Homebrew Questions about the GX series emulators...

[MarcusRaven]

I've been curious for some time now. Why is it that the GX series of emulators only offer a fixed frame skip rate, and no options to adjust it? Is the Wii not capable of handling GBA, SNES, or NES games at full speed? (Don't really know if NES has these issues as I don't use it a lot, but the other two definately do.) (Seems silly considering Virtual Console, and that those are just like playing the original completely.) It's just always been a question that makes me wonder why. Why is it that we don't have the option to adjust frame skip rates like the PC counterparts? What could possibly be the cause and is this something that can be remedied in the future?

And on a side note, why can VBAGX have USB mouse (and keyboard) support, but it has yet to appear in SNES9xGX? Wouldn't that feature make all the SNES Mouse games work just fine?

I just wanted to start a discussion on the matter. If you have frame skip rate options, would you use them? Would you find them useful? Or would you rather the emulators just make the rate 0 and be done? And what are your thoughts on peripheral compatibility (or lack there of)?

 

[Tantric]

I've been curious for some time now. Why is it that the GX series of emulators only offer a fixed frame skip rate, and no options to adjust it? Is the Wii not capable of handling GBA, SNES, or NES games at full speed? (Don't really know if NES has these issues as I don't use it a lot, but the other two definately do.) (Seems silly considering Virtual Console, and that those are just like playing the original completely.) It's just always been a question that makes me wonder why. Why is it that we don't have the option to adjust frame skip rates like the PC counterparts? What could possibly be the cause and is this something that can be remedied in the future?

And on a side note, why can VBAGX have USB mouse (and keyboard) support, but it has yet to appear in SNES9xGX? Wouldn't that feature make all the SNES Mouse games work just fine?

I just wanted to start a discussion on the matter. If you have frame skip rate options, would you use them? Would you find them useful? Or would you rather the emulators just make the rate 0 and be done? And what are your thoughts on peripheral compatibility (or lack there of)?

SNES and NES don't need frameskip - no frames need to be dropped - they can run at full speed. GBA runs on auto frameskip - that means it changes while the game is running to keep proper timing. You really couldn't do better yourself if you set it manually - the games wouldn't run any better. Some games it doesn't matter how high you set the frameskip, it still can't run full speed. PC emulators have frameskip options because PC hardware varies from user to user. With the Wii, we know the hardware - so we can determine optimal settings.

USB Mouse/Keyboard support was removed from VBAGX. The reason being that keyboard/mouse code starts in separate threads and wastes precious resources that I'm sure most people would rather see devoted to keeping the emulator as fast as it can be. In my personal opinion those peripherals aren't game console peripherals - if you really want to play emulators with a mouse use your PC.

 

[Bladexdsl]

snes speeds get wonky if you have the gfx enhancers on 2xsal etc so frameskip might be useful.

 

[Tantric]

snes speeds get wonky if you have the gfx enhancers on 2xsal etc so frameskip might be useful.

That's true. But what's the point of having hq2x on if you have to use frameskip to compensate (detrimental to the experience)?

 

[Bladexdsl]

can't you use frameskip just make it go just a little faster/smoother so it doesnt slow down as much in hg2x? also while your here do you think you'll be able to implement a cover mod/system into future releases of snes9x?

 

[MarcusRaven]

Personally I don't use any image smoothing like hq2x, but I notice slowdown on faster games like Mega Man X3 very easily. (Something about playing it religiously when I was younger. Go-fig.) And on GBA, the auto frame skip can be a nuisance for games that have a flashing temp-invincibility. (Get hit, and the frame skip makes it look like my character is GONE. Very annoying.) I was unaware that the peripheral compatibility was taken from VBAGX, but SNES9xGX could use USB mouse support to make ALL of the games work. Its not needed for GBA, or NES as far as I know, but Mario Paint, Mario no Picross, Mario and Wario, and a bunch of others all take the mouse. As of now the emulator only uses really bad Wii Remote pointing controls, or joystick controls that are never fast enough. If nothing else happens, I just want to at least see this get implemented.

 

[StupidGamer1]

I like how they are but VBA needs work. Lots of 3d esque games need a tuneup (Doom.Wolf 3d,Darkarea to name a few) 2d offerings fare better though.

 

[Jacobeian]

Seems silly considering Virtual Console, and that those are just like playing the original completely.

you are comparing emulators developed by a professional team against unoptimized ports of PC emulators, developed on the will and free time of people like us

QUOTEWhy is it that we don't have the option to adjust frame skip rates like the PC counterparts?

It seems that people often tends to forget that a Wii is not like a PC with various CPU speed, Graphics features, etc...
Frame-skipping is only required when the emulator takes longer than 1/60s to emulate and render one frame (audio+video).
This is unnecessary since most of the time (well for NES and SNES at least), this does not happen as the Wii is powerful enough to keep a constant emulation rate.
In the rare cases where it happens (for example in a game which is very CPU-intensive), this is auto-detected and the next frame is automatically skipped to compensate the speed loss, this is also called auto-frameskip.

By having configurable frameskip, it would means that 1,2,3... frames would be skipped EVERYTIME, which would be damn worst than current situation for NES/SNES... and certainly not better for GBA emulation.

 

[koji2009]

SNES9x GX does have automatic frameskipping as far as I can tell. If you enable filtering the game still plays at full speed but with the framerate effected negatively (a good game where you can easily tell this is The Legend of Zelda. Play it with and without HQ2x and both will play full speed but HQ2x will run with obviously more jumpy playability.

Megaman X3 hasn't run into very many slowdowns for me. I actually just beat the game using the emulator

. Part of the reason it has slowdowns is because it did have an additional hardware chip known as the Cx4 and thus did require more processing than a typical SNES game... but I even find games like Yoshi's Island playing fullspeed without frameskipping in most situations and it was one of the few games with Super FX2 chip, which was an additional 20mhz floating point processor on top of the 3.58mhz SNES processor.

As Jacobien stated a forced framerate will almost always give a worse image because you're rendering 1 frame for every X skipped. A frameskip of 2 forces a 60fps game down to 15fps for example.

 

[MarcusRaven]

Well, if they end up doing anything with the frame skip rate, I'd prefer they remove it completely. I'd rather have slowdown then miss some of my frames.

But I really think support for USB mice to emulate the SNES mouse is something they should do regardless of anything else. It just makes sense. Mouse emulation is shoddy at best right now, and adding this support (since it can be done, as proven by VBAGX), would solve a lot of issues for gamers that play Mario Paint, Picross, and so much more.