StrmnNrmn talks about the mysterious frameskip

[xg917]

Quote From His Blog

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Frameskip

A couple of people have been commenting about the mysterious frameskip version of Daedalus R9 which appeared a short while ago. I'm not going to link to it because I can't verify where it came from. That said, I've not checked my email for a week so maybe the author has emailed me about it :)

Anyway, it just so happens that I implemented frameskip in R10 on Sunday, so expect this to be a supported feature in the next official release. I had been planning to add this to R9, but I forgot :) It's no big deal - it's about 20 lines of code.

It does give a slight speedup, but not always as much as you'd expect. For instance, skipping every other frame won't double the framerate, as not all the time is spent rendering. Paradoxically, it tends to have more of an effect on roms that are already running fairly fast. Hopefully for some roms it will make the different between them being barely playable and playable though.

There are a few other things people have been asking about which I will implement for R10 too:


* A configurable deadzone for the stick
* A configurable framerate limiter



-StrmnNrmn

[Buddy4point0]

this is good but we really dont need a framerate limitor untill you get the speed above 60fps

[Sp3ct0r]

dude thats awsome that frameskip will be in R10 cuz it actually makes a pretty big differance in games that already run fairly well. great job StrmnNrmn

[siulmagic]

nice hearing this

[CaptainMorgan4]

this is good but we really dont need a framerate limitor untill you get the speed above 60fps

The max FPS for N64 is 30FPS so 60 would be CRAZY, I know what you meant so don't take that personally. Anyway if you use frameskip on like 2 and play in some areas (have FPS shown turned on) you will notice that the emulator does go over 30. This mostly occurs in small areas or menus so it's good to have this so the emulator doesn't go too fast, it'll just stop at perfect 30FPS. Sounds great, love hearing from you StrmnNrmn!!

[Cap'n 1time]

The max FPS for N64 is 30FPS so 60 would be CRAZY, I know what you meant so don't take that personally. Anyway if you use frameskip on like 2 and play in some areas (have FPS shown turned on) you will notice that the emulator does go over 30. This mostly occurs in small areas or menus so it's good to have this so the emulator doesn't go too fast, it'll just stop at perfect 30FPS. Sounds great, love hearing from you StrmnNrmn!!

Er.. It may have varied from game to game, but im pretty sure the average intended speed for an n64 game was 60 FPS. Feel free to prove me wrong though (give me a source). I like to learn.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Cap'n: download fraps (http://www.fraps.com/download.php) and have it running in the background while using any N64 emulator for the PC (I'm assuming your PC can handle N64 emulation at full speed). It will display the framerate of the game in the corner of the screen. You will find that very few games ever run at more than 30 frames per second. Some games such as Zelda only display up to 20 frames per second.

[EvilDooinz]

most older consoles only run at 30 fps like ps2 xbox ect. also fps limiter might improve sound quality.

[headbanger15]

I don't realy understand why some games run terribly slow and mario 64 is just about full speed(without going into levels). There should be away to set the maximum speed you want the emulator to run at all times, anywhere in any game. Is that possible?

[quzar]

most older consoles only run at 30 fps like ps2 xbox ect. also fps limiter might improve sound quality.

Who told you that? Both of those systems have the capability to run at 60fps perfectly fine. Many GAMES may only run at 30fps due to the fact that they cannot run fast enough to go at 60fps, but that is on a per-game basis, not a limit of the system.

[CaptainMorgan4]

30FPS for N64 games is FULL speed so if it was at 60FPS it would INCREDIBLY fast and stupid. To HeadBanger the reason Mario 64 runs so fast is because it's one of the smallest roms for N64 (like 8MB). The larger the rom the slower it is going to run, StrmnNrmn will get alot of games running full speed if not all, just you guys watch.

[xg917]

^^ correct statement ^^

actualy 28.5 fps or something like that is full speed to be exact.

also its true that smaller sized roms run faster than bigger roms

mario 64 = 8mb
zelda OoT = 32mb

there is one part in the deku tree in zelda that goes full speed. it made me happy. lol

[CaptainMorgan4]

I didn't know that (28.5), even better though it should make it easier for StrmnNrmn to get all N64 games to go full speed. He is my favorite coder and probably always will be, I didn't really get into any homebrew stuff till I had a PSP but it has changed my life some and I like it.

[xg917]

28 - 29
somewhere around there. when i was playing mario on the computer thats what i got. and i had full sound and full speed. sometimes the fps would go up to 30.1 but most of the time its at 28-29 fps