Mednafen PSX - more overclock options?

Libretro Cores
#1

Hello. My first post on the fourms, and it is more-less a suggestion or idea. I have been playing Chrono Cross using Mednafen PSX on RetroArch, and with the overclock toggled, it looks great! (Maintains a semi-stable 30FPS, sometimes drops to 20FPS, rarely 15FPS when many monsters are present with intensive element effects being rendered)

However, as far as I know, Chrono Cross can run up to a full 60FPS, as i’ve seen in early parts of the game, and it makes me wish that the overclock were faster than it was, so I suggest this idea: Rather than a simple on/off toggle for the overclock, instead, have a few values available to the user: 1.25x, 1.50x, 1.75x, 2.0x, 2.5x and 3.0x.

Certain standalone emulators have an overclock option, but seem to make audio too fast, which is the case with Chrono cross, which is a shame, as at 3x CPU speed, it maintains a considerably stable 60FPS.

#2

Bump | | | | |

#3

Need the attention of a dev. Again, this is a legit post. Not sure why all the others are getting replies.

#4

Afaik its not as simple as just “adding more scaling options” since the way overclocking is implemented in the core doesn’t allow that.

Overclocking in other emulators/videos probably either relies on game-specific hacks or comes at the expense of less accuracy / more glitches (like the audio issues that you mentioned), both of which are not the aim of mednafen.

#5

Far as I know, PCSX2 was able to eventually implement overclocking without audio issues, and helps certain games run better, like the Kingdom Hearts games with the 60FPS patches. But regardless, even just implementing more overclocking options w/out audio problems would decrease the accuracy, correct? If so, is the already existing “Overclock” toggle all we might see?

#6

[QUOTE=VibbyVibbs;40175]like the Kingdom Hearts games with the 60FPS patches. [/QUOTE] Case in point, for this to work you have to “modify” the game data itself to get rid of a game-specific limitation (or rather the cheat system patches it internally when the game is loaded but it has the same effect).

Besides, you can’t really compare those two emulators since they’re emulating different systems and therefore using different tricks/workarounds specific to their hardware to achieve faster emulation, thats like comparing apples with oranges.

Obviously I can’t speak on behalf of the libretro team since I’m just an ordinary user so I can’t say if other overclock implementations for the core might ever happen but you could look at other (open source) PSX emulators that feature overclocking to see how they implemented it and then possibly port that over to the libretro core (assuming it doesn’t conflict with the current implementation) as a secondary option to the existing one.

Though I imagine that they are currently busy with more important things regarding the core (OpenGL renderer, fixing bugs that are not present in newest mednafen version, etc).

#7

Yeah. . . seems like they may have to work on the OpenGL renderer before they even think of CPU overclocking without audio/video issues. . .

(Chrono Cross seems to really hate the 3-point N64 texture filtering and renderer as a whole. . . Serge becomes THIS every now and then for a few frames.)