Daedalus News - R13 Issues, R14 Plans

[wraggster]

StrmnNrmn is on a roll today with more news about his Nintendo 64 Emulator for the PSP:

Over the past week I've started making plans for what I want to do for R14.

To start with, R13 introduced a couple of issues which I want to fix. Firstly, a number of roms now no longer work with dynarec enabled, or show odd behaviour. For instance, Aerogauge now finishes the race as soon as the countdown completes. I've tracked this down to one of the dynarec optimisations I added in August, where I optimise fragments which jump back to themselves. This should be a 'safe' transformation, so it suggests there's a bug somewhere in my implementation. If I can't fix the bug in time for R14, I'll add a temporary setting to allow this optimisation to be disabled on a rom-by-rom basis (much like the 'dynarec stack optimisation' setting).

Secondly, it looks like something I changed for savestate support has broken the 'return to main menu' option. I added some logic to help ensure that when taking a snapshot for the savestate, the CPU is paused in a 'safe' state (i.e. no dynarec code is executing, nothing is running on the RSP, and nothing is executing in the branch delay slot.) It looks like I've messed something up which is causing the 'return to main menu' option to wait for a safe state before bailing out to the menu. Should be an easy one to fix.

Morgan suggested a nice idea in the comments, which is that I generate a thumbnail for the savestate as it is created to display alongside the slot in the UI. It's a little tricky to implement, as by the time the emulator is told to create a savestate, it has already obliterated the n64's framebuffer with the Daedalus UI. I'll have to do something quite clever like speculatively copy the n64's framebuffer into system memory every time you enter the Pause Menu, or create the screenshot on the first frame rendered after saving. Either way, I'd like to add this simple feature to R14.

Next on my list for R14 is to look at making more significant performance improvements. Over the months many people have been asking when I'd get around to implementing audio on the PSP's Media Engine. I've talked about this before, but always kept putting it off in order to work on easier optimisations.

The Media Engine is a bit of unknown territory for me. Even though it's practically identical to the main CPU, you can't just change a setting an suddenly have your code running on it. There are a number of small hurdles I have to overcome before I can get audio working on the ME, but this is my big goal for R14 (I'll save the technical discussion for the next post.) If all goes to plan this should mean that audio can always be enabled without a significant impact on framerate.

So in summary for R14: a few bug fixes, thumbnails for savestates, and audio without affecting framerate.

-StrmnNrmn

[Sonicboy 101]

I'm liking the audio without affecting framerate. Can't wait for R14.

[Prasoc]

sounds good. the audio is quite jarbled at the moment and it will be nice to hear the games as well

[Buddy4point0]

awsome. hopefully we can get some more speed soon aswell

[darkness angel 777]

I really can't wait for r14!!!

[CaptainMorgan4]

Yeah I mentioned to him about the savestate thumbnails a couple days ago, glad to see he wants to implement it into R14. All these blog updates today, it's like StrmnNrmn heaven. This sunday is almost complete for me now, just need a Packers win and Jeff Gordon to finish real strong today!

[mike_jmg]

Just a little thing I want to see implemented, as you know the buttons used in the games are quite different from game to game.

So i was thinking if StrmnNrmn could implement a button maping option, cause sometimes is very difficult to play with the Z button on Triangle, specially mario kart, and at the same time that kind of control works ok with OOT or Mario 64

So I guess a button maping option would be great so you can customize the control depending on what are you going to play, only if it is not that difficult to make and there's enough time

Thanks

[Safari Al]

really am hoping though that soon he gets around to implementing 2 player connection via inffrastructure. but sound is a another thing needed badly so yay!

[xg917]

really am hoping though that soon he gets around to implementing 2 player connection via inffrastructure. but sound is a another thing needed badly so yay!

in your dreams :rofl: in the far future maybe..
i wish to have 2 player also

[CaptainMorgan4]

Mike_JMG StrmnNrmn has implemented custom controller configurations, look in the Daedalus folder. He explains how to create them, it's easy just look at the default file and edit it, on his blog about 3 weeks ago he posted a blog update on how to make them because alot of people like you didn't know you could do this.