scherzo wrote:Hey everyone. I've got some stuff to discuss with you all....
First, by the end of the weekend, I will release a new version of Super Famicast. No, it will not be blazingly faster; not even close to fullspeed. Here's what it WILL have:
- Syncronized sound
- Mouse support
And that's it. Some of you might choose not to burn a new version since there isn't too much different from the last version. I might even give this a subversion number like 1.5.
Second, I want to ask someone to take over the task of speeding it up. The more and more I fool around with the code, the more I realize that maybe the task of writing the CPU core in assembler is in a little over my head being my first assembler project of any kind. I think I could do it, but not with the amount of free time I get. I foresee it taking and LOOOONG time if I do it.
I have made a little progress though. I wrote the main execution loop in assembler. I don't know if it's quality code. I'm not that good at optimizing code where I have little understanding about what it does. I've never written an emulator before. I do know that one of the the biggest bottlenecks is in the frame rendering code. I've gone through gfx.cpp commenting out bits and pieces to see how much faster it would run if it didn't do certain things... like not draw the objs or bgs. It affects performance a great deal. If all rendering is disabled, then it runs at fullspeed without sound.
I don't want to think of this as giving up but more as asking for help. I need someone with a good knowledge of SNES emulation and a knack for writing SH4 assembler. Hard to find. A while back I was talking with yoyofr, the author of openSnes9xGP, to see if he could help me out since he had done a good job of hacking up the graphics code to get speed increases on the GP32. But he started to ignore my IMs and I figured he didn't want to help.
Well, that's where the status of Super Famicast stands. I know I might be disappointing a lot of you. Hell, I want to see full speed SNES emulation on DC as badly as the rest of you, so I'm disappointed as well. I don't have the skills right now and don't have the time needed to really develop them. Yet, that's one reason why I made Super Famicast open source. It doesn't end here. Unlike DreamSNES, you can lend a hand at anytime.
On to other things...
Last night I got the latest version of NesterDC to compile in my dev environment. I plan on making a Special Edition of this emu with added features. The feature that will stand out the most is netplay and will support both the modem and bba. NesterDC will connect to a central server where you can find other people to play with. It will also sport a new interface using the system I developed for Super Famicast.
If anyone here has ideas for new features they would like to see in NesterDC SE (Special Edition, Scherzo Edition
) then post them here.
I will also need testers in the future, especially people with a bba since those are difficult to come by.
I hope you all can understand why I'm moving on. I want to work on something where I can be productive. Thanks.