Let's talk about Latency (and Game Mode)

[JulianoFdeS]

@aorin1

Another improvement shown in the video above I forgot mentioning is the ability of the core/frontend to preload the CHD into memory, and the added increased CD reading speeds/seek time, I probably could go even further to eliminate loading times as the game is split into small sections that needs to load here and there.

Wait, this question is off-topic for my own thread but I must know this, what core are you using and this works in any PS1 game? I tried to eliminate the long loading times of Diablo (this is the only annoying downside of this port in my opinion) but I had no sucess at all.

[aorin1]

If you use normal Bin+Cue or Isos, make sure to check 'Preload CD-ROM Image to RAM, if you use CHD, the best option is the highlighted, while preloading games into RAM doesn’t have too much to do with the read/seek speed, it can definitely help avoiding hiccups if using a normal HDD. In Swanstation and probably in Mednafen too you can shorten load times by using the other highlighted options, be aware that depending on the game, it can hang, while others benefit a lot from the increased read/seek speeds, so if you notice a game misbehaving, try lowering the speed or default it altogether, I think Diablo won’t have issues, but you should try it to make sure.

[RealNC]

Note that pre-cache/preload is mostly useful for unreliable storage devices (like when you have your CD images on some network device that can suddenly become very slow or completely drop-out from time to time.)

On a normal HDD (let alone an SSD) it’s not really useful. The 10x read speed option for example only requires 6MB/s from your storage device. Through a network you might not get that at all times, but from your local storage, it’s pretty much guaranteed.

[aorin1]

@RealNC

Note that pre-cache/preload is mostly useful for unreliable storage devices (like when you have your CD images on some network device that can suddenly become very slow or completely drop-out from time to time.)

Other benefits by using the caching, specially for USB external HDDs, is that it also avoids hiccups since these devices sleep in a few minutes (you can use a third party program to avoid that but this is an extra layer/step to take and the power options to keep it ON all the time in Windows never worked, it always turns off, I had a few in the past and it can be annoying. That can probably make HDDs live a bit longer too, since the games need random access like the real thing, the HDD is accessed frequently, long games and extensive play sections makes so that having it in the RAM is the better option as well.