A host of posts on case news and emus

Posted by: gruso

It was all devs on deck today, with a little video-fuelled excitement on the boards and a bevy of questions answered. First up, a word from the Dragon.

Well, some quick news (I didn’t have time to do a blog post, as I was in Leipzig at the GCO and needed to catch up on everything).

The 105 boards are finished, though I have no idea whether the MP company did take some pictures or if we have to wait until they arrive at Michaels place.
The review of the case is complete, mould creation started.
The TV Out Cables are being built, as soon as Michael gets the first final one, there will be pictures for sure 🙂
WiFi is getting better, everything works except reading the calibration data, the rest is fine. DJWillis is still at it.
And Michael is currently putting the new firmware on all of the nubs… joy 😀

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On reading that, the observant Pandorian might be asking why the case mould is starting now, when we previously reported that it started two weeks ago? Just for you, it’s been asked and answered already.

It was about 30 days for just mould creation and about 45 days for mould creation including the review.
It might change if they need to change something, but that’s something we don’t know yet 🙂
The first review went pretty good, so we’re positive about it 🙂

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Winner. Not only was our reporting correct (which it isn’t always, as you’ll see soon), but ED has confirmed that we’ve begun the 30 day approach to the first real Pandora cases. Could we see some early next month? It’s plausible.

Now to the recent PSX video. We had assumed by the video title that we weren’t seeing Zod’s PSX4all, but another Linux PSX emu. Wrong! Fire that guy. It is indeed PSX4all, and MWeston goes into some detail here:

Zod hasn’t figured out how to properly use the audio buffer in the Pandora kernel (Zod and I think) plus there appears to be some vsync timing issues since all of the audio seems to rely on timing. The LCD is set to 67Hz because the settings Notaz tried at 60Hz caused some flickering on the display. No one has gone back to try and play with the registers to find the magic setting and so PSX4all ends up a little out no matter what Zod does. That would account for the crackling in the audio. The entire audio tends to be a good second out of time with gameplay and it doesn’t matter if the clock is 500MHz or 800MHz. There is something missing in how the audio should be buffered and passed out during emulation. I can’t help him solve that one unfortunately. I did ask around but it may take more eyes on the code when more people have their own devices.

Zod works mostly on his iPhone versions and only recently has had a second platform powerful enough (3GS) to keep up with video and sound going full out at the same time. It’s still a work in progress. The fact that it runs pretty smoothly for me at 550MHz (just a number I like to use) and the audio doesn’t change with the clock increases means that there is something being handled incorrectly in the code. Again, I think it is timing because vsync doesn’t change no matter how fast you set the processor clock.

Oh, and this is still completely software emulation except for using the hardware scalar to make it full screen. Exophase has helped with adding NEON instructions which is supposed to help with screen blitting, especially in 320×240 games. Zod can correct me if I’m wrong but I think it provided up to a 6x improvement in blitting, but it’s still experimental code and not always stable so I don’t have a build that uses it.

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Also working on PSX4all is lad named Tinnus, who drops a few hints as to what’s in store for the emu:

Running too fast: it just doesn’t have a framerate limiter yet. Obviously it will before release 😉 For now it’s interesting to let it run as fast as it can so we can easily see how something added or changed helps out in speeding things up.

Rendering: yep, and that’s still pure software (not for long 😉 ). I’m very excited with the possibilities of the GL ES 2 GPU, not only for speed but also for the possibilities of improving the graphics–bilinear filtering and postprocessing filters for instance, like Pete’s GL2 plugin for the PC emulators does, not to mention rendering to any resolution (actually to a multiple of the original game resolution, but then that can be scaled down).

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Phew!