Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
For one existing data point, some Portrait of Ruin runs reduce the sound volume (costing a few frames in the beginning to do so) to cut down on this effect:
Link to video
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
That's not correct. Any SGB game can use the SNES sound features, and at least a handful of them do (although often to little meaningful effect).
VBA-rr doesn't support some SGB features, like SNES audio and the "Space Invaders" capability, so shouldn't be used for TASing those games. It also has weaknesses in its GB core, so shouldn't be used for TASing any game that gets into trouble that way. Other than these very specific cases, what problems are there with VBA-rr SGB emulation? Your post seems to imply it's a broad issue.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
The clock throttle eats a lot of CPU. The sound throttle eats very little CPU. The VSync throttle can eat a little or a lot of CPU depending on how jenga your video drivers are. For some reason that I can't quite remember right now, the clock throttle is always "used" when no game is loaded.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Accuracy is a slippery eel, and emulator vs simulator is not always well defined; while all of our major cores certainly do emulate basic cpu functionality, other parts of hardware are often simulated at a very low level of accuracy. So simply being a simulator isn't enough to disqualify something.
The existence of a potentially higher quality emulation path also isn't enough to disqualify something unless that higher quality emulator is also fully TASable. I don't agree with this decision, but it's been the official TASVideos decision forever.
Any particular GMW emulator or simulator should be examined for all of the usual criteria, including accuracy and TASability, but not prematurely rejected.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
That's stupid. I can see the potential value to binding digital controls to analog axes for casual play, but for TASing it's 100% guaranteed to be suboptimal; you have an input with many possible values but using a keyboard you're limiting yourself to only two possible values. Use the virtual pad.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Bizhawk does a reasonably good job of emulating CD load times. Due to the nature of the problem, it's impossible to get perfect. A TASBot would be unlikely to succeed on any game that polls the controller during load screens.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
You had me confused, as the title of this thread, of course, is Dolphin dumps, which are always one segment (unless it's more than 3 hours long...)
I always thought the best way to handle multisegment would be to dump 1:1 at the highest resolution in the video as a single segment, then send metadata in a separate file that could be used in Avisynth to selectively resize in different ways whatever parts needed to be resized. I started working on something like that when I did an FF9 encode, but it was a screwball process that I never quite perfected.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
I have never seen FFMS2 drop a frame or add a frame. Stop using it incorrectly: Do not give it timecodes, and do not ask it to perform any framerate conversions.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Bizhawk has no such feature.
That would be an easy thing to do for a system like the GBA, where developers usually slept the CPU when they were done calculating things for the next frame, and that sleeping time can be counted separately. NO$GBA has such a feature.
It would be harder to do on something like the SNES because waiting was done with dumb spinning loops, which look more or less the same as all other executed code. Still, some emulators have "idle loop detection", so there probably are heuristics that would work in some cases, and if you were interested in a particular game, identifying that game's idle loops and then using LUA exec hooks might be enough?
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
I have identified and fixed a bug with hash verification on Saturnus savestates and brk-heap. I can't be sure that it's the same one you ran into, but I think it is.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Checklist:
Did you change syncsettings?
Did you change emulator versions?
Did you change BIOS images?
Did you change disk images?
Savestates will oftentimes not work through these changes.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Could you elaborate on that? Having played both versions on emulators, and watched videos of both, nothing obvious sticks out. The visuals are identical and neither has any significant controller latency.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of modern CPUs have very variable turbo policies. Mobiles or low speed chips can easily have turbo frequencies over twice the nominal clock speed, and all of that is affected by thermal policy as well.
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Challenger wrote:
32x stuff
Please report these in https://github.com/TASVideos/BizHawk/issues/927
It's where I'm tracking 32X emulation issues. If gens is demonstrated to have superior performance in a decent number of games, we might add that and switch between cores per game
Editor, Emulator Coder, Experienced Forum User, Site Developer
Joined: 5/11/2011
Posts: 1108
Location: Murka
Mitjitsu wrote:
I've just tried using the virtual pad to replicate analogue movements on the Saturn, and can't register movements which fall between 340-20 degrees and 160-200 degrees.
Could you name a game that it's easy to see the effect of this in?