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Author Topic: Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2  (Read 263 times)

nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #30 on: July 11, 2006, 05:37:00 PM »

QUOTE(XaRaNn @ Jul 12 2006, 12:07 AM) View Post

You can just change the default .wma and put whatever song you wish, or none at all. same with the "no preview" picture.
Myself i still use the old one from older zsnexbox builds (the cool 3d rendering of a ntsc SNES console) and for music i used the zelda on guitar that was posted in an older thread for awhile, then i switched to my current one, wich is an orchestration of the main super metroid theme.
You can find it around, but if anybody wants it converted to WMA i'll be happy to oblige.

I could definately see a ff6 tune as default tho. Diontae's suggestion of the opera one is good.

To anyone that missed it in the 2.0 thread, here's the link to the XBMC emu launcher script. Go show blittan some support.
http://forums.xbox-s...howtopic=519798

About all those requests for faster browsing, i have no idea how nes6502 has the rom browser implemented (i think he said he modified the source from another port?) but it sounds like something wich would require major rewriting.


Yes. I used the genadrive as the base and modified the rom browser in that to make it as good as it is now (there was no directory browsing, folder support, it did not stop scrollin when it hit the bottom of the list)

However, to add faster scrolling on any level (analog trigger or not) or to do correct paging I'd have to pretty much rewrite my own from scratch. I have basicly tried to hack his to make it do what I wanted. And beleive me, I have tried MANY times to implement scrolling where the highlighted name was in the middle, pagin, and faster scrolling. All to very little success. I allways seem to break some other part of it when I try to make changes and it's allready one HUGE hack.

I want many of these features myself, but unfortunatly I will likely need to write my own from scratch so I have better control of what's going on. This is also why I am not working on a text file viewer, an image viewer, or a favorites menu because they require scrolling items (like the current rom browser).

I do not want to use the current rom browsing code for these new features, so eventually, I will write my own, and many of thes features will start apearing in releases.

Scrolling is not that bad unless you put 4000 roms in one folder. And I don't know why people do that anyway. Why not separate by country (a USA folder, a Japanese folder, etc...). I can scroll from the top of the USA set to the bottom in almost no time. So, the new rom browser is not at the top of my list, so things related to it will be delayed.

I'm trying to work on some features I personally am interested in as well as listen to requests. However, if all I did was requests, I would get sick of this project (for example, it wasn't much fun writing the cheat search functionality but i did it because so many people requested it). The cheat related source code is well over 5000 lines. That means I wrote over 5000 lines of brand new code to add cheat code and searching support. Neither of which I cared about. Now you know why I said it wasn't much fun.

I'm trying not to get burned out on this project. I welcome requests, but I would appreciate it if everyone would stop asking for the same things over and over in every thread. If you are going to make a request, please do some research to see if it's already been asked before. If I am not going to do a feature, I will allways come right out and say it (like SMB, MP3, etc...). If I didn't respond, that means I'm thinking about it, or have decided to do it. But I will never say what release any feature will show up in.
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Vayate

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #31 on: July 11, 2006, 06:14:00 PM »

Nes6502 updates sooo fast... I can hardly keep up. sad.gif Not that I'm complaining. Keep up the good work. Code search gave Zsnesbox a permanent seat on my Xbox last version.
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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #32 on: July 11, 2006, 07:03:00 PM »

-Sound improvements for square games
-Sound improvement for MK1
-Sound improvement for Final Fight and Final Fight Guy
-Kirby Avalanch support
-Top Gear 3000 support
-Star Fox 2 support
-Minor Graphic glitch fixes for Final Fight 3, FF3, Super Mario RPG, Yoshi's story, Lemmings, Super metroid, and Chrono Trigger
-Actraiser 2 (US) support.
-Apparently there is a problem in Micky Mania but i havn't seen it myself.

Most of the above issues are minor and do not affect the whole game (usually just a small glitch somewhere like in the Chrono Trigger save game screen)

Those are all the issues I am aware of that could be fixed by adding multi-core support. The current core plays everything I've tried (other than those) pretty much perfect.
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dohopoki

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #33 on: July 11, 2006, 08:09:00 PM »

Behold the 11 white squares of doom:
http://img136.images...niau00007vg.png

I would like to add that multi-core support will no doubt fix a handful or so of problems no one knows about yet.
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EuroHEV

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #34 on: July 11, 2006, 09:50:00 PM »

I have to say I'm really pleased with your work. I've permently made the switch now to ZSNESXbox. I also want to thank you for adding multi-slots for save states in the last build, as it was a feature that I really wanted.

Speaking of features, it would be nice if you added one where you hold a button in the rom browser and press either up or down on the D-pad to navigate to the first game of the next/previous first letter. I don't know if I explained it well, but this feature is availble in the emu MamedoX and it would make the navigation between games much faster.
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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #35 on: July 15, 2006, 05:04:00 PM »

It may allready cause problems. I'd have to check with an older release to be sure. The next release will likely not work well with those 700+ KB images in that pack.

The size of the screenshots may affect the performance of the emulation (but I doubt it). The most likely scenario is the preview won't load, or it does load, but then the Xbox crashes when the game is started.

ZSNES is constantly releasing/allocating memory depending on the type of game. Super FX 2 games take up the most. You could try starting the current version, scroll down to Yoshi's Story and see if the high res box art shows up. Then start the game and see if it still shows up.

I'm doing all that i can to free as much memory as possible, but huge screenshots can overtake my gains. In the current code I'm working on, many of the screenshots in that pack don't work all the time. There is no need to have a screenshot any bigger then 512x512. Some of those in that pack are around 800x500 which is overkill. The images would look great at a much smaller resolution and when Direct3D loads a texture this big, it can allocate as much as 5MB of RAM just for it. Then if you start a game like Yoshi's Story, the result can be a total Xbox crash.

Long story short, that pack needs to be shrunk down where the file sizes are 500K or less (even better would be 200K or less) and the resolutions should not be any bigger then 512 across or 512 down. These aren't hard rules, but the way they are now is pushing the limits of what a 64MB Xbox can deal with and run ZSNES.
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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #36 on: July 15, 2006, 05:38:00 PM »

I've just confirmed through testing that having lots of large images in memory can and will affect the performance of the emulation. I couldn't figure out why Tales of Phantasia was dropping to the 40 FPS in one part, but after optimizing the images for the GUI it went back to 60.
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XaRaNn

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #37 on: July 15, 2006, 08:55:00 PM »

I guess the only reason i didn't get any problems yet is 99% of the time i launch the games from my "favorites" folder. Now that i hear you confirm this tho i'm probly gonna remove my previews for the rest of the games for the time being.

I don't wanna get over myself here, but wouldn't there be a way to have direct3d free the memory after each screenshot is stopped being displayed ?
Or have some kind of catchall wich runs everytime you start actual emulation. and frees all the memory from the pictures from the gui and screenshots
At least for screenshots, this would be the best, no need to keep those textures into memory while you are not selecting that game and watching the preview, and it would prevent users to have to worry about affecting game performance.

I wrote this, but rereading it i realise you most probably thought about this already. In any case thought i should mention it, and didn't mean anything else by it. i know i can sound obnoxious/annoying.



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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #38 on: July 15, 2006, 09:12:00 PM »

QUOTE(XaRaNn @ Jul 16 2006, 04:02 AM) View Post

I guess the only reason i didn't get any problems yet is 99% of the time i launch the games from my "favorites" folder. Now that i hear you confirm this tho i'm probly gonna remove my previews for the rest of the games for the time being.

I don't wanna get over myself here, but wouldn't there be a way to have direct3d free the memory after each screenshot is stopped being displayed ?
Or have some kind of catchall wich runs everytime you start actual emulation. and frees all the memory from the pictures from the gui and screenshots
At least for screenshots, this would be the best, no need to keep those textures into memory while you are not selecting that game and watching the preview, and it would prevent users to have to worry about affecting game performance.

I wrote this, but rereading it i realise you most probably thought about this already. In any case thought i should mention it, and didn't mean anything else by it. i know i can sound obnoxious/annoying.


That's a good idea, but it wouldn't help for the crashes. It might help if the performance is actually because of allocated memory for the GUI and preview. But I'm still not 100% sure what the problem was. I just seemed to have fixed it after reducing the GUI images.

When a game is started and then the user exits to the rombrowser, the emulation is still running. I just trap the emulation in my loop. It looks like the game has exited and there is no way to resume it, but in reality the last game played is just paused in the background.

I could add a menu item called "resume game" that would let the user resume playing the last game, but i don't know if anybody would want that. So, the point of all this is that if I freed the memory before launching the game, it would just crash when the user exited because I would have to reload the last preview that was freed. So, it's crash before or after.

As far as the performance goes, I havn't narrowed it down but it does seem as though the  performance is affected by the size of preview images and or the size of the GUI files. I can't really explain it and I might be wrong. I've made plenty of optimizations so now all those screenshots in the HQ pack work now, but I need to test the performance issue some more to pinpoint the bottleneck.

As far as removing previews, you could run some tests. Good test cases would be:

Yoshi's Island spinning title screen
Super mario RPG intro demo(certain parts slow down)
Tales of Phantasia intro demo where the song is played (flying section and last 30 seconds or so seem to slow down)

You could try starting these games with or without HQ previews and watch the FPS during each to observe if one or the other scenario causes a FPS drop. All of these are done with Advancemame2x because if you turn off the software filter, ZSNES runs at 60 FPS so its' hard to see a performance drop. A software filter will put extra stress on the emulation and make it easy to see what games are the most taxing.
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guybird

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #39 on: July 16, 2006, 01:21:00 AM »

Although I have taken the last few weeks off (of XMugen/Art packs), I do plan to try to finish what I can of the SNES pack this week.  I have gathered a lot more artwork than what's in the released pack, and off the top of my head I can't even recall if I released the Euro & Japanese shots in it  blink.gif   Anyhow with my experimenting I was able to stretch my previews up to full screen in 1080i, and had absolutely no distortion or quality loss, even with some of the smaller resolution scans.  So I think that I could half my current resolution to your suggested 512 or so very easily.  Dunno if there's any way to force pictures to be no more than 500kb apiece as the only controls I have and use are the resolution and png compression (which I set to max).  As you are the one who can optimize and configure how the previews display, give me a good resolution to go with and I'll make it a standard with any future releases.  Also I'm eagerly awaiting blittan's XBMC script with which I think we'll have a very excellent frontend for all of our emu's; its great to see to implemented support for it (command line options).
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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #40 on: July 16, 2006, 01:45:00 PM »

QUOTE(XaRaNn @ Jul 16 2006, 08:26 PM) View Post

Depending on how much work this is, it might not be worth it, but in my humble opinion, as long as it doesn't effect saving SRAM, i would rather have it crash when exiting, while being absolutely sure performance in-emulation isn't affected.
Alright i tryed Super Mario RPG (SA-1 does make it a pretty taxing game) along with advancemame2X. i took a series of .pngs going around 50k-250k-400k-800k-6000k(wanted to make it crash)
Indeed the 6mb one made it crash, but every other started the game fine.
It does seem that with the 800k one the fps was jumping down to lower numbers than the 50k one in the intro, it wasn't all that terribly obvious grahpically to be honest, but i did see it spike down to 39 fps.
between 50k and 250k previews it may have been slower but i couldn't really tell.


Well the FPS in Super mario RPG with AdvanceMame2x should not drop below 57-59 (and that only happens a couple times for 1 or 2 seconds and only if Advance MAME 2x is turned on) in the demo. If it went to 39 then that's not normal.
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kRaYzRaY

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #41 on: July 16, 2006, 02:52:00 PM »

QUOTE(nes6502 @ Jul 15 2006, 09:00 PM) View Post

Did you delete the previous ZsnexBox.ini?
Have you tried changing the partition where the files are saved (in path.ini)?
Are you roms in a format the emulator can open (not rar or 7z or jma)
Are you using high resolution screenshots or a different GUI? You may be running out of memory. Turn on Show available memory before launching a game. If it is not 17MB or greater then thats the problem.
Is There free space on the partition (E by default) you are saving files to?



Switching my save partition did the trick. Not sure why though. I have 3.7 GB of free space on the default E partition. Maybe a bug to look into? Thanks for supporting your project and keep up the good work. wink.gif
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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #42 on: July 16, 2006, 02:57:00 PM »

QUOTE(kRaYzRaY @ Jul 16 2006, 09:59 PM) View Post

Switching my save partition did the trick. Not sure why though. I have 3.7 GB of free space on the default E partition. Maybe a bug to look into? Thanks for supporting your project and keep up the good work. wink.gif


There's nothing I can really look into. I treat all partitions the same. It sounds like your E partition is corrupted. How big is the entire hard drive? Are there any partitions greater then 250GB? If so, that would be the problem.
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nes6502

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #43 on: July 16, 2006, 04:48:00 PM »

I was thinking that 250GB is the max size for a partition before the file system gets corrupted. I may be wrong. It could be smaller which might explain your problem.

As far as running off the DVD the roms must be burned from an xISO or they will not show up when you select the R drive.
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XaRaNn

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Zsnexbox 2.1 / 2.2
« Reply #44 on: July 16, 2006, 05:03:00 PM »

QUOTE(nes6502 @ Jul 16 2006, 06:55 PM) View Post

I was thinking that 250GB is the max size for a partition before the file system gets corrupted. I may be wrong. It could be smaller which might explain your problem.

As far as running off the DVD the roms must be burned from an xISO or they will not show up when you select the R drive.


That's right.

There only one way to circumvent this if you want all of your 250gb+ on F:, and it is to repartition to 64k clusters with XBpartitionner.
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