First -- just slow framerate, stuttering sound. To be fair, I haven't actually gotten as far as playing tennis - the RPG elements of the game take a while before you get to that point. But just in getting through the first screens, it's pretty bad compared to everything else I've tried so far. Maybe it's a game_config issue, but I wouldn't know what to do to fix it. And by the way, I tried Mario Golf (also Camelot) and it seems fine.
Maybe I have a bad dump? I don't think so - I've used the same rom on my EFA Linker cart and it played 100%.
Mario Tennis: Power Tour, CRC32 DA192D29?
If so, I just started a game of that, and I got to the room where the girl is sleeping and left the music playing by itself. I noticed something odd:
* at the start of the loop, when there are few instruments, the FPS counter states 19 rendered, 58 emulated;
* when more instruments accumulate, the FPS counter states 5 rendered, 43 emulated.
I fear that there may be more of those sound output problems from CATSFC in TempGBA. But if I disable the sound (which prevents rendering to the DSTwo mix buffer, but not to the GBA's sound registers), the FPS doesn't rise again. Maybe it's related to
timers being slow to emulate. I'll need to try more things when I have a debug/performance statistics menu coded.
Second - are you kidding? It works now haha. So far I've messed with Mario Kart, Yoshi's Island, Metal Slug, M&L SS, Golden Sun, and a number of other games, and I have to say this may be the best GBA emulation experience I've ever encountered. I'm playing on DSi XL so the screen size is fantastic of course, but the only thing I've got to beat this is playing real carts (or my EFA Linker cart) on my AGS-101 GBA SP. Just excellent. On the other hand, besides the fact that some of those games simply wouldn't work on NDSGBA 1.21, practically all games on that emu had a lag feel to them. Controls just perceptibly out of synch, sound was crap, enjoyment was zilch. I'm LOVING this. My DSi is gonna be on the charger a lot, I think.
I have to say I don't find much improvement yet with game compatibility, apart from those games I targetted specifically for an audio fix; are you sure you had downloaded game_config.txt when you used NDSGBA 1.21?
I also don't find much improvement in the audio department (!), but that may just be me being used to the SNES's rich sound. You might also be fooled by the twice-louder sound
*. We need someone like, say,
Rydian in here (ahem
) to do some sound comparisons between NDSGBA 1.21 and TempGBA, and perhaps a real GBA.
I was just about to ask what you meant with your "controls just perceptibly out of synch" but I just compared NDSGBA 1.21 with TempGBA beta 8 after loading SMA2: Mario World, and I see what you meant. That's really odd, because I did nothing to improve the input synchronisation at all...
And finally, what really makes the emulator much better for me is how fast it loads itself and games, how I can touch the screen to quickly get to a submenu in the Main Menu's grid, and how it can fast-forward with a key. A minor mention for my remapping of all the keys in SMA2: Mario World so I can do everything SNES-style: dash with Y (GBA B), jump with B (GBA A), spin-jump with A (GBA R ?!?!). That counts as enjoyment for me - what about you?
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* commit a7b5df0 increased the volume by a factor of two, because I saw that the maximum sample value didn't reach the full volume that 16-bit sound allows without clipping. (+1023 * 2⁴ = +16382, which is half of +32767).
