StrmnNrmn answers questions for R9 and gives us a release date.
A few common questions cropped up in yesterday's post so I thought I'd deal with them here so everyone could see the responses.
Firstly, lots of people were asking about the possibility of moving the audio processing to ME. I'm really keen on doing this, but I'm not very familiar with the ME yet so I need to spend a few hours investigating it before I can figure out how much work is involved. Maybe I can do a few technical posts about the ME as I find out more about it?
A few people were asking about an ingame menu and screen size. gotwake424 said:
"will there be an ingame menu? that will let you change the size of the screen and other stuff in game?"
xabier:
"i have just one question: you have mentioned viewport scaling/screen ratio a few months ago. is that going to be featured in Release 9 of daedalus? and i think that i heard somewhere that it should speed up the emulator a little with the new scaling, is that true?"
flyinghippo:
"One of your earlier posts showed your progress on implementing a 4:3 screen ratio. Would this possibly have any effect on the framerate?"
reuben:
"A while ago you noted that you had been working on viewport scaling. Will that be implemented in the upcoming release?"
I'm currently working on the in game menu - this is the last main thing I want to squeeze into R9. With this you'll be able to change the screen size while the rom is running, as well as a few other things (toggle audio on/off, swap controls etc).
I doubt that knocking the screen size down will help the framerate all that much, as the framerate is still largely limited by the cost of CPU emulation rather than rendering.
From philip:
"Do you have plans to implement frameskipping? That would greatly improve the speed, and shouldn't be too hard to add."
on the rise1:
"have you ever thought or messed about putting in frameskipping in the emulator?"
Now that audio support is in, I think frameskipping makes a lot more sense. I'll see if I can squeeze this in for R9 too.
yatahaze:
"can Daedalus run under 300mhz? would that boost those numbers in the table even more?"
Unfortunately Daedalus is already clocking everything at the maximum frequency, so there won't be an easy win there :(
imitiaz:
"Are the rom files you are using zipped or unzipped? Will the extensions of the rom files even matter anymore?"
I was using unzipped rom files. The extension shouldn't matter, provided it's recognised (.v64, .z64, .rom etc) Daedalus should always figure out the correct thing to do with a given rom. I suggest you use a tool like RomCenter to manage the naming of all your roms, and extract them to the roms directory on your PSP as required.
sroon said:
"Will expansion pack be inplented in your blessed R9?"
The expansion pak should already be supported: 'Expansion Pak: Yes' in the Rom Settings screen (just before the rom launches). If it's not working, it's a bug, and it'll be easy to fix.
nick:
"Have you always been able to add audio support? Or did you hold it back because of the slow framerate?"
I've been holding off because of the framerate - I just thought it would sound horrible. The framerate is still a limiting factor with audio support, I'll talk a bit more about this soon.
jeffrey said:
"Is there any official way to support your work? Either through paypal donations or whatever?"
No, not currently. To be honest, I'm a bit uncomfortable about accepting money for this. Financial reward has never been a motivating factor for me, I do this because it's an interesting project with lots of juicy technical problems to solve. If I was to ever accept donations, it would be for a specific goal (e.g. if I broke my development psp and it needed replacing, or to pay for hosting/bandwidth etc).
andrew said:
"The best update possible for R9 is an icon for the PSP menu."
Yes, I know :) I do like the Pochi Style icons. I emailed him asking for permission to use them with Daedalus, if I get the go ahead I'll bundle them with R9 by default.
A few people were asking for videos of the work in progress. I'm not all that keen on doing this as I'd rather spend the time getting the final few features in place and releasing early rather than spending the time making videos. You'll be able to play with it yourselves soon enough :)
As for a release date, I'm going skiing for a week on the 25th February, and I'd like to have R9 out before then.
-StrmnNrmn http://strmnnrmn.blogspot.com/
