SH3 Blitter Delay Discussion Thread

[tzakiel]

FWIW I got the pcb of mushihimesama futari, and I can confirm I suck just as bad at the pcb as I do on MAME with blitter on. If you’re concerned about 100% accuracy, yes you’ll need the pcb. If you want to enjoy the games with roughly the same level of difficulty, MAME actually is fine. I don’t find an appreciable difference in the experience.

[Bananamatic]

FWIW I got the pcb of mushihimesama futari, and I can confirm I suck just as bad at the pcb as I do on MAME with blitter on. If you’re concerned about 100% accuracy, yes you’ll need the pcb. If you want to enjoy the games with roughly the same level of difficulty, MAME actually is fine. I don’t find an appreciable difference in the experience.

this is the most shmupsfarm post I've ever seen

[Xyga]

kill yourself

[Bananamatic]

high rank is more fun

[blip82]

I am pretty happy with the mame emulation. I just can't afford all the games I want to get the PCBs for.
If anything they run too well which makes it to hard [GRINNING FACE WITH SMILING EYES]

A bit of delay does help. Spending hours trying to get every game perfect doesnt seem like the best use of time when I could be playing instead.

If someone does eventually get the correct settings I would be happy to use them, and make a donation [SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES]

Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

[donluca]

Just get an Xbox360 which is way better than MAME for CV1k games and way more fuss-free.

I also agree with banana as there are loads of fantastic shmups out there. If one really wants cv1k games then go the xbox route. For the others MAME is very good to perfect.

[Xyga]

The thing that's for sure is that it wasn't about asking people their opinion if it's worth their time, if the ports are better or prettier which we're discussed a hundred times already, nor giving away this thread to Banana's usual trollshitposting that ruins this community, thank you for supporting that asshole's plan.

This is the cv1k blitter delay discussion, and I was bringing-in on-topic posts with new elements.

This community needs two things: new mods in, and banana out.

[trap15]

I think Bananamatic is a pretty cool guy. Eh posts his true feelings and doesn't afraid of anything.

Also he's right, stop wasting your time fiddling with MAME which'll never be right, and play some games that are actually good.

[Xyga]

Sure, why assholes would be embarassed being themselves? also not surprised a professional jerk would find a troll ass cunt 'cool'.

I've heard you enough about MAME not being right as it is, which isn't what I'm after anyway but since you're another one not interested it's logical that you'd join the line of annoying useless posters. Right?

Now I know some people who don't give a fuck about your opinion or banana's shit will be interested in the topic for what it's worth (and anyone who would have cared to read would know it doesn't aim higher than that), so this thread isn't dead, it'll go on, and both of you should make out for all I care.

[donluca]

Also he's right, stop wasting your time fiddling with MAME which'll never be right, and play some games that are actually good.

MAME has potential to be perfect, and it proved this several times, over and over again.

The issue is that, just like any other open source software, developers need to pour time into it and solve specific issues.

If I was a developer I wouldn't waste time on 4 CAVE games from a niche genre, and I'd rather go and study why the fuck, 10+ years after CPS1/2 drivers were implemented, none has still figured out how to fix the wait states so that the games would run at the correct speed.
We're talking about games that have made arcade history and they embrace several different genres, (even shmups, hello Pro Gear).

It's alright fiddling, nothing bad with that, but that's not going to solve anything, if not on the short run.

Want to play the games properly?
Get a X360.

Want to improve emulation?
Start learning C (for once) and then delve deep into older architecture such as the Hitachi SH series processors and see what the heck is happening and why slowdown isn't properly emulated.

[Xyga]

It's alright fiddling

Which is exactly what this thread is about and nothing more. Glad to see there's one person following.

There's a more elaborate way of attending to the current lackings of cv1k games which brings results superior to fiddling with only blitter delay. Which is what I came to talk about.
No one pretends it's bringing accurate results, but it does make some games playable where they weren't before, add to it shaving off a good chunk of lag with GroovyMAME and it allows whoever would care to try to experience playing those games in MAME in a bit more realistic and practicable fashion.

Why people who have no interest or miss the point entirely, bother with spamming the thread with useless negativity though, has more to do with their shit mentalities rather than the actual topic.

You're right about the alternatives, yes, though they're obvious and have been proposed over and over in several threads included by myself when it comes to the 360.

But let's leave the blitter+cpu fiddling discussion the room it's supposed to have in this thread, since it's the topic, because if we always let snap in the middle every talk on the subject it'll never get anywhere.

[z0mbie90]

.

Want to play the games properly?
Get a X360.

Want to improve emulation?
Start learning C (for once) and then delve deep into older architecture such as the Hitachi SH series processors and see what the heck is happening and why slowdown isn't properly emulated.

Or just keep on arguing and behave like angry school kids, cause that's probably what they gonna keep on doing.

[donluca]

Just out of curiosity, do you actually own the original PCBs or are you comparing them against the X360 ports or Youtube videos?

[Xyga]

The only cave pcb I have left is Ibara, which is the next one I'm going to look into since it's much more convenient than watching replays.

The latter are useful as reference, but mainly when it's games that don't have megatons of those slowdowns, in which case it's pretty hard to just observe.
People who have pcbs and know the games well would be better judges, but of course why would they bother with looking into fiddling with MAME lol ? ^^

I have the 360 ports, though their fidelity to the arcade originals varies. But since we're only looking at approximations here they can be useful too.

[donluca]

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I merely compared very briefly to some youtube videos and thought the X360 ports were alright.

Very un-scientific method, I know.

But I guess that's better than nothing. If we could manage to get MAME to get close to Futari's X360 port I would call that a win.

[Bananamatic]

If we could manage to get MAME to get close to Futari's X360 port I would call that a win.

physically impossible
you realize that at the lowest delay setting, the x360 port was tested to have around 20 ms delay not counting your display which is barely over a frame
the arcade game has 2 frames of lag by default, not counting emulation delay or windows or whatever on top of it which brings it up to 5 frames or so

[Xyga]

You still don't get how GroovyMAME works don't you?

Anyway this topic isn't about lag.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I merely compared very briefly to some youtube videos and thought the X360 ports were alright.

Very un-scientific method, I know.

But I guess that's better than nothing. If we could manage to get MAME to get close to Futari's X360 port I would call that a win.

It's really tedious, as described earlier the only game for which I have spent some time watching, playing and taking notes is Pink Sweets, and the results were surprisingly not bad at all (reminder: cpu 40%, blitter 63%, though this is still largely random, there are certainly finer values to be found)

Regarding Futari it was commonly said that blitter @63% was the best setting, bringing back slowdowns rather close to the original, although I haven't personally looked much into it. Deathsmiles was said to be the same.
I don't know if that's still valid nor if that was working as well as people were saying, since obviously you have to check an entire run to make sure.
That the games have different modes and styles of play sure doesn't make it any easier, it's better to focus on the more played/popular versions and modes (those thankfully have the most video material available)

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

It's alright fiddling

Which is exactly what this thread is about and nothing more. Glad to see there's one person following.

There's a more elaborate way of attending to the current lackings of cv1k games which brings results superior to fiddling with only blitter delay. Which is what I came to talk about.
No one pretends it's bringing accurate results, but it does make some games playable where they weren't before, add to it shaving off a good chunk of lag with GroovyMAME and it allows whoever would care to try to experience playing those games in MAME in a bit more realistic and practicable fashion.

Why people who have no interest or miss the point entirely, bother with spamming the thread with useless negativity though, has more to do with their shit mentalities rather than the actual topic.

You're right about the alternatives, yes, though they're obvious and have been proposed over and over in several threads included by myself when it comes to the 360.

But let's leave the blitter+cpu fiddling discussion the room it's supposed to have in this thread, since it's the topic, because if we always let snap in the middle every talk on the subject it'll never get anywhere.

What is needed for now before mame and demul get to accurate is for one of the devs who knows about it well enough (and has the interest) to make a custom mame/program with hacks made in the driver to mimic the pcb videos as well as possible using all of their "tools". Then there would be no fiddling with settings every time you load roms and the accuracy could probably be better than the X360 ports, albeit with "hacks" that can't be allowed in official programs because devs hate having them in their source.

Pretty simple.

[Shepardus]

All this fiddling around with blitter values and CPU clocking sounds like it's just throwing epicycles at the problem.

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Even mamedevs have said they emulate at a higher level than certain emulators of single hardware systems so good luck with the good science argument.

[Xyga]

Agreed a custom build would be the best temporary solution until the day mame devs manage to improve the timings emulation.

At the moment using GM all the setting but the CPU one save automatically, I have been looking around for a way of saving it per-game but mame devs have made it impossible by default to avoid bad game issues reports.

And of course spend (waste lol) a lot of time checking out the games and tweaking the values until the best possible are found.
(definitely can't do that for all games by myself of course, plus that's way too many of them, too much time. i've tried with DFK 1.5 but I'm not nearly good enough at the game to trigger all the important slowing down events you'd expect to see during a decent run. and the pcb videos around are not very high quality, a bit too blurry or skipping frames)


PS: wtf science now. for the Nth time this isn't about seeking perfect accuracy but getting closer with what we have, so that if not perfectly emulated the games in MAME would be at least playable and offering a decent experience.
God, can't believe all the fuckers will line up to annoy and look down on this to the bitter end, don't care, in the end there are those who will appreciate, it's for them that it's worth bothering anyway.

[donluca]

physically impossible
you realize that at the lowest delay setting, the x360 port was tested to have around 20 ms delay not counting your display which is barely over a frame
the arcade game has 2 frames of lag by default, not counting emulation delay or windows or whatever on top of it which brings it up to 5 frames or so

It has been proven that MAME is able to go down to next frame response (ie: 0ms lag) from an emulation standpoint.
Hacking USB ports to poll inputs at a frequency of 1/1000 it would bring us an additional lag of 1ms, the rest is on your monitor.

If you're playing on a CRT you're good to go, if you're on a LCD, you're probably going to add a couple of frames, unless you have a 120Hz monitor and use black frame insertion which should get the lag halved.

Just to make sure, I'm not making these up myself, it has been tested and documented (I think even here).

Now, if you're telling me that 99% of MAME users will have 5 frames of lag because they do not know what they're doing, then I really can't argue about that, but it *is* possible to get the lag down to PCB levels.

@Xyga: I'm afraid that those people told us those values based on their feel of the game and not a precise comparison, that's why I inquired about how you're getting those results.
If I were you, I'd use the X360 ports and try to get as close as possible to them, since you can put them side by side and precisely tweak values to get good results.
Remember that youtube videos have all kind of compression and speed differences due to frequency switch to standard 60Hz and god-only-knows what else the capture card is doing.

[Xyga]

Yes. Though plenty of simple 60hz lcd displays these days start drawing the frame near-instantly without adding any unwanted lag before it.
So with GM if a game/driver emulated in MAME runs at two frames by default, with proper settings and a powerful-enoug PC you get 2 frames and just a little ms more.

You still have tons of people though, who won't bother getting a decently fast monitor and computer, nor care to learn the little you need to know to run GM and benefit from its features...yet will forever blame it on MAME/Groovy, their grandmother, hitler, whatever.

PS: I still put videos of the pcbs on top, since MAME is emulating those anyway, the 360 ports have sometimes differences specific to them.
replay videos are not all on youtube, you can grab the uncompressed files and play them on your pc. still some of the videos on yt are visibly fine, with the games you know decently enough you can tell by watching. the number of good ones is more restrained though so cherry picking is required.

[Bananamatic]

then I really can't argue about that, but it *is* possible to get the lag down to PCB levels.

except the 360 port is below pcb levels, you can straight up cut away 2 frames from it, you'd have to hack the game itself to get anywhere near 360 performance
and an lcd monitor adds maybe 10ms if you have one that isn't total crap

You still have tons of people though, who won't bother getting a decently fast monitor and computer, nor care to learn the little you need to know to run GM and benefit from its features...yet will forever blame it on MAME/Groovy, their grandmother, hitler, whatever.

except anyone I know plays with vsync off and the groovymame dev himself confirmed that there is no benefit to groovymame if you play with vsync off (hell, shmupmame has less lag than groovy with vsync off according to tests)

[Xyga]

we've been through the lag discussion before and it was absolutely pointless arguing with you so there won't be a second time

back on topic

[donluca]

except the 360 port is below pcb levels, you can straight up cut away 2 frames from it, you'd have to hack the game itself to get anywhere near 360 performance

You're right, my bad, I totally forgot about that! In that case you'd have to hack the game ROM (or make driver hacks like shmupmame does) to get lag down to the X360.
But as MAME strives to get accuracy towards the original PCB, we'll never get the X360 level of low lag.
Now I see you're reasoning and you're right about that: MAME will never get its lag down to 0, they'll always have the 2 frames the PCB have.

except anyone I know plays with vsync off and the groovymame dev himself confirmed that there is no benefit to groovymame if you play with vsync off (hell, shmupmame has less lag than groovy with vsync off according to tests)

I just want to point out that shmupmame uses ugly hacks to get the lag down, whereas GM does it in a proper way *and* by keeping vsync on, which is quite a feat.

Anyway, back to the main topic!

[Xyga]

you're falling for his trap, don, completely

[poptart]

Yes. Though plenty of simple 60hz lcd displays these days start drawing the frame near-instantly without adding any unwanted lag before it.
So with GM if a game/driver emulated in MAME runs at two frames by default, with proper settings and a powerful-enoug PC you get 2 frames and just a little ms more.

You still have tons of people though, who won't bother getting a decently fast monitor and computer, nor care to learn the little you need to know to run GM and benefit from its features...yet will forever blame it on MAME/Groovy, their grandmother, hitler, whatever.

I've tried groovymame builds 3 times now and had nothing but glitchy unreliability and crashes. No one wants to deal with that and no one will go and buy a decent pc specifically for emulation when the mame is so unpredictable and unstable. Shmupmame is meant to be pretty ghetto by all accounts yet its still never given me a single problem, groovymame is almost on par with that super dodgy chinese mame hackjob from a couple years back for pgm2 games.

[donluca]

I've tried groovymame builds 3 times now and had nothing but glitchy unreliability and crashes. No one wants to deal with that and no one will go and buy a decent pc specifically for emulation when the mame is so unpredictable and unstable. Shmupmame is meant to be pretty ghetto by all accounts yet its still never given me a single problem, groovymame is almost on par with that super dodgy chinese mame hackjob from a couple years back for pgm2 games.

There are several guides out there and, trust me on this one, if you "had nothing but glitchy unreliability and crashes" you have been doing *multiple* things *VERY* wrong, which leads me to think that you've just downloaded it, tried it and called it a day, without doing a little bit of research.

Are you using a CRT or a LCD? My personal guess is that you're on a LCD and you haven't configured GM to use it with an LCD (since it's mainly aimed at CRT users)...

EDIT: 1 minute of Google search for "GroovyMAME LCD Guide" produced this result: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... c=146397.0 where a user is having issues (like you I guess) running GM on his LCD screen. You may want to invest 10 minutes reading through that thread, I have a feeling you're find the answers you're looking for.
Bear in mind that guy is using it with an Nvidia card, whereas an AMD Radeon card is recommended.

EDIT 2: further findings: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... 146.0.html
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.p ... c=134085.0

Total: 10 minutes of googling (and I've even read the threads because I was curious as to what could be wrong with using GM with LCDs)

[Xyga]

Yeah generally when people report crashes with GM it's because they havent set up the monitor type as 'lcd' in the mame.ini, indeed, or use savestates regularly, the latter being a legit issue of GM still unsolved.

As for the PC complaint this is a ridiculous, laughable excuse as usual, since who the hell playing video games these days, whether it's PC-library or emulation, would buy a weak-ass one with a slow/laggy monitor ?
MAME's always required decent single thread performance, and now also decent~ish gpu for extra applications like lag reduction and shaders, and laggy monitors have always been an issue no matter the gaming use, everyone's aware of that.
Thankfully these days computers and monitors sufficient for most of what MAME emulates including cv1k are largely affordable.
The extra power that using GM's frame_delay feature requires is normal and expected as no lightweight methods of lag reduction exist yet (only feesync/gsync but with specific hardware), even RA's run_ahead is quite demanding (there's frame_slice/beam_racing coming, but it's still experimental)
Anyway frame_delay is optional and anyone who would have done a minimum of effort reading would know just using the d3d9ex build provides 2 frames lag reduction (meaning 2 frames fatser than baseline MAME) by default without requiring additional processing power. frame_delay is used of shaving off more miliseconds off the third frame remaing in use for syncing the video on top of the emulated hardware's natual lag, but again it's optional.

Note: I've also personally dealt with people seeking assistance keeping silent that they were doing/setting a bunch of other stuff in the ini, or using a setup with specifics obviously in need of special attention, or using an outdated build, yet again without mentioning any of it and claiming that GM wasn't working/trash.

But we've had that conversation in a couple other threads not long ago and it was awful, I'm convinced we're just witnessing a phenomenon of irrational jealous-revengeful provocation from people who can't stand having been told they didn't know about a better way of achieving what they were seeking, or feeling they were told they were too dumb to use it even though they haven't made the slightest effort to succeed, or even threatened that for instance their performance/scores would be invalidated by the 'revelation' of GM for instance compared to ShmupMAME or sync-off baseline (which is of course wrong since the amount of lag reduction is about the same in any case yet without tearing for GM)
Even if you don't mean to, by bringing some new progress in an area that concerns them while they were comfortable, you end up hurting people's beliefs and they see you and what you bring as an enemy/threat, and they'll put you and your thing on trial, it's so common these days it's ridiculous.

The only thing I give them is that GM still lacks a dedicated simple yet complete guide for beginners who just want to use it on their LCD, directly linked and well visible right next to where the download links are. The eiusdemmodi guide isn't appropriate for that, it's written more for people aiming at becoming full users (crt & emudrivers) and/or with already a certain understanding of the topics, and some parts are outdated it seems.
People shouldn't have to google for finding the right infos about GM on BYOAC forums (as I've mentioned before it took me sometimes a lot of time to find some up-to-date info there as what I needed was buired in already old threads)
That log thing for reporting issues also is a problem because using command line in windows has long been gone from the general culture and people (easily a majority of users) with zero knowledge of it fail over and over at producing one and just give up. There definitely should be a 'run game for generating log' button in the UI so anyone could easily make logs anytime without using command line.
Or a log should be generated every time MAME runs a game period, all saved in a dedicated folder: end of reporting problems.

Anyway, as I predicted instead of being interested in the thread's topic (sh3/cvik blitter delay settings), people are lining to shit on the carpet and piss on the furniture, as you'd expect from most these days, especially in a an unattended community forums from where most of the good wills are gone.
So yesterday I was thinking I'd continue to study the subject, but scratch my previous statement; I won't share the results here.

@MMS: also scratch what I said the other day, I've completely changed my mind, were a new one to appear, it'd definitely need to be both private and non-readable to the public. Won't happen but that's to indicate that now it's 'fuck it'.