Having trouble with Equinox

[Chozo Abigaba]

I love recording gameplay with ZSnes and have made many fine .avis with it. Now I want to record a playthrough of one of my favorite games, Equinox, but ZSnes has some problems with this game.

The overworld uses mode 7. The background layer is not displaying properly. The the perspective is 'flat', for want of a better term - it should appear skewed, as if viewed obliquely, but it does not. Therefore, the sprites layered above the background do not move properly in relation to it. Also, the color palette is garbled.

Once I leave the overworld and enter a dungeon, everything works just fine UNTIL I pick up an apple. This causes the game to freeze (although the BGM continues to play). The game does not freeze when I pick up other items (tokens, potions, keys, weapons, etc), only apples.

My rom runs perfectly in SNES9X (which does not have the nifty recording features that I love!).

The CRC32 for this rom is 96A4D1C0.

I would love to be able to record this game, is there anything I can do? I do not understand why it is giving me these problems.

Thanks,
Chozo Abigaba

[franpa]

Use BSNES + Fraps + Vdub >.>

[paulguy]

There is a rerecording version of snes9x, isn't there? Using something like fraps is a bad idea because you get frame dropping. If the emulator is feeding the encoder directly, you'll get all frames.

[byuu]

Use BSNES + Fraps + Vdub >.>

Fraps is terrible. I'd say to use one of the Snes9X versions that outputs to AVI.

[Chozo Abigaba]

Ah, I didn't know Snes9x implemented .avi recording. I'll try that, thank you.

EDIT: Got the latest version of snes9x, which has the recording feature. Unfortunately, whenever I try to use it, the emulator crashes. GARRRGGH.

EDIT: I was not the only one having this problem. Thankfully the snes9x team has fixed it. At last, I'm recording Equinox and all is well.

[lordmissus]

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?
It's also the best SNES emu publicly available at the moment, what with all the other features it has.

Accuracy is not the only thing that bsnes innovates on.

[odditude]

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?

You do know that it was the bsnes developer who suggested using snes9x, right?

[nintendo_nerd]

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?
It's also the best SNES emu publicly available at the moment, what with all the other features it has.

Accuracy is not the only thing that bsnes innovates on.

Bsnes is accurate, yes, but it requires a powerful dual core CPU (E8400) for full speed and even then, it runs at choppy speeds. Snes9x 1.52 uses the same sound core as Bsnes, but unlike Bsnes, it doesn't slow down at all. I use Snes9x's .avi recording all the time and never have a problem with it. What codec(s) are you trying to record with?

[odditude]

EDIT: I was not the only one having this problem. Thankfully the snes9x team has fixed it. At last, I'm recording Equinox and all is well.

[paulguy]

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?
It's also the best SNES emu publicly available at the moment, what with all the other features it has.

Accuracy is not the only thing that bsnes innovates on.

Bsnes is accurate, yes, but it requires a powerful dual core CPU (E8400) for full speed and even then, it runs at choppy speeds. Snes9x 1.52 uses the same sound core as Bsnes, but unlike Bsnes, it doesn't slow down at all. I use Snes9x's .avi recording all the time and never have a problem with it. What codec(s) are you trying to record with?

you're greatly exaggerating. It ran comfortably on my e6750 and probably ran on lesser machines.

[byuu]

Bsnes is accurate, yes, but it requires a powerful dual core CPU (E8400) for full speed and even then, it runs at choppy speeds.

Christ. My E8400 gets about 230fps on average, 190fps on stock settings.

Here's a lowly E4600, that while high in clock speed, has almost no L2 cache:


If you're seeing significantly degraded performance, then there's a problem on your system. If it doesn't happen for you in Snes9X, great, please stick with it. It's still not my problem though. I've spent six years not only fortifying my drivers but working around ATI driver bugs and the like. I'd appreciate if people would quit grossly exaggerating.

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?

It only logs input presses, no AVI output.

AVI recording also crashes on my system with 1.52-fix4. But it sounds like that is fixed now.

[lordmissus]

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?
It's also the best SNES emu publicly available at the moment, what with all the other features it has.

Accuracy is not the only thing that bsnes innovates on.

Bsnes is accurate, yes, but it requires a powerful dual core CPU (E8400) for full speed and even then, it runs at choppy speeds. Snes9x 1.52 uses the same sound core as Bsnes, but unlike Bsnes, it doesn't slow down at all. I use Snes9x's .avi recording all the time and never have a problem with it. What codec(s) are you trying to record with?

http://board.byuu.org/posting.php?mode= ... =3&p=14387
We are having a discussion on byuu's board about what you said, since so many others say the same thing. bsnes will run at much mroe than full speed on most machines from the past 4 years. See my post in that thread:

F-Zero - 78 fps
Earthbound - 64 fps
Dual Orb 2 - 69 fps
Zombies Ate My Neighbors - 70 fps
Cyber Knight - 70 fps

OS: Windows XP MCE, x86
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 640 3.2GHz Prescott Core, 800MHz FSB, 2MB Cache, 90nm, 64-Bit EM64T, XD, Socket 775 LGA775, Hyper-Threading enabled
VPU: ATi Radeon X600 SE 256MB HyperMemory
RAM: 4x1GiB DDR2-533 (Crucial)

bsnes settings:
Video: Direct3D
Sound: DirectSound
Input: RawInput

This is with bsnes v0.059. With v0.064 I seem to get a few fps less, despite the fact that you mentioned it being faster than previous releases. Even still, I get fullspeed on bsnes.
With AMD64 (i.e. 64-bit) version of Xubuntu 9.10, I get slightly higher FPS, with bsnes v0.060 (haven't bothered downloading and compiling the new v0.064 release yet) on the following settings:

Video: OpenGL (glx)
Sound: OSS (running on native OSS4 drivers)
Input: SDL


I don't know where people get these performance figures from. I guess it's from reading your system requirements earlier; it mentioned a C2D E8400 as being recommended. They probably thought that was to get 60 fps, at that. Add to that the reputation bsnes had back then, since more people had less powerful machines... You really should have put more lenient sys regs on your site, byuu. The machine I'm on runs all games at full speed on bsnes, except for the few SuperFX and SA-1 games, which got about 30-40 fps last time I tried.

I've been using bsnes since v0.028 (anyone remember hiro?), and every version has always run games at full speed for me.

If anyone suggests such distorted figures from now on, just direct them to my post.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... processors
The CPU I have was released on February 20, 2005


It's a P4 chip, but I don't know why they didn't call it the Pentium 5, since it's an almost completely new architecture compared to older P4 chips. AMD64 and HyperThreading support, more cache, better FSB...
Older Willamette and Northwood P4's ran on socket 478, whereas this one runs on socket 775.

[grinvader]

older suckamettes also can't run bsnes fullspeed

[lordmissus]

I didn't say they could, either... just that they run on socket 478.

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?

You do know that it was the bsnes developer who suggested using snes9x, right?

Of course. He recommended Snes9x, I recommended bsnes. What's the problem?

[odditude]

It's a P4 chip, but I don't know why they didn't call it the Pentium 5, since it's an almost completely new architecture compared to older P4 chips. AMD64 and HyperThreading support, more cache, better FSB...
Older Willamette and Northwood P4's ran on socket 478, whereas this one runs on socket 775.

NO.

No, no, no, no, no.

HyperThreading was introduced in the highest-end Northwood-B chip, a 3.06GHz/533MHz/512k beast. It was also included in all of the 'C' chips, which bumped the FSB up to 800MHz.

Prescott was a minor evolutionary change over Northwood (C), a die-shrink with a few new instructions (SSE3), a larger cache, and a MUCH deeper pipeline. At the same clock speeds, Prescott had reduced performance, increased power usage, and dramatically increased heat output compared to Northwood. However, the deeper pipeline would eventually allow Prescott to scale up to 3.8GHz. The only Prescott-based chips that performed better than their Northwood variants were the Celerons - the Northwood Celerons had an anemic 128k cache, while the Celeron D's almost-sufficient 256k cache had a bigger impact on performance than the lengthening of the pipeline.

The only Prescott-derived chips that had an FSB higher than 800MHz were the final P4 Extreme Edition chips.

The initial Prescott chips were mPGA478 (socket-N), also - they made up the 'E' variant P4s. The transition to LGA775 happened later that year, providing the extra pins required for the nascent "EM64T" implementation. Again, the original LGA775 P4s were NOT 64-bit - it wasn't until the 600-series (Prescott-2M) that EM64T debuted. There *were* later 500-series chips with the older 1MB cache and EM64T, those were the 5x1/5x6 chips.

The new-architecture processor family intended to debut on LGA775/socket-T was the cancelled Tejas, which *could* have been appropriately named Pentium 5. However, after realizing how bad Prescott's thermals got, they canned it and started looking at the Banias/Dothan family (which led to the mobile-only Yonah and finally the Merom/Conroe C2D family).

hmm... apparently "canceled" is correct in American English, and "cancelled" is correct in British English. never knew that. i've used "cancelled" all my life.

[byuu]

Of course. He recommended Snes9x, I recommended bsnes. What's the problem?

Namely that every time someone does, it derails topics on the ZSNES board into these types of discussions. It'd probably annoy me if all of my forum topics got turned into ZSNES discussions. It would be really great if we could just say, at most, "it works fine here and here", and move on, like we do with Snes9X and SNESGT.

[odditude]

I didn't say they could, either... just that they run on socket 478.

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?

You do know that it was the bsnes developer who suggested using snes9x, right?

Of course. He recommended Snes9x, I recommended bsnes. What's the problem?

When a developer doesn't suggest his own emulator, there's probably a reason.

[grinvader]

i've used "cancelled" all my life.

AND YOU WERE RIGHT DOING SO

wankers

[Overload]

Why is it every time that someone reports a bug, the immediate answer is to use another emulator?

If you know your SNES emulation history then you would know that Equinox was the first game discovered that relies on emulating non-responsive (open) bus calls. This is something that ZSNES has never fully supported, that is why it freezes.

[kode54]

It's an appropriate reply in the case of ZSNES, since the bug may or may not already be fixed. "Thanks for the report, you can expect it to be fixed in the next release, which will be some time in the not too distant future, maybe, if we're lucky. Or, you can, you know, use a different emulator that doesn't have that problem right this very instant."

[byuu]

If you know your SNES emulation history then you would know that Equinox was the first game discovered that relies on emulating non-responsive (open) bus calls. This is something that ZSNES has never fully supported, that is why it freezes.

Yes, ZSNES returns "address read >> 8" for open bus, instead of "last value read", which isn't enough for Equinox or Mega Man X v1.0. So you'd want something like this:

Code: Select all

; eax = result, ecx = address
your_new_memory_read_function:
  call is_open_bus ;bool = (ecx)
  jz .end
  call your_current_memory_read_function ;eax = read(ecx)
  mov [mdr],eax
  ret
  .end:
  mov eax,[mdr]
  ret

Is there an architectural reason why this can't be fixed?

[lordmissus]

Well odditude, thank you for the interesting information about the P4 architecture. I've also learned two new words: nascent and anemic.

Of course. He recommended Snes9x, I recommended bsnes. What's the problem?

Namely that every time someone does, it derails topics on the ZSNES board into these types of discussions. It'd probably annoy me if all of my forum topics got turned into ZSNES discussions. It would be really great if we could just say, at most, "it works fine here and here", and move on, like we do with Snes9X and SNESGT.

Why does it have to be that way? I was just recommending your emulator... I realize you couldn't do it yourself, because you'd come off as egotistic.

I didn't say they could, either... just that they run on socket 478.

You do know that the latest version of bsnes has movie recording, right?

You do know that it was the bsnes developer who suggested using snes9x, right?

Of course. He recommended Snes9x, I recommended bsnes. What's the problem?

When a developer doesn't suggest his own emulator, there's probably a reason.

They don't want to look egotistic?

Why is it every time that someone reports a bug, the immediate answer is to use another emulator?

If you know your SNES emulation history then you would know that Equinox was the first game discovered that relies on emulating non-responsive (open) bus calls. This is something that ZSNES has never fully supported, that is why it freezes.

Well I could advise them to go in to the zsnes src and fix the bug themselves, but most users can't do that (nor can I, I know nothing about how the SNES works), so until they can get a new version with it fixed it's use another emu. In other words, what kode54 said.

It's appropriate to recommend bsnes if a game doesn't work elsewhere, because bsnes is 100% compatible with all SNES games on planet earth, not counting Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shougi 1, Hayazashi Nidan Morita Shougi 2 and SD Gundam GX, according to byuu's page. If your machine isn't good enough, then try Snes9x, SNESGT and others until you find one where the game is playable. Or play on a real SNES, if you can.

[grinvader]

everyone should be using my snes emu

[lordmissus]

Also, by recommending bsnes I'm not saying zsnes is a bad emu. It's amazing how you guys get 95% of games working at such incredible speed on such low-spec machines, all with the amount of features that zsnes 1.51 and 1.42 have; especially in the old days when zsnes' entire codebase was literally in x86 ASM! It's interface is awesome; in fullscreen, it feels like a DOS program (in fact, zsnes was originally DOS only). It's nostalgic.

There's this category of snobs who use the "accurate" emulators and have this thing where they give users of other programs the stick in the ear. I am not one of such people. Fanboyism just isn't my thing, really. bsnes is virtually perfect in every way, but zsnes will always have a place on my HDD. I actually use it sometimes. I've been playing through Earthbound again on it recently.

I'll be incredibly looking forward to zsnes v2.0, too.

[byuu]

everyone should be using my snes emu

How's that going, anyway?