Zpsx: High Performance Psx Emulator For The Zaurus

[stuffman]

Thanks, zod!

I'm testing on my C860, and things seem to be a bit quicker than the last build from awhile back. I'm testing with Final Fantasy 8, and things seem pretty good... except the memory card functionality seems borked. The in-game FMVs play *much* smoother than before (probably because it seems interleave works). I can't wait to see what future builds bring! Keep up the amazing work!

[zodttd]

stuffman: Thanks for the feedback. Are you using the hw accel SDL on the C860? I've never had a C860 user feedback before.
If the memory card support starts to work, would you consider it playable? Playable with only certain graphics options/sound options? Also overclocking the Zaurus and using the lowered psx-clock-adjustment mentioned helps a lot.

[stuffman]

I'm using the SDL you provided. I know it's not optimized for the Cxx0 series, but it's damn fast regardless!

I'd say it's certainly quite playable besides the memcard issue. I tried a bit with FF7 also, and there's a bit of glitching at the top of the screen and on the pop-up dialogue thingies and the bottom-third status thing in battles, but the full-3d battle sequences run much, much smoother than they ever have. I'm overclocked to 471MHz (fastest you can get the Cxx0 devices) and using about 40% psx clock. I'm used to having to turn the sound off to get max performance, but it's still quite playable with it turned on. The improvement with interlacing is minimal compared to how it helped in the past.

Overall, I'd say that if the memcard issue is resolved, it'd be the best release yet, even with the minor glitching in FF7. I'll have to bust out some more games to try, but as far as I see it, this is a big leap forward... I can only imagine a fully optimized GPU and the 2.6 kernel!

[zodttd]

The GPU is pretty nicely done. The issues with FF7 are actually with my scaler and fitting on the Zaurus. I'll fix that up too!

The 2.6 kernels have a really slow SDL it seems. I have a C1000 so without proper QVGA support, it's no good. :-/

My dynarec is constantly improving, so more performance, and more polish is on the way.

[XorA]

The 2.6 kernels have a really slow SDL it seems. I have a C1000 so without proper QVGA support, it's no good. :-/

The Angstrom kernel can do qvga on C1000 and C3X00 devices, you just need to use fbset or call the ioctl for mode change. The mode is actually called 240x320 as its always in portrait. I thought pdaXrom had the same set of patches for the console. Maybe they missed one or SDL is being dumb.

I know this works as we use it within mplayer to change to QVGA for using overlays for video.

[zodttd]

Hmm. SDL works in framebuffer console mode but for some reason they didn't patch it to rotate the blit so it's landscape instead of native portrait. (Why did Sharp use a 240x320 screen?!)
I will look into Angstrom. It should be a very simple compile for it.

Thanks for the friendly response btw. I've seen a lot of mad developers here as of late.

[stuffman]

Well, one more quick update. The menu (psx4zaurus) seems like it redraws a lot and is really flickery and slow to navigate. Those artifacts I were describing in my last post don't seem to be scaler related (I remember in your older releases you were trying to figure out if you wanted to cut off the ends of the screen or rescale it to fit, it's not the same thing as pixels being dropped... that's still apparent on some screens). It's more like it's grabbing a bitmap from the wrong address... for instance, the dialogue thingies have a white "pipe" surrounding the blue background where the text is displayed. The bottom "pipe" (which should be horizontal) is composed of vertical pipes spaced every few pixels. Also, during the battles, whenever the little finger pointer points at something, the area that is underneath it gets duplicated and drawn on top of the status things. Here's a picture demonstrating both issues:

[img]http://thumb4.webshots.net/t/62/462/6/40/54/2190640540099143764LsaHoB_th.jpg\" border=\"0\" class=\"linked-image\" /]

Again, great job!

[zodttd]

Hmm, I'll look into that. Though it might be related to the interlacing bug I had with FF7. If you disable interlacing, does it look any better in terms of artifacts?

[stuffman]

Nope, same effect either way.

[pelrun]

Heh, looks like stuffman's already hit all of the FF7 bugs I was about to post

First things first - WOW. The performance bump in the new version is fantastic. No more constantly tweaking the underclock or interlacing is necessary on my 3100 to be playable!

But I haven't actually successfully quit out of psx4all yet; in one case (launched from X) it killed the screen and even though I could ssh in I needed to reboot to get the screen working again. The other time I probably was asking for it by trying to load an old savestate

The sound is a bit iffy too - in the menu and whilst disabled it keeps making a nasty buzzing noise; when enabled the FF7 background music is running much more slowly than it should.

Keep up the good work! (but beware, one day I'll ask you to get Vibribbon working )

[zodttd]

Vibribbon! Yipes!

The sound and exit bugs are being worked on. The exit bug is a high priority to me. It seems to have to do with using SDL fbcon mode in X11.

[Capn_Fish]

Hey, I just got to try this build, and it is MUCH faster than the last one I used. Great work!

Now for a question: Aren't there supposed to be two L and R buttons (L1 and L2, etc.)? The mapper didn't map them...

Anyway, great work!

[nodens]

arrrgh... can't wait for my Terrier, it's on it's way right now... I'll be able to try in a few days

[zodttd]

Heh, in a few days it'll be more polished too.
I forgot about keyconfigs for L2/R2, I'll get that fixed. I believe it's currently:
PUSH + L = L2
PUSH + R = R2

Sorry about the legacy GP2X code.
More optimizations coming too.

[Dromede]

ok, played with it for a couple of days and here's my results&impressions.

i tried these games so far:

- medievil
- diablo
- warzone2100
- apocalypse

all of these games are full 3d games except diablo.

my testing rig; C1000 with pdaxii3, 512mb lexar sd card, psx4zaurus running outside X, sdl libraries that came with the latest release.

about the gui:

the gui needs some improvement. the redrawing issue is quite severe. keyclicks in the gui aren't recognised often and gui navigation is quite slow. i think some of the options are redundant. things like "show video memory" and  "progressive interlace" are useless IMHO. especially the progressive interlace which looks more like a cheap blur effect than a preformance tweak.it really is quite impossible to play anything with that thing turned on.

about the performance:

performance is light years ahead of the previous release. really. although still not enough for decent playing IMHO. most of the games i tried worked without any glitches which is admirable.all of the games were compressed aswell.
apocalypse is the only game that didn't work at all. medievil worked perfectly but it was a bit too slow for decent playing. same goes for diablo.warzone2100 is quite playable preformance wise but since it's a realtime strategy game it's really hard to play it on the Z' keyboard. sound is quite good in some games and quite bad in others.turning sound off doesn't make much of a difference performance wise. all in all warzone2100 really shines on psx4zaurus.
overclocking to 624mhz really helps especially with ingame movie playback. interlacing set to 1 also helps alot. i tried messing with the psx clock setting and i "think" i saw an improvement in some games. but im not really sure.  

overall i'd say you did an excellent job zodttd. if the performance improvements keep increasing in a linear fashion there really is a chance of a fullspeed psx emu for our Z's.  
ofcourse an exponential jump in preformance is quite welcome aswell...