What environment is DreamSNES coded in?

evilpie · Post by **evilpie** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 5:03 am

Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if DreamSNES is one of those projects still stuck with libdream or if the team is programming in KallistiOS. Would anyone happen to know?

Also, what version of Snes9x is it based on?

jworg · Post by **jworg** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 6:05 am

Niether, they use libronin.

Lilmuckers · Post by **Lilmuckers** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 6:35 am

apperently libronins quite good

evilpie · Post by **evilpie** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 10:07 am

What's the difference between libronin and KallistiOS? In general, what are the most popular/best libraries?

Heliophobe_ · Post by **Heliophobe_** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 12:02 pm

Best is KOS.

Most popular -was- libdream (when KOS was too operating systemy and scared people away), but KOS has everything libdream had an more (more in a good way). I think I'm one of the last holdouts who still uses libdream, and it's sort of a frankenstein's monster/hot rodded version of it anyway. And I'm only holding out because #1 I can't compile @#&*$() GCC 3.0.anything and #2 I'll have to update some code and I'm afraid.

This is the first I've heard of libronin - I assume it's sort of a proprietary library made by the developers, probably started before libdream with a twinkle in Andrew K's eye. Am I right?

WeAreVigilant · Post by **WeAreVigilant** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 1:09 pm

dreamsnes doesnt use libronin its pretty much straight on the hardware
libronin was what happened when the dsnes took out there hardware access code and put it in a lib

evilpie · Post by **evilpie** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 3:46 pm

Wouldn't it be best, then, to attempt a port over to KOS? It may give the emulator a significant speed increase, which is all it really needs now.

My second question was never answered, but I'll ask it again: Does anyone know what version of Snes9x DreamSnes is based on?

Heliophobe_ · Post by **Heliophobe_** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 3:57 pm

evilpie wrote: Wouldn't it be best, then, to attempt a port over to KOS? It may give the emulator a significant speed increase, which is all it really needs now.

Not necessarily. If DreamSNES doesn't use an external library, then its hardware routines are probably fairly well tweaked as it is (Marcus Comstedt is one of the authors after all). Switching to KOS would only be an advantage if it does the hardware i/o better than DreamSNES does.

Best doesn't always mean fastest. In the case of KOS, it's faster than libdream in many functions (libdream at times is quite primitive), but also has more capabilities.

Leif Stensson · Post by **Leif Stensson** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 4:00 pm

Why would it be best to port over to KOS? The speed of the emulator is mainly a function of how efficiently DreamSNES emulates the SNES hardware. What in KOS is it that you think would help speeding things up? (I'm not saying there isn't any, just that I can't think of any obvious advantage of using KOS for this purpose.)

As for the other question: the README.TXT file in the DreamSNES source code refers to v1.39 of SNES9X, but DreamSNES has been rather extensively rewritten, not least considering Marcus Comstedt's recent CPU core emulation rewrites, so it may be misleading to look at the SNES9X version number when trying to assess DreamSNES.

Heliophobe_ · Post by **Heliophobe_** » Fri Feb 15, 2002 5:01 pm

Leif Stensson wrote: Why would it be best to port over to KOS? The speed of the emulator is mainly a function of how efficiently DreamSNES emulates the SNES hardware. What in KOS is it that you think would help speeding things up? (I'm not saying there isn't any, just that I can't think of any obvious advantage of using KOS for this purpose.)

Well, there are some environment specific things that can bog an emulator down enough to affect framerate - for instance, libdream has some clunky maple routines and doesn't have the best CD-Rom routines (more of a problem for games that open lots of different files). - Also, ta_finish_frame forces the main CPU to wait for vsync, rather than using an interrupt handler. Things like that.

Not an issue for DreamSNES, but some emulators would benefit from moving to KOS.

Edit:

Also, I guess it's worth pointing out that all the noncommercial developer's environments in use use GCC as a compiler, so it's not as if switching environements actually means more optimized compiled output.