Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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Raytrace
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Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by Raytrace »

now I know this would be REALLY niche, especially since the Powercore's are actually discontinued now, but I was lookin through the internets abut Gradius IV emulation, and saw someone say this:

'For anything to even remotely BEGIN to work properly in Gradius IV and other Konami PowerPC games, a SHARC core in MAME will be needed. Unless you are going to write one, do NOT ask someone to fix it or if he could fix it, because it's extremely rude. The devlopers work on what they want to when they want to.'

Powercore's use SHARC DSPs I'm pretty sure, does that mean that it would be 'possible' to use a Powercore to accelerate said emulator or MAME variant if it ever existed? by some form of Open CL type software?

that's a lot of if's but I just find it intriguing as if it did happen it would be using an chip designed for audio processing to accelerate graphical stuff, which is the opposite of what some people are using graphics cards to accelerate audio VSTs (Nebula I think is looking at it and there are 1 and 2 reverb plugins that can use CUDA)

anyway total pipedream :p

(not directly shmup related, moved to Hardware Forum /nZ)
gray117
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by gray117 »

Er... maybe? You'd still need some form of middleware to get mame to interact. Unless you were able to simply load the game, as is, with a loader [more akin to typex hacks], but I imagine you'll still have a whole load of secondary issues to cover.

Similar to CUDA I presume there will be some [scalable] timing issues... I've no idea how adaptable Powercore would be in this respect, although I imagine it's setup for such development...

I would guess a more likely solution will be that a driver will be eventually written support this - possibly even sending this task to a dedicated thread... But there's probably many more utilities for such operations that will peak a dev's interest before it happens in this particular case.
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Raytrace
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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gray117 wrote:Er... maybe? You'd still need some form of middleware to get mame to interact. Unless you were able to simply load the game, as is, with a loader [more akin to typex hacks], but I imagine you'll still have a whole load of secondary issues to cover.

Similar to CUDA I presume there will be some [scalable] timing issues... I've no idea how adaptable Powercore would be in this respect, although I imagine it's setup for such development...

I would guess a more likely solution will be that a driver will be eventually written support this - possibly even sending this task to a dedicated thread... But there's probably many more utilities for such operations that will peak a dev's interest before it happens in this particular case.
haha yeah I know it was a confusing post more of a musing I suppose haha

cool - now do any Arcade machines use the Analog Devices DSPs in my UAD cards? :p
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Raytrace
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by Raytrace »

actually I just looked at my UAD 2 box, I had it the wrong way around (well wrong anyway) - UAD 2 box says 'SHARC Processor by Analog Devices'

Powercore's use Motorola DSPs I think
dieKatze88
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Uh. Core i7 does pretty good.
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Raytrace
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by Raytrace »

Uh I have an i7 @ 3.4Ghz and it doesn't do 'pretty good' at all at emulating Gradius IV

then again I'm using a slightly hax0red (apparently) version which is probably optimised for 2D shooters, so maybe there's some switch which is off in it, I shall try with 'vanilla' MAME
dieKatze88
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

I use MAMEPlus 64 bit. I have an i7 2600k that frequently overclocks its self to about 5 ghz.

My old laptop would get about 65% speed with the same build, and that was a Core 2@2.0.
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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dieKatze88 wrote:I use MAMEPlus 64 bit. I have an i7 2600k that frequently overclocks its self to about 5 ghz.

My old laptop would get about 65% speed with the same build, and that was a Core 2@2.0.
Imma check it in MAMEplus - Yeah I have all Turbo and also C1E and E1ST stuff turned off because unfortunately I use the same PC for audio stuff as my gaming
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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ok it does seem to be running WAY better in MAMEplus - the audio still stutters a little but everything graphically seems to be moving full speed :)
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Raytrace wrote:ok it does seem to be running WAY better in MAMEplus - the audio still stutters a little but everything graphically seems to be moving full speed :)
That's an effect of the Audio Emulation being Crap right now.

Why do you have all that crap turned off? That's the stuff that makes these CPUs roar.

I encode 720p video at 90FPS with this beast.
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Raytrace
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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dieKatze88 wrote:
Raytrace wrote:ok it does seem to be running WAY better in MAMEplus - the audio still stutters a little but everything graphically seems to be moving full speed :)
That's an effect of the Audio Emulation being Crap right now.

Why do you have all that crap turned off? That's the stuff that makes these CPUs roar.

I encode 720p video at 90FPS with this beast.
because they majorly effect my soundcard (when being used in a DAW), horrible little spikes and glitches :(
dieKatze88
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Raytrace wrote:
dieKatze88 wrote:
Raytrace wrote:ok it does seem to be running WAY better in MAMEplus - the audio still stutters a little but everything graphically seems to be moving full speed :)
That's an effect of the Audio Emulation being Crap right now.

Why do you have all that crap turned off? That's the stuff that makes these CPUs roar.

I encode 720p video at 90FPS with this beast.
because they majorly effect my soundcard (when being used in a DAW), horrible little spikes and glitches :(
Whatever. I'd imagine it wouldn't be that big a deal because the CPU should just load and stay loaded.
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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dieKatze88 wrote:
Whatever. I'd imagine it wouldn't be that big a deal because the CPU should just load and stay loaded.
what's with the condescending 'whatever' ? - it's a fact - go to any audio forum and look for 'major spikes/glitches/electricy noises' and you will see that C1E, EIST, Turbo and anything which dynamically changes speeds etc. is a major cause of this problem...
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Raytrace wrote:
dieKatze88 wrote:
Whatever. I'd imagine it wouldn't be that big a deal because the CPU should just load and stay loaded.
what's with the condescending 'whatever' ? - it's a fact - go to any audio forum and look for 'major spikes/glitches/electricy noises' and you will see that C1E, EIST, Turbo and anything which dynamically changes speeds etc. is a major cause of this problem...
Not condescending. Just "To each their own." I was wondering what the reason was, I got an answer, If it works for you it works for you.
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by Raytrace »

dieKatze88 wrote:
Raytrace wrote:
dieKatze88 wrote:
Whatever. I'd imagine it wouldn't be that big a deal because the CPU should just load and stay loaded.
what's with the condescending 'whatever' ? - it's a fact - go to any audio forum and look for 'major spikes/glitches/electricy noises' and you will see that C1E, EIST, Turbo and anything which dynamically changes speeds etc. is a major cause of this problem...
Not condescending. Just "To each their own." I was wondering what the reason was, I got an answer, If it works for you it works for you.
oh ok no worries - it is often difficult to ascertain the mood/tone of words in a forum :)
- yeah no it is unfortunately necessary to get Ableton to play nicely with my PC :/
unfortunately I only have one PC, cannot afford another one, so this PC has to do 3 things which often might be isolated to one PC: audio, 3d/raytracing and gaming
I really should get another PC :(
dieKatze88
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Raytrace wrote:
dieKatze88 wrote:Not condescending. Just "To each their own." I was wondering what the reason was, I got an answer, If it works for you it works for you.
oh ok no worries - it is often difficult to ascertain the mood/tone of words in a forum :)
- yeah no it is unfortunately necessary to get Ableton to play nicely with my PC :/
unfortunately I only have one PC, cannot afford another one, so this PC has to do 3 things which often might be isolated to one PC: audio, 3d/raytracing and gaming
I really should get another PC :(
Ahh, No you'd know if I was being condescending. I'm from New Jersey.

Yeah I know what that's like. I do all my HD Video editing and encoding on my PC.
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Raytrace
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by Raytrace »

dieKatze88 wrote:
Ahh, No you'd know if I was being condescending. I'm from New Jersey.

Yeah I know what that's like. I do all my HD Video editing and encoding on my PC.
haha - yeah ah I c that's why you're 64 bit too I take it? the new Premiere Pro is 64-bit only I think...
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Raytrace wrote:
dieKatze88 wrote:
Ahh, No you'd know if I was being condescending. I'm from New Jersey.

Yeah I know what that's like. I do all my HD Video editing and encoding on my PC.
haha - yeah ah I c that's why you're 64 bit too I take it? the new Premiere Pro is 64-bit only I think...
Nope. I'm with 64 bit because I have 16gigs of ram and I like to actually use it. I'm a cheapass and use Open source stuff, so most of it is 32 bit anyway.
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

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dieKatze88 wrote:
Nope. I'm with 64 bit because I have 16gigs of ram and I like to actually use it. I'm a cheapass and use Open source stuff, so most of it is 32 bit anyway.
Yeah I have 6GB which I'm obviously not using properly - I have win 7 32 and 64 installed but stay in 32-bit so far - if you don't mind me asking- which open source video editor do you use? - for ages I've been wanting to make videos out of renders I've made, I can make a bunch of various renders as videos fine, but I've yet to find a free video editor where I could accurately match the waveform to the images (in other words to animate stuff to the beat etc.) in Premiere Pro I was able to do this, but in most other stuff I've tried I cant really zoom in far enough on the WAV :( - blender's timeline view, while impressive for something built in, doesn't quite work for this task either :(
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by dieKatze88 »

Raytrace wrote:
dieKatze88 wrote:
Nope. I'm with 64 bit because I have 16gigs of ram and I like to actually use it. I'm a cheapass and use Open source stuff, so most of it is 32 bit anyway.
Yeah I have 6GB which I'm obviously not using properly - I have win 7 32 and 64 installed but stay in 32-bit so far - if you don't mind me asking- which open source video editor do you use? - for ages I've been wanting to make videos out of renders I've made, I can make a bunch of various renders as videos fine, but I've yet to find a free video editor where I could accurately match the waveform to the images (in other words to animate stuff to the beat etc.) in Premiere Pro I was able to do this, but in most other stuff I've tried I cant really zoom in far enough on the WAV :( - blender's timeline view, while impressive for something built in, doesn't quite work for this task either :(
I only do some basic things, so AVIDemux works for me.
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Re: Using a Powercore to accelerate Hornet emulation

Post by Raytrace »

oh ok i c no worries thanks :)
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