Realistic upgrades to Dreamsnes

-Johnick- · Post by **-Johnick-** » Mon May 12, 2003 8:12 pm

Ok, the one thing i noticed people whining about the most when it comes to Dreamsnes is speed.People, Dreamsnes now has an asm sh4 core, thats almost as good as the entire program being coded in asm.If Dreamsnes does get faster it wont be by much and it wont happen soon.I think we should concentrate on more realistic short term upgrades, such as

Zip rom support - It can be done on the DC, DCmame has proved this.Like a lot of people i would love to be able to cram as many roms on 1 cd as possible.

sdd1 support - The DC has (barely) enough ram to support the gfx packs for SFA2 and all the other sdd1 games.They run quite well on my old p166mmx so they should run full speed on the DC, maybe with the sound off or if luck has it maybe not.

Selectable audio sample rates - Afaik Dreamsnes uses 11250 hz for all games.Some games run full speed and could still run full speed at a higher sample rate.Other games dont quite run full speed but could if the sample rate was lowered.8000hz might sound crap, but its better then no sound.

Selectable resolutions - I dunno what resolution Dreamsnes runs at but the snes only ran at 256x224 max.If Dreamsnes has been using a higher res like 640x480 all along maybe lowering it would help.

Superscope/konami gun emulation with the analoge stcik - some of us dont have light guns, and others have Pal light guns which dont work with Dreamsnes as of now.If Dreamsnes could use the DC's analogue stick like the real Snesx uses the pc's mouse to emulate the light gun that would rock.

Save States for small roms - The DC should have enough ram to allow 1 save state slot for 8 and 12 mbit roms.

The Arm - is it possible for the arm to be used to emulate...well...anything that would take the strain off everything else ?.

Well thats my thoughts, anybody else got an opinion ?.

Smirre · Post by **Smirre** » Tue May 13, 2003 2:54 am

-Johnick- wrote:If Dreamsnes does get faster it wont be by much and it wont happen soon.I

Zip rom support - It can be done on the DC, DCmame has proved this.Like a lot of people i would love to be able to cram as many roms on 1 cd as possible.

Dreamsnes will be faster and i believe in next version. Although next version could be out next month or next year so..

What about zipped roms? In mame it is good because gamefiles(roms) are extremely small compared to snes roms. After unzipping mame roms you have plenty of memory to run the game itself

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Tue May 13, 2003 4:09 am

GZipped ROMs would be easier for them to do, since they already have the decompression code in, and they'd hardly have to code anything extra. The ZVR files are actually PVR files compressed using the zlib deflate functions, so I'm pretty sure they could extend that to cover real GZipped files (like .smc.gz)

scott1234 · Post by **scott1234** » Sun May 18, 2003 10:35 am

i sure hope dreamsnes gets faster... what good is saving, great menue system, good sound... etc if we cant play games full speed. anyways i hope they can do it

toastman · Post by **toastman** » Sun May 18, 2003 1:04 pm

-Johnick- wrote:sdd1 support - The DC has (barely) enough ram to support the gfx packs for SFA2 and all the other sdd1 games.They run quite well on my old p166mmx so they should run full speed on the DC, maybe with the sound off or if luck has it maybe not.

Selectable resolutions - I dunno what resolution Dreamsnes runs at but the snes only ran at 256x224 max.If Dreamsnes has been using a higher res like 640x480 all along maybe lowering it would help.

The Arm - is it possible for the arm to be used to emulate...well...anything that would take the strain off everything else ?.

sdd1 graphic pack support - Is that considering everything else that is currently loaded into RAM as well? Just a question.

Selectable resolutions - Doesn't matter. Rendering is done with the PVR, so adjusting the size to fit the TV screen doesn't affect speed at all.

ARM - From what I hear, the ARM doesn't have the muscle to emulate the SNES sound chip.

SSJKarma · Post by **SSJKarma** » Sun May 18, 2003 10:16 pm

graphics pack cannot be used !

why ?

6.4mb for SFA2 ! i know, i had downloaded and playing it with my emu on my PC, it worked fine, it was real !
the ROM itself is about 3.48mb compressed... so about 6mb not compressed !
real memory usage indicate only 12mb can be used for games, don't know how you calculate, but SFA2 wouldn't even enter into memory, and my calculation doesn't even add the emulator itself !

so i say that graphics pack, unless being 2or 3 mb only (which is impossible)
so basically, you gotta stop trying to play games that aren't suppose to work on EMULATORS !

next... the resolution... for all i know... they are already using the SNES based resolution, or so i think !

no, real way to get speed right now, would be to entirely code the emulator into SH4, but that,s not possible either !

anyway... i agree with sound, getting it to 8000 would help a lot... tho some games will just have weird effect in them. but you said it yourself, its better then nothing !

as for the light gun thing... yeah, i agree, but i already bought a LIGHT GUN for that effect !
tho i was about to buy it anyway for the other games i have that are suppose to use it !

too bad, HOTD2 cannot play with it !
or so i think !

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 18, 2003 10:26 pm

Unless someone works out realtime decompression for the graphics packs, then it's pretty much impossible. You've got DreamSnes, the SNES emulated memory, the MP3 buffer (2MB), the ROM and the graphics packs. Let's say 2 + 1 + 2 + 6 + 6.

That's 17MB. Ouch.

farrell2k · Post by **farrell2k** » Sun May 18, 2003 11:14 pm

More than anything right now, I would like to see a web page update. Maybe a little info that those guys are still there and what they're doing, etc. I miss them posting around here too, even though they didn't ever do it that often.

Smirre · Post by **Smirre** » Mon May 19, 2003 3:03 am

I hate when people are silent and never say a thing even if they are asked like dsnes team.

It starts to be rude and i get a picture of them flying on much higher pedestal over us and enjoying 100% of the situtation. Like "you mortals suck and we the God's right hand are better! hahah"

I prefer nice and friendly developers who want to talk with people...

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Mon May 19, 2003 3:53 am

Actually, the DreamSnes team don't usually read these forums. There are other ways to contact them, if you really want to.

ZacMc · Post by **ZacMc** » Mon May 19, 2003 4:22 am

Smirre wrote:I hate when people are silent and never say a thing even if they are asked like dsnes team.

It starts to be rude and i get a picture of them flying on much higher pedestal over us and enjoying 100% of the situtation. Like "you mortals suck and we the God's right hand are better! hahah"

The DreamSNES team has already answered questions about things like zip support, resolution, themes, GameGenie etc.. I doubt they want to answer the same questions over and over again and again.

SchmuckofNI · Post by **SchmuckofNI** » Mon May 19, 2003 6:03 pm

Seriously, how hard is it to update their website and say we are alive and well and still working on dreamsnes? I have found that e-mailing almost anyone in the emulation scene a pain cause most of the time they don't respond or when they do respond its usually on the lines of "updates are semi-quarterly now."

Psychlonic · Post by **Psychlonic** » Mon May 19, 2003 7:47 pm

SchmuckofNI wrote:Seriously, how hard is it to update their website and say we are alive and well and still working on dreamsnes? I have found that e-mailing almost anyone in the emulation scene a pain cause most of the time they don't respond or when they do respond its usually on the lines of "updates are semi-quarterly now."

Unfortunately, I have to agree. I know they try to work in secrecy (and probably are tired of questions), but they could at least say how progress is going on the DreamSNES. I almost guarantee there would be a decline of talk such as "when is there going to be full speed" or "dreamsnes is dead" if they would just take a little time to post something. It's not exactly going to cut into their coding time

With the prices of XBox beginning to drop, it won't be long before... ah crap, you all know what will happen why am I even saying that?

SchmuckofNI · Post by **SchmuckofNI** » Mon May 19, 2003 7:58 pm

Perhaps we should all sign a petition to the dreamsnes team and ask them the question whats up?

jessman · Post by **jessman** » Mon May 19, 2003 10:04 pm

pfffffft! Dreamsnes CAN get MUCH faster DANGIT! There will just have to be a lot of effort put into JUST speed once all the bugs are taken out of the program! This is not the best it can get so stop acting like it'llnever be full speed!

SSJKarma · Post by **SSJKarma** » Thu May 22, 2003 7:24 pm

its not like were saying it will never be full speed !
well actually yes for most of the games...

example: MEGAMAN X3 cannot be full speed on a 200mhz CPU ! cause 200mhz computers cannot even run it full speed !
so most of the latest games that use HIGH GRAPHICS will not be full speed on DC, but most of the other games will eventually become full speed !

we're just saying that those little update as the sound and the likes, aren't what makes the emulation slow !
we're saying that the coding in SNES9X wasn't really optimized for DC so it is normal that they have to recode the whole thing EVENTUALLY !

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Thu May 22, 2003 7:38 pm

As far as I know, they've optimised the code for the DC a fair bit already, and they've been working on rewriting huge chunks of it in SH-4 assembly.

That reminds me... There's a question I'd like to ask them about sound emulation.

farrell2k · Post by **farrell2k** » Thu May 22, 2003 8:23 pm

email them. see if you get a reply.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Thu May 22, 2003 8:30 pm

Just emailed MC about it. I just can't work out how they got sound emulation running properly when the emulator itself wasn't running at full speed. It's probably something really, really simple, and I'm just not seeing it. But I'd like to at least try to get sound working in Genesis Plus, and that doesn't run at full speed either.

SchmuckofNI · Post by **SchmuckofNI** » Thu May 22, 2003 8:51 pm

I would consider yourself extremely lucky if you get a reply. Then again you are a mod and maybe that carries more weight than the rest of us peons.

Realistic upgrades to Dreamsnes

Realistic upgrades to Dreamsnes

Re: Realistic upgrades to Dreamsnes

Re: Realistic upgrades to Dreamsnes