Mame .191 includes SH3 cv1000 fixes!

[tzakiel]

From release notes:

"This release includes an experimental Hitachi SH3 recompiler from frequent contributor David “Haze” Haywood that shows promising performance improvements for Cave CV-1000 emulation, and holds the tantalising possibility of bringing similar gains to systems based on the SH4 in the future (including Sega NAOMI). Bug fixes to the Saturn/ST-V emulation will enhance your enjoyment of numerous Sega titles from the ’90s."

Has anyone tried it yet? What exactly are the differences?

EDIT: reading haze's blog it seems like it's just a speed boost rather than accuracy fixes.

[soprano1]

Seems interesting nevertheless.

[KAI]

wow, everything runs smoothly, even playing windowed on my shitty pc.

[Xyga]

Only a speed boost indeed, does less for CV1000 games right now than it will for Naomi and stuff it seems.
Smooth/lightweight (albeit ugly af) CV1000 emulation has been available in DEmul for quite a while already.

Still nice, Haze posted something on MW, I just can't tell if it's positive or not as he seems to say it leaves more room to work on accuracy then proceeds to destroy hopes for a decade or something.

[xxx1993]

Will it finally fix the emulation for Data East's Locked 'N Loaded?

[Xyga]

EDIT: just tried 0.191 and it seems the increase in performance isn't so important that a meh~entry cpu would handle CV1000 games.
For instance my laptop (i3-4030U STP 1044) still can't. Practically no difference in FPS % with previous builds.

What seems to have been really improved are the slow data loadings that were making games like those of the Ibara series struggle before bosses and at the beginning of stages, even with a strong cpu.
Good for the setups that were a bit below requirements, but with my other cpu (i5-4690k STP 2238) on the desktop this build makes almost no difference at all.

[Goompaolo9500]

I tried it out. It works 100%.

[pbsk8]

so

no need to set blitter delay effect on and at 63% anymore?

[tzakiel]

so

no need to set blitter delay effect on and at 63% anymore?

This update only addressed performance issues to make lesser cpus do the same running speed as more powerful ones. Whatever settings you needed still apply and whatever problems there were with accuracy still exist.

[Xyga]

also iirc the 63% blitter trick worked so-so and only for a couple of games

decent emulation of cv1000 games is not a thing yet, and not around the corner either it seems...

[Goompaolo9500]

also iirc the 63% blitter trick worked so-so and only for a couple of games

decent emulation of cv1000 games is not a thing yet, and not around the corner either it seems...

Good idea. I updated to the latest version of MAME so that is why. It ran slow on older versions.

[finisherr]

Does this mean that Ibara is playable in MAME now? That'd be pretty sweet. I run MacOS so I don't play Mame much because there is way too much lag with my stick, but it'd be cool to try that game out.

Speaking of which, does anyone else have issues with lag and MAME on PC? I'm wondering if it's only a MacOS thing. Perhaps the driver that MacOS uses for arcade sticks.

[Xyga]

It's been playable for a long time.

Again the fix apparently only attended to specific memory bottleneck issues, for instance the 'loadings' during stage transitions or before bosses, that were drawing way too much cpu time.

For the people who had a little too weak cpu this probably helped, for the rest it did nothing.
(if your cpu was overall too weak never cruising at 100% on any game the fix doesn't make a huge difference, and if it was powerful enough to run at a solid 100% already you won't see the difference anyway)
Overall I doubt anything has actually changed much, the Cave games still play at the wrong speed with a lot of lag.

I think people misunderstood the update and got overenthusiastic.

[finisherr]

Ah ok. I remember the slowdown being inaccurate on Futari. Was hoping this would fix stuff like that. Oh well!

[Firehawke]

You're not going to get accurate Cave CV1000 slowdown until someone actually does a deep dive on the hardware to find out what the actual limitations are. This issue is directly linked to the problems with the PC ports of Cave's games.

Cave did some REALLY BAD design and programming work. I don't think they ever anticipated doing home ports, because they never bothered to actually work out the actual limitations of their hardware. Instead, they designed the games and incrementally tested against what they really see on the screen with the physical hardware as their code overloads the hardware limitations and slows down. That is to say, MOST of the actual slowdown is not artificially induced and controlled.

So when it came to doing home ports, they've estimated what they think it approximates to, but since they don't know the actual real numbers they can't get it perfect. 360 was a lot closer to the original hardware and they were able to approximate it better since it's all the same hardware for every console-- though still not perfect match to arcade. The higher power of modern PCs throws THOSE numbers out the window, and the wide range of hardware means performance differences that are even harder to work out.

MAME, Demul, and the official PC ports are all in the same boat-- until someone actually figures out the actual numbers, accuracy on CV100 slowdowns will always be shaky at best.

Sadly, there aren't many with the required hardware access, the skills, and just as importantly an INTEREST in working on this.

[Obscura]

More than that, there's only about three people in the world who actually care, because now that the hype around the "hardest boss EVAR!" video has died down, everyone has realized that CV1000-era Cave sucks.

[Bananamatic]

nice to see cv1k and pcb dissent starting to spread here
though the port slowdown in most games is far from shaky, only a few spots where it makes a minor difference most of the time

[Muchi Muchi Spork]

Cave did some REALLY BAD design and programming work. I don't think they ever anticipated doing home ports, because they never bothered to actually work out the actual limitations of their hardware. Instead, they designed the games and incrementally tested against what they really see on the screen with the physical hardware as their code overloads the hardware limitations and slows down. That is to say, MOST of the actual slowdown is not artificially induced and controlled.

The slowdown might not be that difficult to anticipate during game design if you understand the default output mode speed (I think it's 50%) during overload when a value is met and design based on that back and forth. I don't understand why people don't like maxing out hardware.

[Shepardus]

It's not a problem with "maxing out hardware" (though, on that matter, CAVE's games were hardly revolutionary in technical achievement, with doujin games like Touhou pushing similar bullet counts with higher resolution and fancier patterns while maintaining a solid 60fps even on normal hardware of the day), it's a problem with poor degradation of performance. Most games that push the limits of their hardware don't crack under their stress and pass it on to the end user nearly as much when pushing the limits, especially when the devs are only designing for one hardware spec (as opposed to a multi-console or PC game).

[Bananamatic]

I don't understand why people don't like maxing out hardware.

because when you do, the ship disappears along with the HUD and sometimes even with the bullets

[pestro87]

The HUD and sprites disappearing is odd (for lack of a better word...) though, the PCB for DFK 1.5 doesn't seem to have this issue. If you use a hyper on the 2-3 Boss on the second pattern on the second phase, the game starts to run at like 1fps, seriously... worst slowdown in any CAVE game ever. Yet the sprites and the HUD are still intact.

[Bananamatic]

I have no idea why they just didn't stick to the doj/ketsui style except with stronger hardware for even less slowdown
instead they overload it to the point of slowdown being everywhere

[emphatic]

I have no idea why they just didn't stick to the doj/ketsui style except with stronger hardware for even less slowdown
instead they overload it to the point of slowdown being everywhere

Maybe because they grew up playing games like Flying Shark and massive slowdown is a nostalgic thing?

[OmegaFlareX]

AC Hishouzame does not come to mind when thinking about old shmups with "massive" slowdown. Gradius games, definitely, but I think in general this wasn't an issue with the genre until 68k hardware started getting maxed out in the 90s.