So, ParaLLEl wasn't much of a success?

Libretro Cores
#1

This emulator was big news in mid July. People suggested that this will finally make N64 emulation great. But i feel like it died out. Pretty much nobody talks about it anymore.

As for the emulator so far, i don’t know. The only game i have found that justifies it’s existence is F-Zero X. It looks as perfect as in the standalone Angrylion but it runs full speed while on the standalone Angrylion it’s slow. Other games i tried are either almost as slow as in the standalone Angrylion or they look broken (unlike the standalone which makes 99% of games look perfect).

Now, i haven’t tried too many games (about 20 or so). But there was a thread recently in Reddit where the OP tried to make a list of games that are the best to play on ParaLLEl. And needless to say, it wasn’t very active. Apart from F-Zero X, Body Harvest and a couple of other games (i remember Pokemon snap) i don’t remember many other suggestions. And by the way, Body Harvest was already perfect + fast on the standalone Angylion so i can’t feel Vulkan’s influence there. F-Zero X is pretty much the only game where i can see it.

So anyway, what’s going on with this emulator? I know it’s maybe too soon to judge but it’s this silence that makes me wonder. Are people using/testing it? Is it active?

#2

The biggest problem for me regarding ParaLLEl is that I can’t run it even when I have the hardware for it which is a huge turn-off (I can’t seem to run anything that has to do with Vulkan) I’ve said before it’s driver related because that’s the only thing that it could be. I’m on Crimson 16.3.2 because they’re stable, anything newer and everything becomes a unstable mess.

I’m sorry, but not being able to run it or try it out properly because of constant crashes probably is the reason why people is silent about it. They’re like me, they gave up if you ask me.

Personally I only have 11 games to begin with and every single one of them is playable in Project64 1.7.0.50 rev23 from start to finish so there is no panic there.

Other then that I don’t know what to say, I’ve lost interest and I hope AMD have fixed the drivers until I regain my interest.

#3

The author took a break from the RDP work and started working on an RSP dynarec because that’s what was bottlenecking performance in most cases. There have been a few RDP updates lately, including a small change to fix the shadows on Pilotwings, though I don’t know if it’s been merged into mainline yet or just in the author’s fork.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and there are other complications like buggy drivers that are holding things back, as well.

#4

I can respect that @hunterk. N64 is my favorite console of all-time so I’m patiently waiting, but at the same time really want Parallel to work. Do you have a timeline on when you think a beta will be released or is that too difficult to tell?

#5

Yes i agree completely with you Hunterk.

It’s just that ParaLLEl felt like something big instead of another version of an old emulator. I know it’s based on Mupen64 but with all the hype before it’s release and the information we got, i was convinced that this had enough differences to be considered a big jump. I was thinking something like what Mednafen’s Saturn emulator ended up being. The moment that core made it’s appearance, it made Yabause and even SSF pretty much obsolete. That’s what i was expecting with ParaLLEl. A core that will make Mupen and PJ64 obsolete (Both Mupen and PJ64 feel like using the equivalent of ZSNES these days :P).

I guess i was expecting too much too soon? Can’t blame me though, i’m into N64 emulation (and testing games) ever since UltraHLE was released. The wait for a proper N64 emulator (that doesn’t need combinations of dozens of plugins and configurations to be compatible with all games) is already almost 2 decades long.

I won’t lie, after Mednafen Saturn i wishfully expect that a fresh N64 core from them will pop up some day, unexpectedly, that will make the same thing for the N64 scene the moment it appears.

#6

The hype for ParaLLEl is well-deserved for technical reasons: what it is–i.e., a software renderer running massively parallel (hence the name) on the GPU–has never been done successfully (someone tried it once with PCSX2 but it never got anywhere) and could potentially represent an entirely new way of approaching accurate emulation of more modern consoles. But from an end-user perspective, it’s just Angrylion but faster (and maybe not even observably faster, at that, depending on your hardware) at best, and Angrylion plus a bunch of bugs at worst.

The libretro group is very, very different from Mednafen. Ryphecha works mostly alone and in private and only puts out tarball releases when she’s ready for end-users to play with it. We have a variety of people doing a variety of things publicly and transparently on github, where end-users regularly poke around in things long before they’re really ready for consumption. Neither way is better than the other, they just represent very different development cultures.

ParaLLEl may end being the amazing, magical super-emu you’re hoping for, but probably not. I think your expectations are unrealistically high. But who knows? Only time will tell.

#7

If it ends even just marginally better than PJ64 I’ll be more than happy to support it. It will not be a difficult task IMO, but you never know…

#8

Standalone PJ64 isn’t just that though. It supports a myriad of plugins. And saves different plugins and settings per game. I personally tested more than 200 games on it so far and managed to make them all work nearly flawlessly or with minor glitches. Apart from the usual suspects like Vigilante 8, Indiana Jones and Battle for Naboo everything else works if you put the time to test which plugins and which version of said plugins work the best for each game.

You can’t have this with ParaLLEl. If a game doesn’t work or is heavily glitched, you can’t just use other plugins. And i think that the ability to use all these plugins is still essential for decent N64 emulation since the system still isn’t emulated properly.

#9

That’s kinda the point, though. Yes, you can fumble around with a bunch of closed-source, Windows-only plugins and game-specific hacks that require per-game hand-tuning because what “fixes” one game breaks another, or you can do it correctly once and have it work everywhere.

When Tiny Tiger fixes a bug/implements a behavior in ParaLLEl, it’s fixed in all games that use that behavior without causing 10x more regressions to pop up in other games. It’ll take time to finish it (the current release is pre-alpha) but it’s actually a clear path to good emulation instead of new hacks on top of old hacks (see also: gln64).

#10

The plugin settings in PJ64 isn’t a matter of fixing one thing and breaking another. Because you can save plugins and settings per game (from version 1.7 and up, you can’t do that with 1.6). Each game has it’s own and doesn’t affect any other game. It’s like having each one in it’s own sandbox. Once you test each game manually this way and setup your config file, you basically end up with an emulator that runs everything seemingly perfect. There are very few games that can resist any combination. Like 5 or 6 out of 300+ games released. So far, for me it’s only 2 out of 200. And there’s one game where the sound is messed up no matter what sound plugin you use (Top Gear Rally).

Other than that, i agree with you. This is a “hacky” method to make an emulator compatible with everything and it’s not user friendly at all. Which is why i hope for a fresh core, that isn’t based on ancient, hacky works like PJ64 and Mupen, to take over and just work without all that crap. I remember reading that N64 emulation needs new cores and how Pj64 and Mupen pulls everything back today. Like taking ZSNES and trying to make an accurate emulator out of it. Which is why i’m skeptical about ParaLLEl right now since it’s based on Mupen64 (AFAIK). But then again, i don’t know anything about programming so i might be wrong.

Anyway, i tested a few more games today with ParaLLEl, Blast Corps and Mario Tennis seem to work like a charm. Cruisin USA crashed on me after a couple of minutes. Pilotwings is as slow as using Pj64+Angrylion.

#11

Progress update on ParaLLEl RDP/RSP -

http://www.libretro.com/index.php/parallel-rdp-and-rsp-updates-september-2016/

BTW, Zilmar’s stuff is not ‘perfect’ in the least. That Glide64 plugin he baked into PJ64 is less accurate than the Glide64 version we have in Mupen64 libretro. That ambientmalice dude wasn’t even competent enough to backport my wobbling patches adequately.

The sound emulation is pretty bad too and it seems to crash randomly with specific games, and no 64-bit dynarec. Honestly it’s pretty much a shitshow and that is without even considering the nagging and all the other immoral crap going on. I don’t see why you come to this channel and make this kind of post honestly. You know which side of the fence we are going to be on and you know what we are going to say on the matter.

I won’t lie, after Mednafen Saturn i wishfully expect that a fresh N64 core from them will pop up some day, unexpectedly, that will make the same thing for the N64 scene the moment it appears.

Saturn/PSX are still 2D systems, N64 is a totally different ballgame. Not wanting to cast aspersions on Ryphecha and her relative skills, I applaud Mednafen Saturn, but honestly, for N64 emulation, she doesn’t have much to bring to the table since 1) you need a dynarec pretty much which no Mednafen emulator has ever had, and 2) software rendering isn’t going to cut it and none of the existing emulators shows any high-level understanding of GL/Vulkan, at least not to the degree you’d need to make something similar to ParaLLEl.

Honestly I find you having a lack of understanding of the actual principles being involved and then casting aspersions on other projects like ours to be pretty annoying and denigrating to the project as a whole.

A bunch of endusers in here who don’t have a donkey’s clue about the challenges surrounding N64 RDP/RSP emulation and OpenGL/Vulkan programming should honestly be the last in here to be acting like quarterback referees judging the ‘merits’ of this or that project. Vulkan by itself right now is in a completely experimental state, there are drivers out there right now by top Fortune 500 companies that are STILL BROKEN and they DON’T CARE, and then you want to cast all sorts of aspersions as to what YOU expect out of this project? At a point in time when literally, there are less than 4/5 commercial games with Vulkan support and we are pretty much one of the few homebrew teams on Earth right now with this kind of impressive tech demo? Come the hell on dude, get real and start at least reading the blog post and see how much work and effort is going into all of this. Maybe then you’ll finally get a frame of reference about the actual challenges involved.

#12

Alright then.

Thanks for the update.

#13

Glide64 is outdated anyway. The plugin that should be used in almost all cases is GlideN64. Not sure why this plugin isn’t supported by Mupen64 though since it’s open source. And much better than any other graphics plugin except Angylion’s (but it’s faster).

#14

Gliden64 is outdated by default since it’s just a fork of GLN64.

Gliden64 is also not better for every game, and it has several regressions itself and things that Glide64 does well.

Glupen64 is another N64 libretro core (based off the current mupen64plus libretro) which has gliden64 incorporated, but there are several issues still with the GL state machine which prevents me from just pulling it in.

Anyway, Gliden64 is all hype and no delivery. I don’t really have any high impressions of either Gonetz or that plugin. But sure, we can support it eventually down the line. But whichever way you cut it, it’s yet another hacky HLE plugin, based off an existing HLE plugin as well which is donkey’s years old. It’s not really all that significant compared to ParaLLEl.

#15

From my own testing, i find GlideN64 the best of any plugin, except Angrylion (which i believe is the plugin ParaLLEl is using)??

Also, GlideN64 has a LLE mode as well. Using this mode it plays World Driver Championship and Stunt Race 64 almost perfectly (although the lens flare effect is missing on WDC) which is really impressive. It’s the only plugin (along with Angrylion) that shows all visual effects in F-Zero X (shine effect on cars). It fixes texture bugs in Goldeneye and it’s the only plugin that runs Beetle Adventure Racing with no glitches (Snow level fogging is correct for instance) and corrects the menu transitions. I could go on, there are many other instances where GlideN64 reigns above the “regular” Glide64 plugin. But that’s from my personal experience so others may have a different one, i don’t know.

It’'s something that i would like to see implemented on Mupen64 but in the end, it’s ParaLLEl that matters the most right now.

#16

There is a libretro core that uses latest GLideN64 - https://github.com/loganmc10/GLupeN64

imo there is still a need for a decent HLE plugin as many popular devices don’t support vulkan, and/or don’t have the CPU/GPU grunt for paraLLEl. plus running games in higher rez. not to take anything away from paraLLEl, which is super cool for all the other reasons already mentioned.

#17

@Twinaphex: I’d be interested in the Vulkan bugs you run into and which vendors do the best job. Kind of like the Dolphin blog post about OpenGL drivers a while back :slight_smile: A post like that could be linked to from Phoronix and other news sites for more visibility. Aside from that, keep up the good job! I love playing around with Vulkan and paraLLEl currently :slight_smile: