Laggy performance when running emulator?

[leathco]

Can someone give me a hand? I'm running PocketSNES (the version that supports the x51v video card in the games secion of the forum) and with sound enabled I am getting a bit of lag. I have also installed gapi 2.0a (does this run automatically in the background, as I haven't found a startup icon for it) and have shut down all other programs running. There is still a small amount of lag however. I tried Morphgear and still have the lag. Is there anything else I can do to increase performance other than shipping my Axim off for the 128 system memory upgrade? I'm wary of shipping my new Ax of so someone can solder more memory on......

[ksong12]

Dude... its an emulator. Very expectable. Unless you want to like over-clock it an run the chance of overheating and very bad battery life, there isn't much you can do.

[Eric12341]

yea emulation isn't perfect. I remember when I had this one gb/nes emulator for my desktop pc and I was playin zelda 2 and u get to this one level and its all scambled and glichy it jus looked terrible. so jus be glad there's no glitches of that nature.

[leathco]

I was just thinking if my old 333 mh processor and 64 megs of ram system running win 98 had no probs, why does a 624 mh processor, with a graphics accelerator, and 40 megs system ram free lag? Maybe the architecture of the CPU has something to do with it?

[ksong12]

Yeah, and the fact that is Windows Mobile... and its just completely different. Obviously, a desktop program would take better advantage of the processor.

[greenglide]

shipping my Axim off for the 128 system memory upgrade?

You say that you have a X51V, as far as I am aware the upgrade is from 128MB to 256MB which is what you already have! The upgrades I have seen are for the X50 series and cost more than the difference between the second cost of a trade up.

The 333MHz processor running Win 98 is a totally different animal to the 624MHz XScale. The Pentium processor (or AMD equivalent) is VASTLY more powerful that the XScale - but it does use a lot of power!!

[moonlonely]

[QUOTE=greenglide]You say that you have a X51V, as far as I am aware the upgrade is from 128MB to 256MB which is what you already have! The upgrades I have seen are for the X50 series and cost more than the difference between the second cost of a trade up.

The ppctechs upgrade is for RAM, not ROM. The x51v has more rom than the x50v, but because it uses WM5, it actually has less room available for RAM. That said, I'm not sure that more RAM would necessarily make either pocketnes or pocketgba run faster. It would, however, let you open larger roms on pocketgba.

[bluevolume]

I was just thinking if my old 333 mh processor and 64 megs of ram system running win 98 had no probs, why does a 624 mh processor, with a graphics accelerator, and 40 megs system ram free lag? Maybe the architecture of the CPU has something to do with it?

The two systems are very difficult to compare. We can blame Intel's marketing for promoting system speeds like they were "horsepower", but the truth is that unless you are talking about very similar architectures you can't use "MHz" for comparison.

Emulators are extremely taxing on the host system, usually requiring a machine several orders of magnitude more powerful than the original. There's some MAME ROMs that want 2GHz+ PCs to emulate what was originally running on a ~400MHz board.

The solution to this is to either write a better emulator that specifically takes advantage of the video hardware in the x50v/x51v, or to simply re-write the games to run on the WM platform (natively).