Quick question about Snes emulation, in the next major release, will Snes9x Next receive further emulation optimizations to help affected games such as Star Fox and/or emulate effects such as pseudo hi-res (like the water transparency effects in Kirby's Dreamland 3)? Or will the Snes9x 1.53 have to be optimized instead? I'm just curious is all, but once more, I'd like to state that I'm sticking with RetroArch, it's amazing.
Star Fox affected in what way? It should play perfectly fine on Wii with Next - in fact, I did a quick speedrun of it some days ago.
Actually - disabling pseudo hi-res was a deliberate speed hack on my part for Kirby's Dreamland 3 - pseudo hi-res would dip below fullspeed and I felt that sacrificing pseudo hi-res this way would be a quasi-acceptable way to at least skip the huge FPS hit.
Fair enough, it does have quite a speed hit in Snes9xGx, too (Tantric acknowledged that), but without it, completing the game is impossible, as there are some levels where you're underwater, but that's fine
, I can always use Snes9xGx to bypass that level, and switch back, it's not that a big of a deal (not sure how Nintendo did it on the VC though...weird, I'm sure they sacrificed something). Oh, and about Star Fox, I noticed some slight audio crackling when it shows the Arwings taking off from the base when you start the Corneria level, but it does run at the correct speed. Do you think you could have someone look at the mosaic tile effects in FF5 and FF6? I noticed that the FPS dips for split second when encountering an enemy, if that makes sense.
I guess I have a weird knack for noticing quirks in emulators, especially when the SPC700/Nintendo S-SMP isn't emulated correctly; I suppose my ears are trained after using emulators all these years, but I digress. Please don't get me wrong, I'm loving Snes9x Next a lot, and it doesn't have the weird tinny-sound-after-opening-the-menu-issue that plagued Snes9xGx, which apparently was caused by a flaw in libogc, but that problem is nonexistent here
What you're noticing in Star Fox (audio crackling) is the few times when FPS dips below 60fps - sorry, SuperFX games requirea good deal of CPU power - it's a surprise SNES9x Next runs as well in its current state as it does on Wii - I was expecting far worse performance - more inline with what i'm seeing on Xbox 1 to be honest. If this bothers you, definitely don't try SNES9x 1.53, which will be even worse.
If disabling the pseudo hi-res graphics in Kirby's Dreamland 3 makes it impossible to finish, then fair enough, I can re-enable it.
Do you think you could have someone look at the mosaic tile effects in FF5 and FF6? I noticed that the FPS dips for split second when encountering an enemy, if that makes sense.
Yep - again, FPS dips slightly below 60fps thus you can hear a slight audio crackle for a split second. FF6 is surprisingly heavy on the CPU in field mode. On PS3 and 360 this slight audio crackle before transitioning from field to battle mode doesn't happen as they run way above 60fps there.
SNES9x GX relies on frameskipping to create the illusion games are running well when they really don'. I will never, ever resort to frameskipping if my life depends on it - it either runs at 60fps and when it doesn't, it's not worth playing to begin with.
I'm also sure you've noticed that every time SNES9x GX resolution switches (in games like Seiken Densetsu 3 for instance - where every time a text window is rendered, it jumps to 512x224 mode) , there's a very annoying audio hiccup/crack/pop that happens. This doesn't happen on SNES9x Next. There are a lot of little things like that which were optimized.
I'm sure there's room for improvement still and will be investigating a redone-from-scratch version of SNES9x Next with improvements in both speed and accuracy.