Need Help - Performance + Audio problems on Yabause (Saturn)

RetroArch General
#1

I got a massive itch to play the Panzer Dragoon series and found this emulator (which so far I love everything in it!) But I’m having some framerate issues and audio glitches trying to run Panzer Dragoon. I have a mid-2014 MBP 2.6 GHz i5, 8 GB RAM and an Intel Iris 1536 MB, pretty beefy am I right? :^)

Is there any tweaks that I can do to make this playable? The threaded video option justs… oh gawd, it goes from bad to worse.

Better yet, lay it on me if I can’t even play any of the 32 bit generation games :frowning: It’ll save me the heartache of trying to satiate my inner 7 year old nostalgia beast…

#2

Both of the Saturn cores available in RetroArch require very fast CPUs. I’m not sure whether Yabause-libretro or Beetle-Saturn is faster/slower, but I know they’re both demanding.

This is a case where you might need to try Sanshiro (formerly ouYabause; based on Yabause) standalone, which includes a CPU dynarec and hardware renderer. This should make it substantially faster than the libretro cores.

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#3

Ah how… unfortunate. Thanks, I’ll give Sanshiro a try. I’ve read libretro has been working on Yabause to upgrade it’s performance but is there talk of turning this “Sanshiro” into a Saturn core?

Edit: Looks like the Yaba Sanshiro emulator is only on Android, iOS, and Windows… oh woe is me :sob:

#4

It’d be nice to have a ouYabause libretro core yeah.

The main issue why the current Yabause core is so slow is because the dynarec doesn’t work yet. Not entirely sure what the issue was there but I believe the main issue is that the x86_64 backend isn’t PIC-compliant, and that is what we need for libretro cores. Maybe things have changed since then though.

Also, it could really benefit from a working OpenGL renderer.

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#5

The entire post flew waaaay over my head, EXCEPT for “because the dynarec doesn’t work YET.” I’ll just hold out till it gets improved down the line.

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#6

I’ve had more success with the Beetle_Saturn core than Yabause as far as compatibility goes, but I’m also not sure on speed comparisons.

Are the current holdback issues (such as the dynarec [what is that anyway?] not working) with Yabause also affecting the possibility of a Sanshiro port? Or is that a different beast all-together?

I’m just curious mostly, seen a lot of talk about the ouYabause and requests for a core.

#7

If Sanshiro has a new PIC-compliant dynarec, then that’s a good reason to move over to it. I’m guessing it may have one for ARM but is probably still using the same one from Yabause for x86 (not based on anything, just a guess).

For reference, ‘dynarec’ is short for “dynamic recompiler”, which takes instructions for one architecture and dynamically recompiles them (that is, works sort of like a translator) for the host architecture. That is, it takes non-native instructions and converts them to native ones.

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#8

OH!!! Ok, now I get ya. So that’s like the big bulk of how the entire emulator works then, right? That makes much more sense.

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#9

It’s just a small part of the emulator, but it’s one of the more demanding parts.

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#10

I’m a newbie to retroarch and i guess to the emulator scene in general, never knew about Sanshiro until @hunterk suggested it.

As for what’s better, that’s what I read in some posts that Beetle_Staurn/Mednafen (why is the core listed as two different names anyways?) might have an edge but on some games I couldnt run Beetle_Saturn, eg. Panzer Dragoon 2, tried like 3 different versions with the only one working and on Yasause for that matter :confused: Idk I’ll take what I can get I guess and just wait for better optimizations

#11

The author of mednafen asked us to use a different name to reduce confusion if people encounter bugs, etc.

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#12

From my own experience, compatibility comparisons of Yaba Sanshiro and the two Saturn emulator cores goes like:

beetle mednafen > Yaba Sanshiro > Yabause.

But for Performance:

Yaba Sanshiro > beetle Mednafen > Yabause

There’s been some pretty nice compatibility and performance improvements in the recent Sanshiro releases. It’s the only Saturn emulator that runs full speed on mobile Android devices at the moment.

I’m running Yaba Sanshiro on my Shield TV and run the Mednafen and Yabause cores in RetroArch on my laptop with an Intel i5 6200 dual core with HD520 Intel integrated GPU. Which interestingly enough, supports Dx12 and Vulkan with the latest drivers. Still crashes PPSSPP/Dolphin when trying their Vulkan Renders though.

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#13

When a handheld can handle 20+ y/o console graphics while your laptop can only play SNES… Talk about superior optimizations

I’ll try force the games into using Beetle/Mednafen instead of Yabause, although I’ve been having lots of problems “loading content” to be seen by retroarch, it just shows loading 0% in the bottom right and disappears. Whether the game gets recognized is like 20% hit, 80% miss.

#14

I’ve found that Saturn images generally have higher compatibility loading in emulators if they’re in bin/cue format. Try ripping your Saturn games into that format. Iso/wave cue images I’ve found have issues loading sometimes.

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#15

sega saturn emulation is very demanding…

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#16

Tis, I’ll admit it’s baffling how it’s supposed to be CPU intensive(?) but my activity monitor shows my CPU usage not even reaching 50% and that’s with my browser in the background trying to look for solutions.

#17

Nearly every emulator besides RPCS3 are single threaded so they’ll never make a multicore cpu hit 100% usage. The original consoles only had one cpu core so it’s best to emulate them using only 1 core of modern CPUs.

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#18

Ahhhhh, makes sense in terms of simplifying emulation, albeit a pity can’t use multiple cores to make up for a lack of a beefier single core. Thanks for explaining.

#19

Saturn emulation should benefit from Multi Core CPU’s more than most emulated consoles. The Saturn had 2 CPUs and 2 video processing units. But it’s not always as simple as that. For example, Yaba Sanshiro allows you to select multi core for emulation on Windows. I’ve recorded up to 70% CPU usage on my Dual Core Intel Laptop. But the emulator also off loads some VDP processing to the GPU so my Intel HD520 GPU usage goes to about 60% at the same time.