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 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.