ESPgaluda II in MAME

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Bassa-Bassa
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Xyga wrote:Anyway nobody really cared to research which OC % or blitter values (both together?) do best for each game.
Which is strange, if you ask me. The days mamedev were pestered day after day to have the SH3 games perfectly running on the emulator are not too far away, and now the tools to achieve an almost perfect emulation for every title are available (including saving the CPU setting!), nobody cares (o shares?).
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Xyga
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by Xyga »

There are several reasons why not many people care;

- emu devs opinion; because it's a hack and not real emulation, a sacrilege
- player's opinion; because cpu underclock and blitter delay, even if you find the closest working values, likely won't achieve slowdowns 100% identical to the pcb's anyway
- because actually finding the best cpu/blitter values, working closest to real slowdowns is extremely tedious, ideally involving the participation of several players who know the games on pcb very well, or at worst the endless viewing of many pcb replays of good-enough quality to compare
- part of the most anal people stemming from the first two categories, to which you could add pcb collectors, actually hate the idea that the playing experience of Cave games in emulation could be improved even a little bit, and they've long campaigned to discourage people from trying and hoping

PS: note that the CPU% slider you see in the menu is not accurate, the granularity is actually of 1000, which is why it moves so slowly.
you can see where you actually are, the real value, in the game's dedicated .cfg file in the cfg folder.
knowing that the smallest increment/decrement can change the game's behaviour, you can picture getting it 'right' for each game is a pharaonic task.
(and I don't even want to think of the various modes and revisions)
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el_rika
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by el_rika »

I have Espgaluda 2 at 48% CPU speed (i play on android, but it should be the same in Win). Except for very few specific moments, like the pop enemies right before the stage 3 mid boss for example, the slowdown is there and very useful in scoring runs.

Daiffukatsu (1.5 ) works best at 43%, while BL at 38%.

Mushihimesama is at 45%, it produces, maybe, a bit more slowdown in Ultra than pcb, but i'm not entirely sure, as the pcb has tons of slowdown too, so it may be the playstyle.
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Xyga
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by Xyga »

It's Android indeed, and you're using an older MAME build also IIRC ? things might be quite different with a recent build and on Windows (speculating tho)
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Bassa-Bassa
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by Bassa-Bassa »

Xyga wrote:There are several reasons why not many people care;

- emu devs opinion; because it's a hack and not real emulation, a sacrilege
- player's opinion; because cpu underclock and blitter delay, even if you find the closest working values, likely won't achieve slowdowns 100% identical to the pcb's anyway
- because actually finding the best cpu/blitter values, working closest to real slowdowns is extremely tedious, ideally involving the participation of several players who know the games on pcb very well, or at worst the endless viewing of many pcb replays of good-enough quality to compare
- part of the most anal people stemming from the first two categories, to which you could add pcb collectors, actually hate the idea that the playing experience of Cave games in emulation could be improved even a little bit, and they've long campaigned to discourage people from trying and hoping
I thought you were going to just say that the people aren't aware of Groovymame and the few who are feel intimidated by it somehow. I still think that's the main reason, so I have hopes that a project for getting the best numbers for every CV1000 game in MAME will happen sooner or later. Just a matter of spreading the word like you do.

Mamedevs enabled the blitter delay feature to get knowledgeable users' opinions and improve the emulation some day, didn't they? A hack to what is an incomplete/suboptimal emulation code to begin with can't be messing with their ethics at this point. Nothing's stopping them from improving their work.



PS: note that the CPU% slider you see in the menu is not accurate, the granularity is actually of 1000, which is why it moves so slowly.
you can see where you actually are, the real value, in the game's dedicated .cfg file in the cfg folder.

knowing that the smallest increment/decrement can change the game's behaviour, you can picture getting it 'right' for each game is a pharaonic task.
(and I don't even want to think of the various modes and revisions)
You can manually edit that cfg file, which helps a lot. A pharaonic task indeed and that's why it needs the community. Knowing that the proper way of emulating these slowdowns won't come in many years, if ever, but that there's a way to get very close which doesn't involve any coding nor special knowledge, should suffice. At least, for the more popular game without a proper port. (Wishful thinking, whatever.)
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Xyga
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by Xyga »

Bassa-Bassa wrote:I thought you were going to just say that the people aren't aware of Groovymame and the few who are feel intimidated by it somehow. I still think that's the main reason, so I have hopes that a project for getting the best numbers for every CV1000 game in MAME will happen sooner or later. Just a matter of spreading the word like you do.
Knowing Groovy isn't required for that, only set 'monitor' to 'lcd', and 'cheats' to '1' and you're ready to experiment OC'ing.

Regarding the blitter delay slider though, it saves in the .cfg like cpu% does, but I'm not sure you still have to turn it on in 'machine configuration' prior, or not anymore. That's something to confirm.

Anyway for the reasons I've invoked, I don't think we'll make it or that there will be a 'community effort'.
But that's just my opinion. ^^
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el_rika
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Re: ESPgaluda II in MAME

Post by el_rika »

Xyga wrote: things might be quite different with a recent build and on Windows (speculating tho)
True, but i'm sure every build has that sweet spot where things get close enough. As you said, the exact PCB experience will probably never be duplicated, by neither ports nor emulation.
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