Hacking CATSFC released

[keine]

Supercard....entice us all in and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.
I personally find the GBA emulation sub par as I find the SNES emulation. I still find that Earthbound on the latest CATSFC is laggy. See Threed. Super laggy.

 

[machomuu]

Supercard....entice us all in and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.
I personally find the GBA emulation sub par as I find the SNES emulation. I still find that Earthbound on the latest CATSFC is laggy. See Threed. Super laggy.
What? Your post seems to be missing words, because many parts don't seem to make sense, unless you meant this:
QUOTESupercard....indulge us all and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.

 

[GreatCrippler]

Supercard....entice us all in and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.
I personally find the GBA emulation sub par as I find the SNES emulation. I still find that Earthbound on the latest CATSFC is laggy. See Threed. Super laggy.

Painful to read... Sounds like you have a crappy Micro SD. Earthbound runs flawlessly for me.

 

[keine]

SD card is a microsD 4gb Kingston SDC4. I'm using the latest CATSFC and CPU is set at 5. The Earthbound rom is verified as (U) [!] by goodtools. I'm sorry for my first post. It wasn't the correct way to communicate.

Suggestions? Barring that this Kingston micoSDHC is counterfeit (which I highly doubt, bought from the shoptemp store when it existed and the hologram looked good) what *am* I doing wrong. Obviously I am doing something wrong. I get massive slowdown walking around Threed.

Maybe I should try another rom.

I also feel that on this setup with 1.21 GbaEmu, metroid Zero mission isn't as fluid as on my EZFlash4 Slot 2. A member argued that it was on my end. Maybe these two issues are connected.
Maybe I should try solve this problem again, since Earthbound isn't supposed to have any slowdown.

edit: my Supercard must be broken or something. I tried another completely different rom of Earthbound, also verified to (U) [!], ran panasonic complete reformat (Full Overwrite/ON) and reloaded everything. Updated EOS/Patch. Running CATSFC 1.1. I still get pretty massive frame skipping/lag in threed with the zombies. I don't think that SDHC Class 4 wouldn't be good enough. Authentic Kingston.

 

[Terminator02]

it's not the class, it's the random access memory speeds that matter, and it most probably is your microSD card

also, the EZFlash 4 will run games better, because it's not emulating

 

[keine]

I have another 2gB Kingston class 2 I believe SD card. Assuming the SD card is my problem, formatting this one as before and testing it, Earthbound should run without slowdown? correct?

Why do access times matter again? Does the supercard not have enough ram to load the entire rom into memory? Are we reading it as we go? How have cards gotten around it in terms of nds games.
Reading back through the thread it has been said that SD card access time is an issue. Can someone explain why say the psp doesn't have this issue with SNES emulation? Is there any way we could take the speed of the card out of the equation? Its a very variable issue.

Authentic Kingston microSDHC class 4 is officially "crap" in terms of this program. Can someone recommend me a card that is guaranteed to not produce issues with emulation for both CATSFC and GBA?

 

[ShadauxCat]

Only if it has better random access speed. If not, it will run the same or worse.

 

[T.Kuranari]

I have another 2gB Kingston class 2 I believe SD card. Assuming the SD card is my problem, formatting this one as before and testing it, Earthbound should run without slowdown? correct?

Why do access times matter again? Does the supercard not have enough ram to load the entire rom into memory? Are we reading it as we go? How have cards gotten around it in terms of nds games.
Reading back through the thread it has been said that SD card access time is an issue. Can someone explain why say the psp doesn't have this issue with SNES emulation? Is there any way we could take the speed of the card out of the equation? Its a very variable issue.

Try to format you card with 64KB per cluster (FAT16 neccessary).

 

[keine]

I tested the random access time with a program called "speedtest for libfat" i found via google here: TeamCyclops forum post on random access time and carts

This program tells me that my random access times are as follows on the Kingston class 4 4gB microSDHC.

Random (512B) 664 microseconds
Radmon (4KiB) 2713 microseconds
Random (16 KiB) 10750 microseconds

I could compare these numbers to what HDTach reports but I'd think that would be less accurate given the random card reader I'm using. Here is h2benchw

C:\Users\Me\Downloads\h2benchw3_16>h2benchw -english -s 6
H2bench -- by Harald Bögeholz / c't Magazin für Computertechnik
Version 3.16/Win32, Copyright (C) 2010 Heise Zeitschriften Verlag GmbH & Co. KG
Dutch translation by F&L Technical Publications B.V.
!!! WARNING: results will not be saved!
Capacity: 7727265 sectors=3773 MByte, CHS=(481/255/63)
Checking timer for 10 seconds (Win32) ............. Ok.
timer resolution: 0.255 µs, 3.919 MHz
timer statistics: 265842687 calls, min 0.00 µs, average 0.02 µs, max 72.46 µs
Reading some sectors to warm up... done.
Measuring random access time:
reading... 1.07 msÂÂ(min. 0.62 ms, max. 1.49 ms)

The small random seems to be under the .7ms threshold which the cyclone articles talks about (not according to h2benchw though),but I don't know what that means in terms of supercard and CATSFC.
Thoughts? from here? I don't want to criticize but wouldn't it be better to remove such a variable from the program given its variability. Or should I just go away and buy a better SD card.

 

[Terminator02]

you can't just "remove such a variable" it's reading the ROM off the SD card

so yes, get a brand name microSD card from a reputable site like amazon, newegg, your local retailer, etc.


and never get the microSD cards in bundles from chinese shops, they're always cheap

 

[keine]

you can't just "remove such a variable" it's reading the ROM off the SD card

so yes, get a brand name microSD card from a reputable site like amazon, newegg, your local retailer, etc.


and never get the microSD cards in bundles from chinese shops, they're always cheap

Would someone go out on a limb and link me a card (from amazon/other reputable) that would allow me to play Earthbound reliably with CATSFC? 4gb or 8gb? Someone who perhaps plays Earthbound sucessfully on CATSFC1.1.

 

[Nimbus]

I'll admit, I am very impressed at this revised version of the DSTwo SNES Emulator. Me likes

ShadauxCat, you did a job beyond that of what could have ever been expected, something the Supercard Team seems to have been incapable of with this emulator at least. Thanks for your hard work, and I hope you're doing well at Bioware and whatnot.

 

[keine]

Bought an ADATA 4gB class 4 from amazon. I'll be reporting back very! soon on my results. My 2gB had even worse random access reads than my 4gB. Both are Taiwanese Kingston....supposedly. Here's hoping for

 

[LearnIIBurn]

I've been doing a lot of testing with CATSFC 1.1 and have had mixed results. I may be using a pretty nasty SDcard now that I think about it. But either way CATSFC runs much better than SC team SNES emu.

Has anyone tried SNEmulDS? Not to bring up another emulator in this thread. But for testing purposes, SNEmulDS seems to play some games absolutely flawlessly for me. But other games (Mario Kart, Mario RPG) won't run at all.

Just throwing that out there

 

[Deleted-236924]

and we would need a entirely new flashcart
Why?

Supercard....entice us all in and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.
I personally find the GBA emulation sub par as I find the SNES emulation. I still find that Earthbound on the latest CATSFC is laggy. See Threed. Super laggy.
What? Your post seems to be missing words, because many parts don't seem to make sense, unless you meant this:
QUOTE

Supercard....indulge us all and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.

 

[keine]

Bought a new ADATA from Amazon. Class 4 4gB SDHC.

Before and after formatting with SDFormatter, both h2benchw and HDtach measure random access of the card at ~1.6ms. So that got *significantly* worse.

Needless to say Earthbound @ 5CPU in downtown Threed is pretty dang laggy. No change. I personally find the experience not enjoyable.
What say you now?

 

[machomuu]

and we would need a entirely new flashcart
Why?

Supercard....entice us all in and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.
I personally find the GBA emulation sub par as I find the SNES emulation. I still find that Earthbound on the latest CATSFC is laggy. See Threed. Super laggy.
What? Your post seems to be missing words, because many parts don't seem to make sense, unless you meant this:
QUOTE

Supercard....indulge us all and drop the product. Not the first time and not the last.

 

[Terminator02]

Bought a new ADATA from Amazon. Class 4 4gB SDHC.

Before and after formatting with SDFormatter, both h2benchw and HDtach measure random access of the card at ~1.6ms. So that got *significantly* worse.

Needless to say Earthbound @ 5CPU in downtown Threed is pretty dang laggy. No change. I personally find the experience not enjoyable.
What say you now?

I say i should try it out myself once i find the time

Edit: is it all the way through the game or just in Threed?

 

[keine]

Its worst in downtown Threed (around the hotel/hospital) when the zombies are present. However, I've also tested the rom on Zsnes and Wii snes 9xGX. I believe there is slowdown inherent in this part of the game which was present on the SNES as well (lots of sprites on overworld); however either due to a) emulation speed or b) random access time of micro sd card it is amplified greatly here. It varies throughout the game. Of course it is "playable", completely enjoyable is different. Its gets much worse as you decrease CPU speed. If this was entirely a card speed issue, I believe changing CPU speed would not have an effect. I also feel the input to commands on the battle screen have some lag to them. On Zsnes or Snes9xGX they are nice and snappy but here they are delayed. I still appreciate the work being done here.

Why am I so crazy about Earthbound? I've never played it before and I'm trying to use catsfc for my first play-through. I'm also interested in this program. I did buy an entirely new SD card just to try and get SFC to work better. No such luck, but then again I didn't get a faster random access one like I'd hoped.and I'd buy another if someone could guarantee me sd card X would get me silky smooth SFC on DS. However I feel people's definition of smooth is similar to people's definition of "playable" ADATA formatting out of the box and Panasonic SD format both measured ~1.6ms. FAT 64KB actually increase random access by .1ms to 1.7ms. If a delta of .7ms doesn't make any difference for me(Kingston compared to ADATA), I don't think .3 less beyond that matters. I tested Earthbound after each change in formatting. I noticed nothing. Between 1.0ms and 1.7ms (Kingston versus ADATA) I also noticed no difference. Whats saying that .7ms will work wonders. I'm skeptical.

Previously the scrolling background being jerky in Super Mario Kart was mentioned. I took a look at it and I can see the jerk as well. I don't know whether or not it was present in BAGSFC.

 

[nl255]

Its worst in downtown Threed (around the hotel/hospital) when the zombies are present. However, I've also tested the rom on Zsnes and Wii snes 9xGX. I believe there is slowdown inherent in this part of the game which was present on the SNES as well (lots of sprites on overworld); however either due to a) emulation speed or b) random access time of micro sd card it is amplified greatly here. It varies throughout the game. Of course it is "playable", completely enjoyable is different. Its gets much worse as you decrease CPU speed. If this was entirely a card speed issue, I believe changing CPU speed would not have an effect. I also feel the input to commands on the battle screen have some lag to them. On Zsnes or Snes9xGX they are nice and snappy but here they are delayed. I still appreciate the work being done here.

Why am I so crazy about Earthbound? I've never played it before and I'm trying to use catsfc for my first play-through. I'm also interested in this program. I did buy an entirely new SD card just to try and get SFC to work better. No such luck, but then again I didn't get a faster random access one like I'd hoped.and I'd buy another if someone could guarantee me sd card X would get me silky smooth SFC on DS. However I feel people's definition of smooth is similar to people's definition of "playable" ADATA formatting out of the box and Panasonic SD format both measured ~1.6ms. FAT 64KB actually increase random access by .1ms to 1.7ms. If a delta of .7ms doesn't make any difference for me(Kingston compared to ADATA), I don't think .3 less beyond that matters. I tested Earthbound after each change in formatting. I noticed nothing. Between 1.0ms and 1.7ms (Kingston versus ADATA) I also noticed no difference. Whats saying that .7ms will work wonders. I'm skeptical.

Previously the scrolling background being jerky in Super Mario Kart was mentioned. I took a look at it and I can see the jerk as well. I don't know whether or not it was present in BAGSFC.

I believe that CATSFC/BAGSFC load the SNES ROM entirely into the DSTwo's 32MB of RAM so cart speed shouldn't affect anything except initial loading time (and save times).