Pocket Nester x51v WM5

[gillius]

Running Pocket Nester on the 624mhz x51v is slower than I would expect, but playable. I thought this was inevitable until I saw posts from a couple of years ago saying that 200mhz was slow and 400mhz xscale would allow for 60 (full rate) gaming. Well here I have a 624mhz xscale but in order to play Pocket nester at real-time I need to do a frame-skip of 2, so it is running at less than half-speed with no frame skips. What gives? I saw posts of people with X5 Axims and much older axims claiming to run at full speed?

[soulmirror]

Where is your game saved? Some people have said that saving things on the internal Flash, which is relatively slow, can really impair performance vs. saving on a fast CF or SD card. But I haven't personally tried PocketNester.

[soulmirror]

Addendum: I just tried SMB3 on PocketNester on my x51v...I get 45 FPS with zero skip, and I can get faster than realtime with the auto mode, without a lot of "noticeable" clipping. Was the NES ever 60FPS to begin with?

Although... PocketNester seems to crash my Axim quite frequently as well.

[shpwrckF03]

Hey,
I've got an x51V and I just downloaded pocketnester. Wondering if the ROMS for this were generic like the old NESTICLE ROMS. Any help would be appreciated as I'm in the Navy and shipping out in a few days. Would like to take some games along. Thanks.

[JonMisurda]

If you have a VGA device, try this modified version that I made:

http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~jmisurda/ppc/nesterce_vga.zip

It only plays full screen, but I think it should hit 60fps without a problem, as it does on my WM2003SE x50v.

It may crash if you attempt to run it on a QVGA device, who knows

Let me know how it performs.

Jon

PS Yeah, they're the same ROMs as nesticle used. But, shh, we don't talk about ROMs here. What ROMs, I know nothing.

[gillius]

ROMS for NES games I've seen work on all emulators. I can't guarantee about the format, but I've never seen a ROM that is compatible with one emulator not be compatible with another, with one exception. Some accept the ROMs compressed as a ZIP file (in which case the emulator reads the file inside). Pocket Nester allows ZIP files and .NES files.

I have seen different formats for SNES roms and other systems, but typically the emulators are able to read all the formats. It's likely the case that the formats differ only in trivial ways.

soulmirror: the FPS counter says 45 on the bottom, but I've seen frame skipping and stuttering but still see it report 45 so I don't know if I completely trust it. The NTSC NES is supposed to report at 60fps I believe. It's questionable whether the emulator is measure the number of unique frames chosen, or the number of frames scanned to the screen. It's probably the former as the later wouldn't be very helpful.

But when I play with auto-skip it plays in real-time but I do see some frameskips. When I set it to manual skip, skip 0 plays in far less than real-time, skip 1 plays less than real-time as well, and skip 2 plays in real-time.

Also I saw forum posts from x5 users saying they get 60fps on a 400mhz with an older xscale (the PXA270 is faster clock-per-clock than the older PXA). My onyl guess is that the pixel-doubling needed for the VGA device slows things down. Maybe this is also hitting on that thing where I've seen benchmarks place the x51v at 1/4th the graphics speed x50 in I believe the SPB test (although real-world experience shows these results to be bogus). So perhaps there is a subtle incompatibility between Pocket Nester and either VGA mode or WM5 causing some performance issues?

[soulmirror]

Jon, your VGA version does indeed get 60+ FPS on my x51v / WM5 as well. Thanks!

[gillius]

Beaten by Jon... yes I will try it. Also my ROMS are all on Hitachi Microdrive 6GB (second edition).

So far nesterce.exe from that link has crashed my PDA but I am still working with it. It gives me an all-white screen then goes-all black after a button press. If I press the hardware buttons to switch apps I get screen garbage and parts of things. It looks like a stride and/or pitch problem as it skips every so many lines etc (so the apps are probably writing to the card thinking it is in a different video mode).

[gillius]

I partially take that back. It sometimes works. It really doesn't like it if you pause and start it a lot or go into the menus. It crashes eventually if I start playing in the option menus. If I go to Pocket nester and set everything up then exit it then go into vga nester then it works.

EDIT: heh, nope, not exactly. Now I don't know what the criteria is but it crashes almost every single time, requiring reboots.

EDIT2: when it happens, my PDA is actually in perfect order and if I guess where everything is at I can see parts of my Today screen or other progs etc... It's pretty bad though. I still have to reset.

[soulmirror]

Gillius -- thanks. For what it's worth, I also have been using the mode in which frame-skipping is forced to zero. If I set the last option on that page to real-time, the QVGA version seems to run around 45 FPS and faster than realtime. The VGA seems to run at 60+ and maybe also slightly faster than real-time.

I got a lot of crashes with the QVGA version, requiring soft reset, in the same situations you describe. I haven't played with the VGA version enough yet to know if it makes a difference....

[gillius]

soulmirror, you haev x51v and WM5 and you aren't getting crashes? I don't know what I am doing wrong? Pocket nester the original QVGA version hasn't crashed on me a single time -- ever.

My test game is super mario bro 1 (the original that came with the NES).

[soulmirror]

Wait... huh? The way I understood your previous post - you got crashes, I also get crashes. But now I am confused. The QVGA version *DOES* crash for me as you describe -- when playing with pausing the game too many times. The VGA version...I only tried for a minute. I'll play some more.

[gillius]

The original (official) pocket nester has never once crashed for me. The version that was just posted by Jon has crashed for me every single time but once, and the one time it didn't crash I paused and restarted and it crashed. When it crashes the PDA is operational but the display is in a bad state in that I can't see anything, so I must soft reset. I've tried about 8-10 times now, so until I hear more I am stopped because it is not working for me.

[JonMisurda]

Hmm, well it doesn't crash for me ever, so hmm what might be different.

Let's start with your end first. Might you have a corrupt ROM? Try another maybe. Are you using the GAPI Tweak? If so, disable it and try.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what the problem could be. I don't have a WM5 device to try it on.

Jon

[soulmirror]

Yes, the QVGA version *does* crash for me sometimes, typically when trying to pause the ROM after starting it once.

Something new (and strange) is happening for me. Now, every time I run Jon's version, it starts out okay, but when I start a rom, the screen distorts, so that it shows just a small portion pixel quadrupled (maybe), with ghosted menus and stuff. Sleep->Wake fixes this, but it does the same thing the next time. I wonder. Maybe I can try re-downloading everything -- the roms and the software? Anyone know where it keeps its preferences file, so I can delete that too, in case its corrupted? (Resetting all prefs to default in the program doesn't fix this).