Endless Paradigm

StrmnNrmn Wrote:I had planned on posting this update on Monday, but I've spent the last couple of nights catching up on a few games that I've not had chance to play since they were released (Crackdown on the 360 and Afterburner : Black Falcon on the PSP for the curious :)

For R11 I'm hoping to fix the Expansion Pak support for once and for all. Memory is currently very tight, so I need to look at shaving off a few hundered KB here and there. Almost all the memory Daedalus uses is allocated up front - there are very few dynamic allocations at runtime, with the biggest culprit being the texture cache. So for R11 I want to introduce a pooled allocator for the texture cache, which will mean that when it runs out of memory, you just get white textures appearing rather than a hard crash.

The other feature I want to improve in R11 is the way that global settings and per-rom settings are handled. At the moment Daedalus discards any changes to settings that you make when you restart your PSP, and it can be incredibly tedious setting things up every time you run a game. This is quite a small feature to add, but I think it will make the emulator much nicer to use.

Behind the scenes, I want to spend a short while working on some scripts to handle packaging new releases for distribution. Current I do all of this by hand, and it's one of the things I least enjoy about the project. Hopefully, the more automated I can make this, the more frequently I'm likely to release builds :)

I'd like to get all these changes done and release R11 within a couple of weeks. I have a couple of busy weekends coming up, so I'm not going to specify an exact date. You can expect it before May though (I'll try not to be a couple of days late this time :)

R11 is essentially going to be a compatibility release - hopefully the Expansion Pak support will lead to a few more roms running (Majora's Mask being one I've already verified). Looking further ahead, R12 will be back to concentrating on speed (as it happened, R10 achieved a 10-15% speedup without having implemented the majority of the optimisations I had planned :)

So lets put it this way, StrmnNrmn plans on working on R11 this next few weeks wanting to fix the Expansion Pak once and for all making more roms compatible, and he will also be working on per-rom settings, so when you change a setting it will stay changed.

Then after R11 he will be back to working on speed improvements for R12 (And that's what wee like to hear) ;)

Via- - http://strmnnrmn.blogspot.com/2007/04/r11-plans.html

NIIce
can't he make a swapfile for the memory issues? but make it optional...
i dno
i mean, the texels that would otherwise be white can be loaded from the swapfile later on taking maybe a second or something but still be better to have just a few load breaks than no texel at all...

ill be waiting for R11 or if im not patient enough ill just install R10, and later R12. more options would be cool? is there an option to display the framerate in screen? also, if he used a swapfile you could make it pause one rom and start another, then later pause that rom and switch back to the first one :P

yes on R10 you can display the framerate on the screen

nice. i have R9 atm

R10 is way faster

Urgh, I hate programming dynamic stuff - so much more of a pain that statically doing stuff, but dynamic is way more efficient though.

hmm idk what zinga just said but if its better then it should be done!

I just can't wait for it to be full speed

i just want to wake up from this nightmare and go back to a life where sony FW is developer friendly to the last byte, i have a dream where sony will allow for homebrew and customizing psp, i have a dream where sony will take all that pride and divulge it into something that developers can use, i have adream that will never come true