homebrew application to check exactly how the console handles memory cards?
LLCoolDave wrote:
This seems to be competing for the "Worst looking TAS of 2011" Award.
Posted: 7/25/2014 4:51 PM
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JMC47
Emulator Coder
Joined: 5/8/2014
Posts: 125
Totalnerd provided me with some homebrew, and I ran the tests for him. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W2BfG27hU7kKPvPIhiHNREb6z7GT2d2zZeKK53ph6lE/edit#gid=0 Something is incredibly broken in how Dolphin handles things, meaning that instant complete (old memcard methods) were hiding some serious problems in Dolphin. Because of this I don't know how long until we can get the read/write speeds to be much closer. It is troubling, especially when we thought things were getting better. To be fair, the new timings are more accurate...
Posted: 7/25/2014 5:03 PM
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hegyak
Editor
Joined: 3/31/2010
Posts: 1466
Location: Not playing Puyo Tetris
JMC47, I can confirm that F-Zero GX behaves properly now or is at least a LOT closer.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war. The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
Posted: 7/25/2014 10:59 PM
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JMC47
Emulator Coder
Joined: 5/8/2014
Posts: 125
Write speeds are very, very close to accurate. Read speeds are really slow currently. No idea what's wrong yet.
Posted: 7/26/2014 10:13 AM
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jlun2
Skilled player (1743)
Joined: 9/17/2009
Posts: 4986
Location: ̶C̶a̶n̶a̶d̶a̶ "Kanatah"
GBA TASer of 2010
Have you posted the program for the other devs as well so they can try it as well? Same with posting this on the issue tracker so others with different cards can also help.
LLCoolDave wrote:
This seems to be competing for the "Worst looking TAS of 2011" Award.
Posted: 7/26/2014 7:07 PM
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JMC47
Emulator Coder
Joined: 5/8/2014
Posts: 125
It's not my program, but I can post the test.dol for people to try on their Wiis with various memory cards. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/484730/MemCardDemo%283%29.dol This is configured for Wiis, and won't work with Transmit-Mii, you have to manually boot it from the homebrew channel. I've tested my memory cards, but I'd gladly add more to the data if we could get it. The average is broken on the test program, you have to kind of calculate the average yourself. Getting it to run on Dolphin is pretty tough; so I'd recommend people mostly test it on hardware for right now until it's cleaned up.