An update for the N64 (PS64) port!!

[gamba]

gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums - View topic - PS3 - forgotten?

We'll have to wait a bit .

[barnhilltrckn]

Thats some great news to hear right there. This for me is almost as big as a working ps1 emulator. Cant wait for the first release of it.

Also if they release the source then maybe square can add all his great tweaks to it and have all kinds of nice shaders to really make it shine on hd tv's.

[squarepusher2]

Thats some great news to hear right there. This for me is almost as big as a working ps1 emulator. Cant wait for the first release of it.

Also if they release the source then maybe square can add all his great tweaks to it and have all kinds of nice shaders to really make it shine on hd tv's.

They insist on using PSL1GHT though - and because of that insistence, that means losing out on runtime Cg compiler support

[barnhilltrckn]

They insist on using PSL1GHT though - and because of that insistence, that means losing out on runtime Cg compiler support

Well that just sucks but ohwell. I can understand why some want to use pslight but all you do is hurt your port because lets face it, it aint gonna be nowhere near as good as it could be with the sony sdk. I mean does it look like sony is coming after ppl for using it to create homebrew?? No they are not and most likely will not. If they were then they would have done so allready.

[squarepusher2]

Well that just sucks but ohwell. I can understand why some want to use pslight but all you do is hurt your port because lets face it, it aint gonna be nowhere near as good as it could be with the sony sdk. I mean does it look like sony is coming after ppl for using it to create homebrew?? No they are not and most likely will not. If they were then they would have done so allready.

Yeah, but you've got people in certain scenes with chips on their shoulder about wanting to be 'legit' and all that jazz, so they're going to use the 'open source'/legitimate alternative even if it means an inferior port in the end.

Oh well - can't do anything about it - it's their call. I'd just offer them some advice though - performance already isn't great as it is with PS3 - if they aren't going to use the SPUs - better use the right tools for the right job because they're going to need all the breathing room on the PPU that they can get - unless they're aiming for slightly-above-Wii performance - in which case, Wii64 still doesn't hold a candle next to Surreal64 on the Xbox 1 - and yes, I have access to a Wii (set up a dev environment too), same with Xbox 1 (set up a dev environment for that too), and I can compare Wii 64 to Surreal 64 head-to-head - the latter can run GoldenEye at +30fps instead of 16fps. I know it's an x86 box with very easy ports vs. very heavy work having been put into a PPC port of what's basically a slightly less developed emu (Mupen64) - but it'd be nice if the PS3 port offered some real performance improvements over the Wii version instead of just being equal.

This is what separated the Xbox scene from the others - pure stone-cold pragmatism above all else - and better ports and better software as a result. No fussing about with OpenXDK because it never amounted to shit in the end - wishful thinking along the lines of 'oh it might amount to something in the end' isn't going to cut it in the end I'm afraid.

[cacrosh]

squarepusher, before I write anything I need to admit that I know nothing about coding, I'm simply a consumer so pardon my "ignorance".

I got a question though. Since it seems that you know what you are talking about and taking in consideration your previous projects (ps3 emus), what would you need to be able to port other emus over to ps3, such at n64? I mean, you would be the perfect candidate to make a really good port, providing you have the tools.

[squarepusher2]

squarepusher, before I write anything I need to admit that I know nothing about coding, I'm simply a consumer so pardon my "ignorance".

I got a question though. Since it seems that you know what you are talking about and taking in consideration your previous projects (ps3 emus), what would you need to be able to port other emus over to ps3, such at n64? I mean, you would be the perfect candidate to make a really good port, providing you have the tools.

BTW, I feel a bit bad about being so snarky before - I too want to see Wii64 on PS3, so I don't want anybody from that team reading my comments and thinking 'what an ass'. I for one welcome their port - it would just be great if we are able to use the pre-existing shader collection we have built up on it.

As for what it takes to get involved - nothing, really. I started doing this with practically very lightweight programming experience - you can learn an awful lot in a year.

Just don't stare yourself blind on programming tutorials and the like but just start messing around with pre-existing codebases and try to improve on it.

[lenskip]

this is great news, cant wait to play n64 on my ps3, i hope donkey kong 64 works

[gamba]

BTW, I feel a bit bad about being so snarky before - I too want to see Wii64 on PS3, so I don't want anybody from that team reading my comments and thinking 'what an ass'. I for one welcome their port - it would just be great if we are able to use the pre-existing shader collection we have built up on it.

As for what it takes to get involved - nothing, really. I started doing this with practically very lightweight programming experience - you can learn an awful lot in a year.

Just don't stare yourself blind on programming tutorials and the like but just start messing around with pre-existing codebases and try to improve on it.

square, I just posted on his forum and kinda copy pasted your advice and thought about this issue about the PSL1GHT/leaked SONY SDK and few things you said in your posts above and here what he said back :

We have hardware accelerated graphics already using PSL1GHT and although the shaders are static (no compiler support), it is fine, just more work for us.

We don't use the SPUs either, but we shouldn't, after all, we're emulating a 93mhz cpu on a 3ghz or so cpu

gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums - View topic - PS3 - forgotten?

This is really getting interesting. Wonder what he means by ''the shaders are static''?

[squarepusher2]

square, I just posted on his forum and kinda copy pasted your advice and thought about this issue about the PSL1GHT/leaked SONY SDK and few things you said in your posts above and here what he said back :



gc-forever - Gamecube/Wii Forums - View topic - PS3 - forgotten?

This is really getting interesting.

Alright - good that he's so hopeful about getting it to run at fullspeed - but I'm telling you, that 3.2GHz clock rate of the Cell means absolutely nothing - we thought the 3.2GHz Cell PPE alone would run bSNES decently - and we were wrong. Dead wrong. It ran slower than molasses. We managed at best 50fps on Super Mario World - and that's with bSNES Performance Core. That is pathetically low when you compare it to an Atom that runs that game at well above 190fps.

This is the reason why you have seen no bSNES port. There would be no point to it.

The PPE is an absurdly pathetic PowerPC processor on its own - I'd say that it can barely perform better than the Wii CPU itself - certainly not a big difference in speed to shout about. Wii is out-of-order - PS3 is in-order. That alone is a huge difference in terms of how efficient it is on its own.

You can laugh about it now and find out later about it - Byuu thought too bSNES would run out of the box at 60fps - he even believed it would run everything with Compatibility Core at well above 60fps. We were lucky to get 50fps out of Super Mario World (ultralight low-frills SNES game) with Performance core. That is epifail territory right there. That was AFTER optimizations BTW.

You can check out an earlier version of bSNES running in Mednafen PS3 right now to see it's not just us doing a 'crappy port'. I think it runs at 30/25fps on a lucky day.

We didn't test this just on bSNES to confirm our findings - VBA, Genesis Plus GX PS3, FCEU, and so on - according to ekeeke (I've talked with him a bit about the performance I've managed to get with the PS3 port of Genesis Plus GX), Genesis Plus GX PS3 runs perhaps a little bit better than the Wii - that uses no SPUs also. Believe me, me and Themaister made sure with Cellframework2 that the input/video/audio drivers were optimal and that there were little to no branches that could cause pipeline stalls. Still, the results are not all that great - it still pushes well above 60fps - but we should still be getting far higher FPS than we're getting.

The PS3 PPU is certainly no powerhouse, I can guarantee you that.

What has saved our butts really is offloading the filters to the GPU through shaders - CPU filters would have absolutely killed performance - it wouldn't even been worth bothering with HQ2x - now with shaders we're able to apply two shaders - one to the front buffer, and another one to the backbuffer - effortlessly with almost no speed hit compared to CPU filters.

Anyway, let's just see how this goes. But really - even with the dynamic recompiler - I'm leaning towards this definitely not going to be a case of 'boom - instant port - 60 VI/s on everything'. I think they're going to run into the same stumbling blocks me and Themaister have been running into with pretty much anything we've ported so far.

Anyway, best of luck to the team.

And yeah, you can statically compile the shaders, but what that means is that it's not easy for users to just drop in Cg files into a shader, have the runtime compiler compile it on the fly and apply it in-game. We have an entire library of shaders worth already - it's going to be a pain to statically compile all that stuff in - and most probably will preclude them all from being included. And the buck will stop at the 'devs' - and not at the end-user as it is right now. The end-user will be dependent on devs to put new shaders in - the end-user is not able to include new shaders into just a folder as they come available - hence you will be pestered for the inclusion of new shaders as they come along.

Anyway, I understand they don't want to go with the PS3 SDK - they have their reasons for it, and I guess I'll respect it. It's just not the route I would take - since I know already that PS3 performance in general is certainly nothing to shout about, and you need a tried and proven SDK to really get everything at it. PSL1GHT is not that SDK right now - sorry to say.