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

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.