Tutorial: How To Get DreamSNES To Play At 100% Full Speed

[Christuserloeser]

Okay, the title might be a little bit confusing as you won't get completly rid of the frameskip but since the speed increase is pretty exactly about 20% if you obey the info below I thought this topic would really deserve a catchy title. ;)

At first some general things to improve the emulation speed which should be widely known by now:


A Small Checklist To Improve The Emulation Speed With DreamSNES

In the options menu you change the following settings:

Turn on CPU optimizations
Turn off the Sound or set it to MONO
Turn off Mode7 Interpolation
Turn off Transparencies if not needed for the game

This will definitly improve the emulation speed noticable and will help to make most games playable.


Now on to the 20% boost mentioned in my introduction:


European 50Hz PAL vs. US/JP 60Hz NTSC

It's been a rumor for quite a long time, but it's true. If you use European PAL games instead of their American or Japanese versions you definitly will expierence a major speed boost of about 20% - thanks to the 50/60Hz difference between PAL & NTSC and just because emulating games that run at 50Hz is much easier for DreamSNES than emulating games that run at 60Hz.

That means all American or Japanese games that previously ran at 80% speed will run at 100% if you use their EU PAL version in DreamSNES.


If you are not sure what region your games come from, try using GoodSNES, a tool which renames and classifies your games.

GoodSNES is available here: http://www.allgoodthings.us/



Some more details about the reason why EU PAL emulation is so much more efficient with DreamSNES:

PAL games by Nintendo, Rare, Infrogrames, and other good European distributors and developers are 20% faster because their speed has been modified/optimized to match 50Hz. On DreamSNES these actually would ran smoother yet also faster than the US/JP versions of the same games.

Playing these games will offer 100% full speed emulation with very little frameskipping.


European PAL releases by smaller Japanese or American companies with small or bad European distributors miss the speed modification for the 60Hz -> 50Hz difference, thus they will run smoother with DreamSNES, but actually are slower than their US/JP original on a real machine.

Playing these games on DreamSNES will offer 100% speed with very little frameskipping but they'll be still be slower than on a real American or Japanese SNES.



I also posted the info at Dreamcast-Scene.com's Wiki along with some more general info about DreamSNES:

http://www.dreamcast-scene.com/index.php/Main/DreamSNES

[Cap'n 1time]

welcome to the year 2000 :o

was there a new dreamSNES release or am i missing somthing?

[Christuserloeser]

No, I just felt like posting it =P



...though, I now do think it fits better in the Help forum.

[SSaxdude]

Thanks, I'll probably be trying that sometime soon.

[M Dash]

It's an interesting information... Never heard of that before... I think I'll try it soon enough... Thanks! :)

[Masta-G]

Hell yeah!
Mario World seems near full speed.
Even Megaman X works better.
Too bad my favorite game yoshi's story is still unplayable. Tried Super Famicast Snes4All and DSnes.
That game seems too hard to emulate even without transparency effects :(

[Darksaviour69]

nice tut Christuserloeser

[Christuserloeser]

Thx all for the feedback :)


Too bad my favorite game yoshi's story is still unplayable. Tried Super Famicast Snes4All and DSnes.
That game seems too hard to emulate even without transparency effects :(

Yeah, it's using a SuperFX2 chip (update of the one used in StarFox/StarWing).

Here's a list of games that use special chipsets, some of them run amazingly fast with DreamSNES (like Mario Kart, F-Zero, etc.). Others - like Yoshi's Island - don't:

http://nsrt.edgeemu.com/INFO/chipinfo.htm

(Thanks to Mikozero for the link!)

[AuroEdge]

I don't understand why you would go to all that trouble to emulate SNES on Dreamcast (even if this spans into PC etc. emulation). To me, if I'm going to emulate something rather than play it on its original hardware, I want it to be as good and accurate as possible. Depending on the emulator, even in the best of circumstances you still lose a lot of the original feel of the game. When a game requires frameskipping to play, it completely ruins the fun :\. I dunno, maybe I'm just a prick.

[Black Jackal]

AuroEdge, the reason why it's so important is because it's running on a DC - fair enough, even with Chris' tip to accelarate emulation some games like Yoshi's Story, Bubsy and Dragonball Z Hyper Dimension are still sluggish, but it's still early days.

[Christuserloeser]

I don't understand why you would go to all that trouble to emulate SNES on Dreamcast (even if this spans into PC etc. emulation). To me, if I'm going to emulate something rather than play it on its original hardware, I want it to be as good and accurate as possible. Depending on the emulator, even in the best of circumstances you still lose a lot of the original feel of the game. When a game requires frameskipping to play, it completely ruins the fun :\. I dunno, maybe I'm just a prick.

I doubt that you tried it with PAL games, but then again it's 100% okay if you don't want to mess around with DSNES. It's just that I love it. It's great to play some of my favorite RPGs or adventure games on my DC :)

[hoodiejuggalo]

I'm fairly sure the answer to this question is going to be 'no', but I thought I still might ask anyway in the hopes of me being wrong. Is there any way to convert an NTSC rom to a PAL rom?

[Christuserloeser]

Technically it's possible but I don't know if there's a patcher for that kind of conversion.

...would be great tho. The games would run a lot smoother.

[Runefox]

It sure would be nice if we could get an updated version of either SNES emulator for Dreamcast. Unfortunately I can't see that in the near future.

[Christuserloeser]

Is there any way to convert an NTSC rom to a PAL rom?

Juan pointed me to it: SNESTool should be able to do that! I am not sure if it actually would work because I have yet to test this, but if it does your NTSC game should run about 20% smoother with much less frameskip.

[Xiaopang]

i just compiled a disc full of european snesroms and it runs quite fine. i don't have a frame of reference though, since this was my first dreamsnes disc and after reading your post, i concentrated on filling it with european roms only. amazing to see that donkey kong runs nearly at 100% while such an old game like super mario world still plays kinda jerky.

as for the ntsc conversion, most converters i know, usually re-flag the game without changing anything technically, so i doubt that a game would run faster

since even playable roms don't run with a perfect speed, it would be more useful to optimize the emulator, which is unfortunately very unlikely.

[Christuserloeser]

amazing to see that donkey kong runs nearly at 100% while such an old game like super mario world still plays kinda jerky.

I had the impression that SMW ran quite good, but it's been a while sinced I actually played it...


as for the ntsc conversion, most converters i know, usually re-flag the game without changing anything technically, so i doubt that a game would run faster

Yeah, could be true. Definitly would never run faster anyway - in fact slower (!), but smoother with less frameskip if it actually would run at 50Hz instead of 69Hz.


it would be more useful to optimize the emulator, which is unfortunately very unlikely.

Yeah, but I hope that maybe SNES4All or SuperFamicast will one day be better than DreamSNES.

[Xiaopang]

I had the impression that SMW ran quite good, but it's been a while sinced I actually played it...

just tried to play it again. it is somewhat smooth and shows 100% but it still looks jerky. on my snes it looks much smoother. anyways, looking smooth isn't that important if you can play the game. as for super mario world i was experiencing a major lag between pressing a button and mario reacting (about 200ms). turning sound to mono helpedcuring that. the lag is still there, but it's much smaller now. so the game is in fact quite playable. :)



Yeah, but I hope that maybe SNES4All or SuperFamicast will one day be better than DreamSNES.

which one of these emus is the most recent? i heard good stuff about super famicast, but never tried it though. also seems that the last version is already two years old.

[crackkills]

Maybe aeroedge you just don't understand the point. IT is awsome to be able to play it on the dc, what about us people who don't have a snes or whatever and want to try games that we have never played before and also to be able to play all games from one disk and not a billion cartridges or whatnot. n e ways nice guide Christuserloeser, it helped in many games

[kohan69]

Are saves in dreamsnes cross-region compatible?

im still amused that ps1 genesis, and turbogrphx 16 games can run fullspeed while snes cant. is it due to its sound chip emulation?

[Xiaopang]

Seems so. If you turn off sound in DreamSnes then most games run at 100%. Also emulating the 3D-Chip for a few games reduces performance remarkably. For such a low power system as the Dreamcast, emulators have to be quite to optimized to run well, but it is possible as the commercial releases of Sega Smashpack and some NeoGeo ports show.

Unfortunately no coder seems to have the patience, skill or both to accomplish a perfectly good running snes-emu which implements all features and let's almost all games run fluently. Especially not after the release of the new console generation...

[Christuserloeser]

Time will tell. SNES4ALL has the most potential atm, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed ;)

[Xiaopang]

uhm you mean the emulator which last update lies back more than a year? well, to me that project seems kinda dead. and even if it isn't, at that pace it will take a decade till it's as reliable and fast as dreamsnes.

wasn't there another emulator for snes where you could turn off backgrounds and stuff? that looked very promising last time i checked it, but that was a while ago and i forgot the name

[Darksaviour69]

there are 3 main snes emus, dreamsnes, Super Famicast and Snes4all. At the moment snes4all has the best chance as chui said that he will be getting back to it.

http://dreamcast.dcemu.co.uk/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,47

[Xiaopang]

well, let's see what time brings. what about that emulator i mentioned? i stumbled over its webpage half a year ago. it showed screenshots where you could turn off four background layers. the whole site was in a super mario world style. i can't remember the name and no big emulation site seems to know it. may be it was a hoax. i just want to be sure about it.

[Darksaviour69]

well all the known snes emus are listed on that link i gave you there.

[Christuserloeser]

uhm you mean the emulator which last update lies back more than a year? well, to me that project seems kinda dead. and even if it isn't, at that pace it will take a decade till it's as reliable and fast as dreamsnes.

It isn't dead. It's currently on hold until the 68K/Z80 emus are completed.


well, let's see what time brings. what about that emulator i mentioned?

Super Famicast. I think that's abandoned in favor of other projects.

[StryfeDc]

Being as this is in a tutorial thread, I'm going to bump this dinosaur.

My question is: Can you delete any unnecessary files in DSNES that aren't needed?
For some examples for deleting, how about the Mp3 or text files that I found in the directories?
Are these loaded into the RAM, and therefor could they be deleted to speed things up? :confused:

[Darksaviour69]

na, it won't help speed things up as the mp3 is only played in the menu. While the games are running it only the emu and rom in the ram