Lack of recent progress and current news

    People have been asking for an update, so I thought I'd let everyone know what's going on. The past month and a half has been very busy for me. I'm now in college and working full time. I work 7 days a week 12 hours a day for up to two months straight then I get a week or two off. I was unemployed most of last year, so now I have a lot less time on my hands for code. My job does afford me some downtime most of which goes toward school. I'm currently pursuing a Associates of Applied Science in Computer Programming. I'm also looking at getting several IT certifications along the way to help keep my options open when I can finally make a career change. I do still have a decent amount of left over time most of which has been spent working on the forums and dealing with staff issues. The main changes I had planned there are done. (I got a staff hierarchy set up in order to reduce issues there and integrated the compatibility list with the site.)


    On the code side of things I've done some minor code clean-ups and I'm currently working on a few regressions. Along the way I've learned to better debug crashes which is a good thing. I also made my first attempt at moving code to the ME. I tried to move the "JPEG_Task" to the ME but this didn't go so well. So far it gets about half way through the code for it and crashes. Crashes on the ME are hard to debug, but this will be good practice for the CPU move. I've also started a full port of 1964Video(Rice 6.3.0r35) from the 1964 SVN which should kill 90% of the graphical errors and a few crashes from within the graphics plug-in. It will also increase the overall compatibility of the emulator as well. This will all take a while. The JPEG_Task isn't planned to be move and I'm only doing this as it much simpler than the CPU_Task and a good case for learning. As I stated I'm working on the regressions I introduced in Rev 432, this should only take a few days. Then I'll be back to debugging my JPEG related code and porting Rice.


    On a side note, both school and work are going well. Salvy has been adding a few bits of code related to uCodes and the blender lately and one of our forum members (Yamagushi)  has implemented a new GUI on Rev 463. I still have further plans for the GUI but his changes are a good starting point for my plans.

Rev 444 and the beginnings of Beta 3

Rev 444 was just regression fixes and a bit of code clean-up from some of my prior commits. Now, I'm on to the major recode for Beta 3. I've changed the way I'm going about it from my prior post here. I've decided instead of working in reverse removing parts of DX64 and working backwards, I will start from scratch, import code as needed, and work forward. This way I can ensure all the code gets looked at and I would've basically been doing this after I finished with the code disassembly.

I've talked with Strmnnrmn about how I plan to do the ME move to get a normally serialized process working asynchronously. Right now in DX64 it goes:
1.Dynarec
2.CPU Execution
3.Graphics
4.Audio (Although in Async this is basically bypassed on the SC.)

Which is basically serialized access to the individual components. To make this a truly multi-processing app. When the move is done it will go:

First Two Frames:
SC                      | ME
1. Dynarec (Frame 1)    |
3. Dynarec (Frame 2)    | 2. CPU Execution (Frame 1)
4.2 Graphics (Frame 1)  | 4.1 CPU Execution (Frame 2)
4.3 Audio (Frame 1)     |

Subsequently: (Frame X = Current Frame, X-1 = Last frame)
SC                      | ME
1. Dynarec (Frame X)    | 0. (Finishing execution of X-1)
2.2 Graphics (Frame X-1)| 2.1 CPU Execution (Frame X)
2.3 Audio (Frame X-1)   |

This will mean at any given time DX64 will be working on two frames at once. I want the Dynarec, CPU Execution and Audio to all individually be able to be moved between the SC and the ME through build flags as needed for debugging purposes. Graphics will always be on the SC as the ME has no GE access. (The only exception there might be some math heavy tasks like clipping, but without a VFPU I think this should stay where it's at.)

What all this means is I will basically be recoding everything from scratch and looking at all of the code for optimization and memory usage as I go. This includes uCodes, graphics, audio, the combiner, RSP emulation, etc... I literally mean every line of code. I got the go ahead from Strmnnrmn to do this, but I'm not going to be committing the changes as I go as not to break the SVN. I will also be looking at the new GUI and preparing for it as well as all the other plans I had listed for Beta 3. Next time I post, I will update my progress on all of this and list any issues I'm running in to.

Rev 443 and the next few revs

For Rev 443, I tracked down the issue plaguing Paper Mario. Since it was a regression, I went about it the way I normally find regressions I found the last revision that didn't have the regression and I checked the changes to the next revision after looking at the purpose of that particular revision. In this case it was rev 431 and 432 respectively. However, Rev 432 had 50 files and a couple hundred lines of code changed. So, over the course of two days I went through each file one by one and it turned out to be one line one 1 file which was the last one I went through. In Rev 432, I reverted some changes from some older Revs to fix a few regressions causing lock-ups in some titles. Now, I need to finish going back through the changes and see which are needed for speed and preparation for the ME move. After that, I have a few quick ideas I'll look at for further speed. After they are implemented I'll explain them here. Hopefully after the speed regressions and my new ideas we should see an overall boost in speed. Then it's on to the Async bug and the rest of the changes leading to Beta 3.

Rev 432

I just posted Rev 432 here's what happened. I had a few speed ideas, but thought ehhh... I'll throw in a fix for GoldenEye(GE) freezing since it's a regression (I.E. It didn't used to freeze.) just for the hell of it. Along the way of doing that (I found where it broke, but just reverting that one part broke other games) I remembered having to disable the loop optimization (A speed-up Strmnnrmn added for R14 that had some compatibility issues.) So, I decided to check what broke it and found that as well and I found it. All in all code from 3 revisions (All that Howard0su posted way back, 305, 316, 318) needed to be reverted, some of it I was still able use use and the rest will be brought back over time as we near Beta 3 and I track down each piece that was causing the breaks.

In the end, 432 includes: GE(No Freeze) + TS(No Freeze or Crash even on Phat) + Loop Fixed + Minor Texture Speed-ups + A few new settings for texture update. (It now has: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30)

The extra speed is enough to be noticeable(About 5%): The Mario head on Mario 64 goes at a consistent 19 FPS. Games the dynamic loop never worked on will still get some extra speed, but not as much. (It still freezes MM and a few others.)

For the next bit of code I post I plan on working on how DX64 handles Textures, on the Phat and even sometimes on the Slim DX64 runs out of memory for texels in both the VRAM and the secondary RAM buffer. This was my purpose in reducing the secondary buffer on the Slim a few revs back so I can do testing with the lower Phat value. Besides trying to get a bit of memory from else where (Some other buffers are a bit larger than needed.) I plan to work on the way Daedalus decides to throw away a texture when it's no longer needed. I thinking that I will have it throw away large textures sooner. Some sort of texture compression may be another possibility.  A couple games that are good examples of this are Transformers - Beast Wars, Tetrisphere, and Space-station Silicon Valley. All three have issues with texture memory with Beast Wars being the worst. This also causes the crash where if you go to the select menu several times the emulator crashes. I reduced the memory intrafont uses a few revs back to help with that. Right now DaedalusX64 keeps textures for 10 Frames automatically (Not 100% sure if this is 10 actual frames or 10 virtual frames). If I lower this to 1 Texture update is not needed as textures are all thrown away every frame, but then there is a speed cost. However at even a setting of 2 Texture update is need for persistent items like onscreen text it OoT but there is still a speed cost. Loading small textures take a small amount of time compared to large ones, but loading them too frequently causes cache thrashing. So in the end we need a more dynamic way of dealing with this. Also as an added measure large textures will likely get converted to 16Bit to cut there size in the memory in half which would help as well. This fix in the end should help a few crashes and possibly add just a bit of speed as more textures (Especially the small ones) will be stored in the VRAM (which is 2X Faster than the RAM) Also as part of this I will be testing various games to get a count of how much texel memory they are using at any given time to know how much I need to save. The fix for the Slim it's as simple as upping the secondary RAM buffer, but as you can see it's going to be a bit more complex for the Phat.

BTW: On a side note my crazy plan from a few posts back didn't happen... It will eventually just not yet. Also my wife's desktop died so until we get her a new system (which may take a while.) we will be sharing my laptop on which I do my developing. Other than that I will continue to try to udpate this around once a week to once a month depending on progress I make and life happenings.

Restarting DaedalusX64

That's right I'm restarting DaedalusX64 practically from scratch. I've already announced it to the devs and my reasoning behind it.

In preparation to move the CPU(R4300i) to the ME(Media Engine) I noticed we lack encapsulation of CPU. Howard was trying to accomplish it but was unable to finish it. So, due to this I'm going to be semi-restarting DaedalusX64 from scratch in order to encapsulate each component to be handled by a central thread management function. It would be like a PC emulator having separate (CPU w/Dynarec), GPU, SPU, and Input plug-ins and the "main app" only handling the I/O between them instead of the CPU built in to the emulator. In our case the "main app"(AKA the thread handler), the GPU, and input will run on the SP, and the CPU on the ME. The SPU will be able to run asynchronously on either. (So it's portable to where we need it.) By having each item fully encapsulated we should be able to debug CPU/Async Sound issues by bringing it back to the SP with a simple #define flag since they will be fully encapsulated and not dependent on other functions to operate. This will allow DaedalusX64 to be truly multi-threaded.

This is going to take me a while to set up and I will continue working on non-ME related performance and bugs in the mean time, but this is my planned direction for DX64. Also in doing this I will be dropping OSX/Win32(I will restore this later for debugging on the PC)/XBOX support and this will become a PSP only version(temporarily until W32 is restored). However fixes and improvements we make will still be easily portable back to the original project(Strmnnrmn's -N64 branch). As I do this I will be rewriting several parts on this app to ensure that we are getting the most out of it. We've lost some decent speed somewhere along the way. Some titles in interpreter mode have seen over 20% drop in speed. This should also simplify the source code and have our processing going closer to the original N64 in the way it operates. I will also be commenting the source to make it easier for future developers to work on.

My first step is to learn about the ME and it's limitations. I have some ME test code I've been playing with and know some of the limitations of the ME now. Once the ME has been called:

1. CPU speed can't be changed we'll be stuck at 333Mhz (Not a problem)
2. Standby mode will not work. Not sure if this is a limitation of the current PSP SDK libraries or a Hardware limitation. So, no standby mode for us with the CPU on the ME since it will be called with every ROM. This limitation may only be temporary, but I have no clue. If it's permanent sorry to those that like to use standby.

First I will be rebuilding the main app. Now this part will be platform specific and be written for only the PSP to begin with. This means the DaedalusPSP project will still exist and the whole app won't become one project. The DaedalusW32 will be recreated later. This main app's purpose is only to set-up the environment variables, the user interface for ROM/Option Selection, and detection of system capabilities (AKA Phat/Slim/3K). I plan to look at the current GUI bugs at this time as well. Once a ROM is selected and "Start Emulation" is clicked, this is where things will be different. The system will then create the primary thread manager/memory manager first and then create the individual threads for each component as needed on the proper CPU based on code flags. Then the thread manager will act as the I/O interface between the individual parts so they can all be running asynchronously. This is what Howard was trying to accomplish, but I'm not sure it's possible under the current code. Once I have all the different threads running on the SP then I will push the CPU to the ME with the encapsulation already in place at that point I can set-up whether or not to use the ME as a flag so we can still debug CPU/Audio issues by using or not using the ME in Debug Mode as needed.

I also plan to rework the batch test and profiling code to help us further and last but not least add a wolf fence technique to the memory management to prevent leaks. As I work I will be bringing each piece back in slowly in small parts. Grazz will be helping with this and debugging the individual parts as we go to get rid of as many of the current bugs as possible. This is all going to be done on a private SVN for the time being with small fixes being back ported to the current code for testing. This process will overall take several months. Afterward, we will be posting the Beta 3 Preview in the Testers Section for final debugging. Then it will be finalized, committed and published as Beta 3.

The end result as compared to current Revs...
In Release Mode DX64 should be much faster and more stable. However the Debug version may be slightly slower when ME CPU processing is off than currently. This will be due to the thread manager overhead.

This is what's currently happening and my current plans. 99% of my other work on the project has been put on hold, but I think this is definitely worth while to pursue.