Alpha Testing Underway!

[neo3]

sorry to double post but i decided i wanted to ask a question. I have the stock android 2.3.3 rom (root) and i experience minor lag on mario 64 but more on other games. I noticed that paul or someone said to make sure we had the latest rom for our device (2.3.4 for me) and i was wondering if anyone who also has the galaxy ace could tell me if they have less lag after upgrading and anything else you did to increase speed. I plan on overclocking after a custom rom is released for the galaxy ace. I think villainrom is in version 1.0 for the ace.. i'd rather wait for it to have some more bugs ironed out.

My Galaxy Ace is with the original rom 2.3.4 without root, and the Mario 64 runs fine, but the sound has a little lag.

I tested other games as: Mario Party 2, The Legend of Zelda and Mario Tennis, but has much lag because of the sound.

[Mats]

how it goes with the GUI ?

[Paul]

how it goes with the GUI ?

It is going well.  Everything is working so far (other than the core restart function, but I'll worry about that bug later).  It's in several pieces at the moment - I'll try and get it all put together this weekend.  I need to come up with some better logic for controlling which views are visible (the code is pretty hackish at the moment)

[xperia64]

sounds good 
and i rooted my xperia play 

[TFreestone]

sounds very good indeed can't wait! thanks for all your hard work!

[Mats]

some new test coming this week ??

[Mats]

some new tests'

[Paul]

Soon.  Once I get everything together, I'm sure we'll have to work out a few ANR issues on some of the more sensitive devices (seems to be the most reoccurring issue I've been dealing with since the project started).  I'll try to have everything ready to test some time tomorrow, if nothing comes up.

This is the last piece I'll be debugging this round of tests.  There are still plenty of bugs, but I feel like I've surpassed my original goals for the alpha testing phase.  It's exciting to finally be nearing the beta testing phase - I expect things will really start hopping once a wider audience discovers the project.

[Mats]

nice thanks for your hard work  ;P

[TFreestone]

just a note my hardware is still not being recognized. The emulator is very stable now but I experience a crash every time I boot up the application for the first time after i turn the phone on again after shutting down for the night or doing a reboot for other reasons. Nothing i have done has made this crash go away. Its not a fatal crash especially since all i have to do is let it crash then open the app again and it works fine. I'll collect a couple of alogcat readouts with miscellaneous bugs including that crash and the several graphics glitches i experience on the more high end games, such as the textures failing to load in Links house, several houses in kakariko village, the entrances to the temple of time and the castle market, and finally the failure to resume properly often times. On Smash Bros the percentage and character symbols texture fails to appear except for a few seconds here and there (usually after someone has been hit far off the stage causing the camera to zoom out), also on the game mode selection screen and she score screen after each level of classic mode the screen is glitched to a large degree.
I also experience a general emulator glitch (one that i think others have shared as well), when loading a game sometimes it uses the resume save instead of the rom save. eg. when i don't want it to it resumes the game.

Games in which i have experienced no noticeable glitches: F-Zero X and Mario 64 (still need to test others)

~alogcat Descriptions~
"Zelda Resume from start" : Usually when starting a rom in the emu it boots the rom save, and in the case of zelda you can then choose from 3 saved games and begin from either the temple of time as an adult or links house as a child, if you are inside a dungeon you start at the entrance to said dungeon. A glitch that i an several others have experienced is that the emu loads the resume save every time instead of only when resuming.
"Mu64 fail at startup" : the first time i boot up the emu after booting up the phone it crashes
"Smash bros" Just a log of smash bros game play. basicly a log of the glitches that i described above.
"Zelda glitches" a log of me running around looking for all the graphical glithes i could think of off the top of my head. (Temple of time entrance etc texture fail, and the start screen background glitch) all of these are shown in my gameplay video which has it's own accompanying log.

[Vincentmrl]

Can't wait for the GUI, what settings are you planning to add to the first release of the GUI?

[TFreestone]

~continuation of earlier post~
Gameplay Video
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/SoqpClNlrj0" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/SoqpClNlrj0</a>
~notes~
As you can see there is an unholy amount of lag
The captions should point out the things I wanted to show
I have decided that the missing textures are all from places that use a still 2d image as their texture, rather than to create a 3D environment.
The part i cut out is just the 30 seconds that it took link to die so that i could get out of the boss battle
The accompanying log might be useful or not.. sorry it's so long

[Epic_bubble]

~continuation of earlier post~
Gameplay Video
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/SoqpClNlrj0" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/SoqpClNlrj0</a>
~notes~
As you can see there is an unholy amount of lag
The captions should point out the things I wanted to show
I have decided that the missing textures are all from places that use a still 2d image as their texture, rather than to create a 3D environment.
The part i cut out is just the 30 seconds that it took link to die so that i could get out of the boss battle
The accompanying log might be useful or not.. sorry it's so long

Did you have your phone on mute or was the audio plugin disabled? Disabling the audio plugin will give you a small speed boost. Also your phones clock speed is a little too low for n64 emulation, it risks damaging your phone but you could overclock to improve speeds.

Also the n64 Zelda games are some of the slower n64 games to emulate, even on my xperia play I get alot of slowdown but games like mario 64 run buttery smooth.

[Paul]

Thanks for the thorough testing and documentation, TFreestone.  Could you do some similar testing with the gles2rice video plug-in for the games you've noticed graphics problems?  It will run slow as hell, but I'm curious if some of the issues you mentioned are fixed (gles2n64 has a lot of problems).

The cause of your initial startup crash seems to be that the app is checking the emulator state too soon (not sure why it only happens one time - to be honest, I don't know why it is even working for anyone now that I think about it)  I'll have to think of a better way to do this.

The startup behavior in your video is normal for the version of the app you are running.. it's one of the resume tests, so naturally it resumes when you start it .  In the upcoming official build, "Resume" is one of the options in the main menu (vs. "Open ROM", which starts a game from the beginning).  Resume will take a long time until I figure out how to do it without having to recreate the SDL surface (something I'll work on again soon).

Most of the Zelda graphics glitches you demonstrated (wrong/missing background textures and missing image of Link) are related to a well known and documented deficiency in current N64 emulation.  They are due to the fact that one of the N64 framebuffer modes is not emulated properly.  The problem is specific to static 2D background textures.  As you mentioned in your comments, this issue affects every N64 emulator out there.  It is improved to various degrees in various plug-ins (some of the areas in-game are textured correctly with some video plug-ins, for example), but I know of only one video plug-in which emulates this framebuffer mode correctly (and unfortunately it is closed-source, so someone will have to re-invent the wheel to solve the issue definitively).

what settings are you planning to add to the first release of the GUI?

Running the app or clicking the status-bar icon brings you to the Main menu.
Main menu has Open ROM, Resume, Plug-ins, Skins, and Close.
    Open ROM brings up a basic file browser.  Clicking a ROM file selects it and starts the emulator.
    Resume resumes the last session (needs work.. it should remember which ROM was opened last).
    Plug-ins menu has Video, Audio, Input, RSP, and Core.
        These menus have Change, Configure, and Enabled.
            Change brings up a file browser (needs work.. goes to sdcard instead of /data/data/..etc).
            Configure only works for Input and Core.
                Configure Input has A button, B button, etc. and Disable volume buttons.
                Configure Core has Reset, Pause, Fast Forward, etc. and Disable volume buttons.
            Enabled (checkbox to enable/ disable the plug-in).
    Skins just has Virtual Gamepad at the moment.
        Virtual Gamepad has Select Layout, Display FPS, and Enabled.
            Select Layout lists the layouts to choose from (needs work.. should be possible to import new layouts).
            Display FPS (checkbox to enable/ disable the FPS indicator).
            Enabled (checkbox to enable/ disable the on-screen gamepad).
    Close Closes the app.
In-game menu has Menu, Restart, Save, Load, and Close.
    Menu saves the session and brings you back to the Main menu.
    Restart restarts the emulator (currently broken).
    Save does a save-state.
    Load does a load-state.
    Close saves the session and closes the app.
Home Button saves the session and returns to the home screen.

[xperia64]

Might i suggest renaming the plugins section just to settings so really non developer users dont get confused?