Sunday, July 29, 2007

Recharged

It's been quite a while since my last update. I was starting to feel a little worn out from all the work I'd been putting into the emulator over the past few months so since releasing R12 I've been taking a bit of a break from Daedalus to unwind and recharge my batteries.

It's been really nice just taking a bit of a break to do a few different things with my spare time. I spent a short while in Spain with my sister, and since I've been back I've been catching up with a bit of reading, watched a load of TV that I'd queued up and played through a few games I'd had gathering dust for a while. Sadly my 360 succumbed to the Red Ring of Death last week so it seems I might have been pushing it a bit too hard :)

I found a new flat in Guildford which I'll be moving to at the end of August. I'm quite excited about the move as I'll save a lot of time commuting. It currently takes me little over an hour to travel into work and it'll just be 15 minutes once I move. I'm hoping that cutting back on the commute should not only free up a couple of hours each day, but I'll also be a bit less knackered once I finish for the day.

I also picked up a Macbook Pro during my 'time off' and I've really been enjoying my new-found sense of computing freedom (I've been writing this post on the train on the way home from work.) It's the 17" 'lapzilla' model, and it's an absolute beast. It actually compiles Daedalus faster than my year old desktop PC which I find pretty impressive. I'll have some details and tutorials about compiling Daedalus PSP under OSX in the near future.

Now that I've had a bit of time off, I'm feeling very excited about getting cracking with R13. My main feeling is that I'd like to continue working on speeding up the emulator to try and improve the framerate for titles that are already working. From your comments on this blog and on other sites such as the DCEmu forums (the site seems to be down right now - I'll update with a link later) it seems that this is mostly what people are interested in seeing for the next release.

There are a number of different areas I can investigate to help improve performance. The two main possibilities I want to investigate are working on further dynarec improvements, and looking at making use the Media Engine. To start with I'm going to explore both of these areas and try and figure out which would give the biggest 'bang for buck' for R13. I'll post and update on R13 when I have more details.

-StrmnNrmn

PS Thanks for all your comments while I've been away. I have about 100 left to approve which I'll start to go through now.

23 comments:

Unknown said...

Congratulations with new flat and laptop. Sounds great. Hope you had a good time in Spain. It's a shame what happened to your X360.

Your plans for R13 sound promising. I can't wait to hear more from you. Good luck!

Morgan said...

Great to see your back and recharged, it's been hard without DCEMU but I used PSPUpdates to stay current and download the latest IRShell. I'm looking forward to seeing what you think you can do with the 3 titles that were selected in the poll. Anyway good luck in R13 and I hope you can have a smooth time going through the R13 fixes.

Anonymous said...

Great to hear from you again, sounds like you really enjoyed your time off!
I guess I'm one of the few that would rather see you work on compatability. You could do it on a per game basis, like trying to find out why F-Zero stopped booting with R11, or why Paper Mario crashes when you create a new save file, or why Zelda locks up frequently with dynarec enabled, and then after you applied the fixes maybe other games would be fixed in the process. Of course a nice overall speed boost would be great too :)

Spoons For Thought said...

Great work on the emulator so far.

One current genre the PSP is lacking so far is a major RTS, which Starcraft 64 could fill the missing void. I'm curious if you've looked at its performance.

cyclonmaster said...

I dream that Daedalus had a save state. Emulation is not complete without it. Almost all emulator had it, can daedalus had it too?

Anonymous said...

its good you take a break every so often other than be stuck to the screen all the time with sore eyes and probably a few cans of red bull ( or some alchoholic beverage :P)

Bloody microsoft and their Red Ring of Death....

Good on you for finding somewhere closer to where you work. Didnt know you had to travel so far.

Good to hear you got a Macbook Pro :).

Just something though.

Daedalus compiles in OSX but it needs some path \'s switched around in the source. I cant really show you as my macbook is getting repaired as we speak.

DCEmu is down b/c martin has gone away, wraggster cant reboot the server for some reason. Probably b/c there arent any safeguards :P

I have been trying to get DKR to run better in daedalus. However something isnt implemented somewhere in the GFX core (none of the blendmodes would go over the top of the blue screen that comes up which is supposed to be the sky.

By all means, im glad you are excited about R13 :)

Good luck!

Swish said...

Random question:

The redesigned PSP will have twice as much ram and some people have said how that would be good for Daedalus.

If the redesigned PSP aka PSP Slim were to get homebrew in the future would you design Daedalus based on the new specs of the PSP Slim ?

Obviously if you were to do that Daedalus wouldn't work on the old PSP :(

mike03$$$ said...

Cool good to see your back, and nice to have to a new and fast laptop anyways I wanted to know if you can look into some of the the wrestling games because none of them worked before so I just wanted to know if you can do a little compadability

Thank you

Antony Lin said...

hey guildford? country and state/province? and city?

Unknown said...

ood to hear you've taken some time off, was starting to feel guilty that I've been enjoying all of your great releases of Deadalus whilst you'd been slaving away!

One thing I think needs some working on is that in some games (Pokemon Snap/Stadium) I have noticed that it runs well but the controlls do not fully work! I hope its an easy one to fix as these are two games i really want working!

Thanks for your continued hard work into the best piece of software on PSP yet!

Hawkstriker said...

Glad your back!
Hope you had a great time!

Unknown said...

Guildford eh? I live just down the road in Petersfield, small world :) Take it easy, everyone is looking forward to the R13 release, keep up the good work :D

evlnoodle said...

awesome guildfords a nice place except for a few too many scene kids i would rather be there than aldershot anyway hope too see some updates soon ;]

kentaromiura said...

for R13 a "must" should be to emulate the save system of paper mario, since it work very well except for saving that actually is not supported

Jody said...

Your 360 died :(

haha, so did my PSP. I bricked it with my stupidity. I hope I can get a new PSP in time to try out R13. I need a job. 'o'

XG917 said...

nice to know that u had a good time off and nice to know that you are back :-)
i cant wait to see what you have to offer us in R13

Anonymous said...

so whats better? mac or pc? :P

good choice: speedup

keep going strong, man, we're all pulling for you!

Rodrigo Cardoso said...

hey strmnnrmn!

did you see that PJ64 option "force 16x9", works perfect with lots of games...(except smash bros... the camera goes crazy LOL)??

this would be perfect for psp *_*

McLovin said...

Speed up is fine with me, whatever you do I don't care, you obviously know what you're doing.

That just sux with the xbox thing, it's wierd cuz that's happened to a lot of my friends, and it always happens right after their warranty is up

XG917 said...

regarding the Media Engine. would it speed up the framerate itself? or just enhance the audio so that it doesnt slow down the emulator? thanks

-XG

Unknown said...

Glad to see that you are back
keep up the good work
and about your 360. Microsoft extended their warranty to 3 years for red ring errors. Just so you know

pj1115 said...

Guilford? As in Surrey, UK, or Connecticut?

Great to see you're still kicking :)

StrmnNrmn said...

@pj1115: Guildford, Surrey, UK :)