Daedalus PSP R12 Released

I've just finished uploading the latest build of Daedalus PSP:

Daedalus PSP R12 for v1.00 Firmware
Daedalus PSP R12 for v1.50+ Firmware
Daedalus PSP R12 Source

As usual it will take 20-30 minutes for the files to propagate across the Sourceforge mirrors, so please be patient :)

Here is the list of changes:

• [!] Fixed issue preventing Goldeneye from being loaded.
  
• [!] Fixed dynarec for Goldeneye.
  
• [!] Fixed dynarec for Super Smash Bros.
  
• [!] Fix various texturing issues with 4bpp and small or non power-of-2 textures.
  
• [!] Fix TexRect instructions with negative s/t components.
  
• [!] Fixed the HUD in Mario 64 (broken in R11.)
  
• [!] Fixed lights in F3DEX2 microcodes.
  
• [+] Correctly implement instruction fetch exceptions, improving compatibility.
  
• [+] Improved floating point compatibility.
  
• [+] Correctly handle mask_s/mask_t tile values.
  
• [+] Implemented a few custom blend modes.
  
• [+] Screenshots just cover visible viewport.
  

If you've been following the updates on this blog over the past month the most obvious change is that Super Smash Bros. is now running well with dynarec enabled, and many graphical glitches have now been resolved. The compatibility fixes were specifically aimed at Super Smash Bros. but may well fix issues with other roms too. Overall SSB is looking and playing much better than it was in R11, but even at 30-40fps it's still not running at fullspeed yet. There are a few graphical issues that still need resolving, but all in all it's starting to feel very playable with frameskip set to 1 or 2.

Goldeneye is also running in R12. Although the intro sequence is running very quickly and with few noticable graphical issues, a lot more work is needed to it running at a playable framerate in-game. I think it's a good start though, and something to get excited about for the future :)

Otherwise R12 just has a fewm minor compatibility and graphical fixes - there are no optimisations for this build.

As always, leave your feedback on the comments pages. I read all your comments and I'll do my best to reply to any questions you raise. I'm particularly interested to hear if any roms which were broken in previous releases are now running in R12.

Enjoy!

-StrmnNrmn

R12 Release Date

A number of people have been asking in the comments when R12 is going to be released.

There are still a number of things I want to work on. Now that Super Smash Bros. is running nice and quickly with dynarec enabled, I want to spend a week or so polishing the graphics and trying to make it as playable as possible. Although Goldeneye is running with dynarec in R12, it still needs a lot of work before its playable, so I'm not going to spend any more time on it for R12.

I'm going on holiday at the end of June, so I'd like to have R12 released before then. I'll aim for next weekend (23rd/24th June) but it may end up being as late as the 26th/27th.

-StrmnNrmn

Status Update

It's been a couple of weeks since the last update. As people tend to get a bit nervous when I don't update regularly, I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm ok and still thinking about getting R12 ready :)

I'm still in the middle of looking at fixing the various dynarec bugs which are keeping Super Smash Bros from working with Dynarec enabled. I've not made as much progress as I would have liked since the last post, as I've been very busy with work and various other commitments. Hopefully I should get a bit more time to work on R12 from the end of this week. I'll post an update as soon as I have more news to report on.

-StrmnNrmn

Dynarec Fixes

In the previous update I mentioned that the dynarec wasn't working with Goldeneye:

...I can still only get the rom running with dynarec disabled on the PSP, so the framerate is currently just 6-7 fps. Interestingly it runs fine with dynarec on the PC with the same set of changes, so this indicates a bug somewhere in the PSP dynarec implementation.

I've spent a couple of evenings investigating this problem, and I've finally had a bit of luck in determining the root cause. As I suspected it was due to a bug in the PSP dynarec implementation - it turns out that I was fiddling addresses to compensate for the different endianness of the PSP twice (essentially having the same effect as not compensating in the first place).

The fix was very easy to implement (just a single line of code). It's quite a significant bug, so I'm hoping that it will fix dynarec issues with a few other roms too. Unfortunately it looks like the bug which is preventing dynarec working with Super Smash Bros. is a different issue, so I'll have to spend some more time investigating that.

I'm pleased to say that Goldeneye is now running fine with dynarec, so it now boots and runs the intro sequence very quickly. Although the intro and menu run at around 30-60fps, in-game is still very slow (around 5-8fps) so I need to profile this and see what's going on.

As I've hinted above, the next job is to have a look why dynarec is causing Super Smash Bros to hang. A cursory look revealed that it's still broken even when I disable most of the native code generation and directly call the interpretive instruction handlers from the compiled fragment. Because of this I think the problem has something to do with how traces are selected and the resulting fragments are linked together. I'll know more later in the week.

-StrmnNrmn

Goldeneye Update!

Ok, I know the last thing I said yesterday was:

Anyway, given the work involved Goldeneye isn't an immediate priority, but I am thinking about it.

I couldn't quite resist having a quick hack to see if I could get Goldeneye working using the third method I outlined. It turned out to be relatively painless to crowbar in the required changes, and I'm pleased to say that I've managed to get Goldeneye booting again! :)

With the changes, Daedalus now dynamically pages the Goldeneye ROM into the PSP's RAM so that it no longer requires a free 12 MiB. I now check the instruction pointer on every instruction fetch in the interpretive core*, and raise a TLB Read Miss exception if required. If this happens, it causes Goldeneye's exception handler to realise that the required code isn't in memory, and to load it in from ROM before continuing execution.

So here are the first screenshots of Goldeneye running under Daedalus R12 - you can see there are a handful of graphical glitches to sort out, particularly on the main menu:







Not bad for an hour's work!

There's still quite a long way to go though. Firstly, I can still only get the rom running with dynarec disabled on the PSP, so the framerate is currently just 6-7 fps. Interestingly it runs fine with dynarec on the PC with the same set of changes, so this indicates a bug somewhere in the PSP dynarec implementation. Secondly, I've not been able to get in-game yet - it just seems to hang with a black screen shortly after starting to load the level. I've not figured out whether this is just running very slowly without dynarec and taking its time, or if there's another bug to be fixed somewhere.

Getting the rom booting is a great first step though - it can only continue to improve from here :)

-StrmnNrmn

*I probably want to tidy things up to avoid doing this for most other roms as it can be quite expensive - especially if dynarec is disabled.

R11 Plans

I had planned on posting this update on Monday, but I've spent the last couple of nights catching up on a few games that I've not had chance to play since they were released (Crackdown on the 360 and Afterburner : Black Falcon on the PSP for the curious :)

For R11 I'm hoping to fix the Expansion Pak support for once and for all. Memory is currently very tight, so I need to look at shaving off a few hundered KB here and there. Almost all the memory Daedalus uses is allocated up front - there are very few dynamic allocations at runtime, with the biggest culprit being the texture cache. So for R11 I want to introduce a pooled allocator for the texture cache, which will mean that when it runs out of memory, you just get white textures appearing rather than a hard crash.

The other feature I want to improve in R11 is the way that global settings and per-rom settings are handled. At the moment Daedalus discards any changes to settings that you make when you restart your PSP, and it can be incredibly tedious setting things up every time you run a game. This is quite a small feature to add, but I think it will make the emulator much nicer to use.

Behind the scenes, I want to spend a short while working on some scripts to handle packaging new releases for distribution. Current I do all of this by hand, and it's one of the things I least enjoy about the project. Hopefully, the more automated I can make this, the more frequently I'm likely to release builds :)

I'd like to get all these changes done and release R11 within a couple of weeks. I have a couple of busy weekends coming up, so I'm not going to specify an exact date. You can expect it before May though (I'll try not to be a couple of days late this time :)

R11 is essentially going to be a compatibility release - hopefully the Expansion Pak support will lead to a few more roms running (Majora's Mask being one I've already verified). Looking further ahead, R12 will be back to concentrating on speed (as it happened, R10 achieved a 10-15% speedup without having implemented the majority of the optimisations I had planned :)

-StrmnNrmn

PS Off to Spain again over the Easter bank holiday weekend. Back on Tuesday :)