Hacking TempGBA: NDSGBA revival

[Metoroid0]

TembGBA is superb in compared to NDSGBA from official DSTWO website. Every game i tryed runs perfectly..almost (fps issues).

I wanted to ask..Could GBA emulator on DSTWO ever run 60 fps all the time an 0 frame skipping (i mean like on real gba)? or is that the best emulator on DS can do?

By the way, all of my games are at 1FS and no prolems

 

[Canadacdn]

1.41 is a big improvement! So far I've been able to run Warioland 4, and Metroid Fusion & Zero mission at frameskip 0, 60fps with no issues.

 

[Metoroid0]

1.41 is a big improvement! So far I've been able to run Warioland 4, and Metroid Fusion & Zero mission at frameskip 0, 60fps with no issues.

No issues..now wait a second, how come no issues? what card are you using? i'm using DSTWO and this emulator and i'm pretty sure that all 3DS's and DS'a hawe the same hardware. So how come you dont hawe issues at 0 frameskip and i do???

I mean i'm not saying i cant run the game or it is not playable, but it's not perfect as real GBA, but on 1 frameskip it's a different story...

And especially Metroid zero mission..at 0 FS it laggs a little ot it tears or something..eather way it's not as near as good as 1 FS, but 0FS is smoother, you can see that with naked eye, but not enjoyable

 

[Rydian]

1.41 is a big improvement! So far I've been able to run Warioland 4, and Metroid Fusion & Zero mission at frameskip 0, 60fps with no issues.

... even when you hit the frog switch in Wario Land 4? o.o

 

[Deleted member 319809]

... even when you hit the frog switch in Wario Land 4? o.o

The plot thickens!

 

[Deleted member 319809]

... even when you hit the frog switch in Wario Land 4? o.o

Unfortunately, that's a nope. The FPS counter shows 49 rendered, 51/60 emulated, at 396 MHz.

 

[Metoroid0]

OK, the fps in warioland 4 is 58~60 fpa @ 0 frameskip, but picture scrolling left-right up-down is not smooth, despite fps being almost 60. And as Rydian said, when you hot the frog switch a lot stuff is happening on the screen so fps drops down from 25~42 FPS (if you move Wario around) and sound has issues. Why is that? is that v-sync being off or the CPU cant handle or ram or whatever...?

And on Metroid zero mission at the beginning of the level when Samus opens her eyes and go to the left for the morph-ball fps is down to 54 and sound issues and lagging and skipping. That is if you set frameskip @ 0 but on
1 frameskip it runs great! but it's not as smooth as real GBA game. i mean it's not that noticeable but it can be felt its not smooth. i tried to increase CPU frequency to 396MHz @ 0 frameskip but nothing is happening...

I'm talking about rendered fps, the emulated one is always 59~60 more or less. Emulated fps is not that big issue.

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Oh and by the way, can i put a frame around GBA games, like so --> http://goo.gl/Zps6L

and where can i find more of them and how to put them in there (if it's possible)?

Unfortunately, that's a nope. The FPS counter shows 49 rendered, 51/60 emulated, at 396 MHz.

What's that CPU frquency option anyway, since it does nothing for the game... at least nothing i can notice?

 

[Deleted member 319809]

OK, the fps in warioland 4 is 58~60 fpa @ 0 frameskip, but picture scrolling left-right up-down is not smooth, despite fps being almost 60. And as Rydian said, when you hot the frog switch a lot stuff is happening on the screen so fps drops down from 25~42 FPS (if you move Wario around) and sound has issues. Why is that? is that v-sync being off or the CPU cant handle or ram or whatever...?

Indeed, at 60 FPS the scrolling is not smooth. Despite rendering 60 FPS in the emulator, only about 42 FPS are actually sent to the DS's screen. The emulator hits a limit for the DS2-to-DS image transfer speed.

It's likely that the video effects are too much for the DSTwo's internal CPU to handle in Wario Land 4. 3D games are especially bad, too.

(Following that part of your message is something about Metroid, which I don't know about at all, so I can't comment. Maybe someone else can comment.)

Oh and by the way, can i put a frame around GBA games, like so --> http://goo.gl/Zps6L

and where can i find more of them and how to put them in there (if it's possible)?

Not right now. Here's where I start an informal poll in this thread to see how many people want this.

 

[Metoroid0]

Indeed, at 60 FPS the scrolling is not smooth. Despite rendering 60 FPS in the emulator, only about 42 FPS are actually sent to the DS's screen. The emulator hits a limit for the DS2-to-DS image transfer speed.

It's likely that the video effects are too much for the DSTwo's internal CPU to handle in Wario Land 4. 3D games are especially bad, too.

(Following that part of your message is something about Metroid, which I don't know about at all, so I can't comment. Maybe someone else can comment.)

It's ok, someone will, but the thing is almost the same as in wario when hitting the frog.

By the way, i thin there should be a lot o options in emulators in general, not just this.
I know there are a lot of options on Visual Boy Advance for PC and i can adjust almost everything.

But i guess if you want smooth GBA games, buy EZ flash 3in1

Oh and by the way, can i put a frame around GBA games, like so --> http://goo.gl/Zps6L

and where can i find more of them and how to put them in there (if it's possible)?

Not right now. Here's where I start an informal poll in this thread to see how many people want this.

Too bad :/
I would like to find some frame like on GBA sp, where at the bottom said GameBoy advance SP and slick black frame

 

[masterz87]

I don't know if this was still an issue with previous versions of tempgba, or gpsp itself, but I do know that other emulators _do not_ have this issue when rendering the screen even at 1x resolution. It does this at random times in mario&luigi superstar saga. Also I read something on wikipedia that said the ds2 has 32mb of ram, does that mean that 32mb roms aren't suppported(when zipped) in tempgba? I know they weren't with the psp since at the time, exophase only had access to 24MB of ram total, later versions of the psp had an extra 24mb of ram to work with, but I don't beieve it was ever supported. The one I'm talking about is kh chain of memories for the gba, it's 33.6mb(for whatever reason) and trimming it with ndstokyotrim gets it to 32mb but then the video messes up and it crashes. I had a saveslot for the game but I accidently deleted it earlier when I was checking on them so you could see them yourself.

Edit: Also _yes_ I did convert them from bmp to png to try to save space/time uploading them/people loading the page. But obviously they're exactly the same either way. That issue happens whenever a character does a huge speech bubble, I'm running it on frameskip 1(with sound sometimes) and it runs just fine. The one thing I wish is if tempgba could speed up saving, I use the temporary fast forward for each save in this game as it _always_ takes ~10-20s and that small of a save file should go way faster. I don't know if you're able to detect the bios function and then just say "OK skip half the next frames when emulating them" or something similar but that would be a nice feature to have.

Edit 2: OK it's tempgba it can't decode the video for KH:COM. I'm going to include some images showing the issue with the video decoding. I don't think it's because it's _too_ slow since at frameskip 2 it's doing 20fps stable. it's just not decoding it right. I tried to take the same screenshots with a desktop gba emulator in the same exact moments but I wasn't able to do it exactly, I just hope it shows it off a bit better. this is the opening cinematic of the game so I don't think a savestate should be necessary. I'm also going to be opening a github bug for this issue in a second and link to them there and also some debug information if you tell me how to get it.

Edit 3: I am glad to say that he rom loaded just fine(just took awhile) as that was always an issue with gpsp was that it couldn't handle 32mb ones. The link to the issue is here. https://github.com/Nebuleon/TempGBA/issues/24

Edit 4: I was/am able to run golden sun #1 in battles with sound at frameskip 1 at 240mhz before that was 360mhz to not get stutters. In #2 it's 396mhz w/ sound at frameskip 1 to get no sutters at all. Before that required frameskip 2 at the same clock speed. Also the game's screenshots I first showed is being played at 240mhz, even though it doesn't do _much_ 3d it does do a lot of effects when entering/leaving battle and honestly that's very nice to see it running at such a low frequency.

I'm still torn as to whether I should do 240mhz or keep it at the default 336mhz because I don't know which'll yield less power drain, I don't know if the idle times for 336 are enough to make it use less power than 240. Anyway it's nice to see it constantly approving once you get this memory thing fully implemented I may be able to run everything at 300mhz at 30fps constant w/ sound which will still shock the hell out of me.

 

[Rydian]

The video crashing is known on clean ROMs too, gotta' save state and then load state to progress (I tested on Beta 12). It happens on GPSP too.

See if the text issue happens on frameskip 3.

 

[masterz87]

The video crashing is known on clean ROMs too, gotta' save state and then load state to progress (I tested on Beta 12). It happens on GPSP too.

See if the text issue happens on frameskip 3.

I don't have a save state for it, but I'll try to get to a point where it happens again and try it then. As I said above, the svae states were accidently deleted so I don't have any way to check them again.

edit: I said it was still messing up now, since it's went from beta to stable, and thus I was hoping that issue(whatever it is that's causing it) was/is fixed now.

 

[Metoroid0]

Im curently playing "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow" for GBA (great game, love Castlevania games ), and game runs perfect on 1 frame-skip (except that is not as smooth as real thing but its great still).

But, i noticed that if i play, lets say for 30~45 minutes the sounds starts being distorted..or after i qick-save than quick-load the game that happenes.

I mean you can hear the game, but it has extra noise in it that i just cant stand (annoying) so i have to turn OFF DS and turn it on again. exiting or restarting cant fix the issue.

 

[nl255]

Im curently playing "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow" for GBA (great game, love Castlevania games ), and game runs perfect on 1 frame-skip (except that is not as smooth as real thing but its great still).

But, i noticed that if i play, lets say for 30~45 minutes the sounds starts being distorted..or after i qick-save than quick-load the game that happenes.

I mean you can hear the game, but it has extra noise in it that i just cant stand (annoying) so i have to turn OFF DS and turn it on again. exiting or restarting cant fix the issue.

I have noticed that happens in FF6 as well and the only fix is to do a regular SRAM save and then reset and load it (no need to turn off the DS or exit the emulator).

 

[masterz87]

OK that text issue _still_ happens with frameskip 2, and also if the CPU is set at 396mhz _and_ the sound is off. So it's _something_ with the drawing routine... I don't know what, since I don't have a debugger and the information that I'm able to see doesn't show me much if anything. There are many different times when the breaks in the lines is shown early in the game. I guess the reason I _didn't_ see it before on the psp(when I tried it there) was because the image was stretched and then had a billinear filter applied to it, and thus breaks in the text were likely fixed(I'm guessing) since it's a single white pixel with black pixel on top and bottom of it.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

TempGBA 1.42 is now available. It bumps the version number and adds the following small features:

• Automatic frameskip can now alternate between 0 frameskip (60 FPS) and 2 frameskip (20 FPS) as needed by the currently loaded game. BUT NEVER 1 FRAMESKIP. That's because of flashing objects in games, which flash at 30 Hz.
  
  I added this one in because many more games support 60 FPS rendered -- or close to that --, because the audio crackling doesn't freeze the emulator anymore, and finally because 20 FPS just sucks.
  
  edit: 42 FPS is still better than 20, which is close to the DSTwo-to-DS limit.
  
• Packs the newest version of game_config.txt as of this writing.
• Contains instructions in installation.txt to put the BIOS at the correct location. These instructions were already in README.md.

 

[Rydian]

Yeah I had to tell a lot of people to just rename the .md to .txt to see what to do.

 

[BvanBart]

Would be awesome to be able to delete files. My Mac puts .1200-pokemon.gba files on it (its a HFS+ thing...). Would be awesome if I could delete them with the list viewer.

 

[BvanBart]

Yeah... go ### yourself? Same kind of answer. Not really contributing to this treat.

Ontopic:
The ability to remove files could always come in handy. Also if you want to remove save games.

 

[Metoroid0]

TempGBA 1.42 is now available. It bumps the version number and adds the following small features:

• Automatic frameskip can now alternate between 0 frameskip (60 FPS) and 2 frameskip (20 FPS) as needed by the currently loaded game. BUT NEVER 1 FRAMESKIP. That's because of flashing objects in games, which flash at 30 Hz.
  
  I added this one in because many more games support 60 FPS rendered -- or close to that --, because the audio crackling doesn't freeze the emulator anymore, and finally because 20 FPS just sucks.
  
  edit: 42 FPS is still better than 20, which is close to the DSTwo-to-DS limit.
• Packs the newest version of game_config.txt as of this writing.
• Contains instructions in installation.txt to put the BIOS at the correct location. These instructions were already in README.md.

I will try it right now

EDIT: Hmm, not much improvements that i can see with my eye, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. But i will continue to use it and post my results.
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By the way, can someone link me where to buy EZflash 3in1 expansion cartridge. nds-cards.com doesnt hawe it, at least not Lite version... (please PM me)