Thursday, October 25, 2007

R13 close, honestly!

Apologies again for the lack of updates. I know people get nervous when I don't update regularly, but I don't like to post when I have nothing new or exciting to talk about.

I'm very close to releasing R13, I've just been struggling to find the time to add the final finishing touches to the savestate support. I've found it hard to get into a regular working pattern since moving, so what should have been a 1 week job has ended up taking a month. Bioshock and Halo 3 haven't helped either.

Savestates are working very well. The current implementation provides 10 slots which are shared across all roms. You can save to any slot at any time from an option on the Pause menu, or choose to reload a previous savestate. In this way it works just like QuickSave/QuickLoad found in various PC games (I'm tempted to add a special slot for this to the top level of the Pause menu).

I use zlib to compress the savestates, so an 8MiB savestate compresses down to 1MiB (or even smaller if you're running games which don't use the Expansion Pak).

There are just a couple of things I need to finish off now before I can release. Firstly I need to check if the savestate you're loading is for a different rom than is currently loaded. If this is the case I need to scan through your available roms looking for the correct one, and load it. To make this efficient I need to get the RomDB which I use for the PC build working on the PSP.

The second thing I need to do is come up with a decent way of linking some metadata to the savestate so I can show this in the UI. Just simple stuff like the full name of the rom, time the savestate was created and the total time spent playing when it was created. I figure without this information it'll be quite difficult to figure out what it stored in each savestate slot. The alternative is to add a text entry system to the UI so you can name each savestate, but I think this will just delay things even more.

In summary R13 is really close and I've not forgotten about it. Just a few more things to sort out and it'll be ready for release.

-StrmnNrmn

Monday, October 01, 2007

Daedalus and the PSP Slim + Lite

A number of people have been asking if Daedalus will support the PSP Slim and Lite (PSP-2000), and if it does, if it will take advantage of the extra 32MiB RAM to improve the speed of emulated roms.

I am planning on supporting 3.xx firmware, but not until I have a PSP with suitable firmware which I can test with directly. People will probably end up compiling the Daedalus source for 3.xx (and they're welcome to), but until I can verify everything directly myself these will have to remain 'unofficial' builds. If there is strong demand for a 3.xx version of Daedalus then I'll consider setting up a donations page with the aim of buying a Slim and Lite for development.

As for the additional 32MiB RAM that the PSP-2000 provides, it's unlikely that this will provide for faster emulation. I've spent a lot of time reducing Daedalus's memory requirements so that it runs comfortably in the 32MiB that the PSP-1000 provides (it's actually a fair bit less than this when you take out OS overheads etc.)

There are only two main areas of the emulator that would benefit from an increase in cache size. The first is the texture cache, which is only used when video memory is exhausted. I fixed a few bugs with this months ago which means that very few roms ever have to place textures in system memory.

The second place that would benefit from a cache increase is the ROM cache. In order to support roms larger than the PSP's system memory, I dyamically map pages of the ROM into the PSP's RAM on demand (rather like virtual memory on PCs.) If a page of the ROM that is requested isn't in the cache, I have to pause emulation as I load it from memory stick. Currently this cache size is 2MiB. It could be increased up to 32MiB which would fit most N64 roms comfortably, and would entirely eliminate paging while the emulator is running. This might give a small speedup, but I don't believe this is currently a significant issue even with the tiny 2MiB cache that is currently in use.

Increasing the dynarec buffers would be very unlikely to provide a speedup, as I've yet to see a rom where they fill up before they are flushed for some other reason (typically instruction cache invalidation.)

So in summary, yes, I will support the PSP Slim and Lite at some point, but no, it's unlikely to offer much of an improvement over the PSP-1000s (other than being slimmer and lighter, obviously :)

-StrmnNrmn