Emulation Homebrew VRAM and Performance Monitoring Methods for NDS Game Development?

[DigitalDesignDude]

I develop NDS homebrew games using PALIB and DS Game Maker and wonder if there's any existing tools or emulators that offer some way of monitoring how much VRAM and other performance resources that my game is using at any given time.

I hope such a tool would provide a better indication of where my code isn't efficient or is taking up too much memory, and save me from having to play test my games until they crash or the following VRAM depletion message shows up.

Aside from that message and the game crashing, I currently have no other way of knowing how much memory I'm using and would appreciate any direction or recommendations for tools/emulators that could help me.

Thanks you!

 

[FAST6191]

I don't know PALIB that well to suggest what it might have internally but various things are given to developers (which get left out of final builds players and ROM hackers see). Indeed if it has a no more VRAM thing within it you can probably twist it to display how much is free. This might also include speaking to GDB via a bridge (desmume having some options here).

RAM usage is potentially more tricky as not everything will overwrite memory to blank when it is done so you are relying on its internal stuff when you malloc or whatever, and if you are doing inline assembly as well that gets even more tricky.

https://problemkaputt.de/gba.htm has some other options, however most things are more about CPU usage as that is what most people play to when doing things on the handhelds (there even being patches from hackers to reduce CPU and thus power usage).

It might almost pay to go the other way and figure out limits for things on screen and what you need to do, and then making that happen.

 

[DigitalDesignDude]

I don't know PALIB that well to suggest what it might have internally but various things are given to developers (which get left out of final builds players and ROM hackers see). Indeed if it has a no more VRAM thing within it you can probably twist it to display how much is free. This might also include speaking to GDB via a bridge (desmume having some options here).

RAM usage is potentially more tricky as not everything will overwrite memory to blank when it is done so you are relying on its internal stuff when you malloc or whatever, and if you are doing inline assembly as well that gets even more tricky.

https://problemkaputt.de/gba.htm has some other options, however most things are more about CPU usage as that is what most people play to when doing things on the handhelds (there even being patches from hackers to reduce CPU and thus power usage).

It might almost pay to go the other way and figure out limits for things on screen and what you need to do, and then making that happen.

Thanks for your thoughts and the link to more information.

I see now it will not be a simple as looking at something like a VRAM meter and trying to stay underneath a certain value. Though that would be nice for those without a lot of backend knowledge of Nintendo DS memory allocation and CPU usage.

I'll have to do some studying. Thanks again!

 

[cirote3]

As PAlib is open source, you can always add your own functions to track VRAM usage.