Need Help......Definitions/answers

[sinnedone]

I tried searching and looking at the wiki but could not manage to find the answer.

The thing is threre are alot of checkboxes and choices for emulation on snes and Gens. So I wanted to know what all these mean and what they do. Some things are self explanatory like frameskip but others are abbreviated and not so easy to figre out. If anyone could please give a explenatin of what each of these is and what it does it would be greatly appreciated.


Snes

1. fast sprites
2. transparancy
3. ign fixed color changes
4. ign clip window changes
5. ign add/sub changes
6. ign pallete writing

Gens n Snes

1. smoothing



If its in the wiki or posted somewhere else please post a link. I tried searching but came up with no results.

[_Em]

SNES:

1) Sprite code (the stuff that animates objects in the foreground on the screen) is optimized for speed instead of accuracy; you might find some graphical glitches appear as the sprites move across the background on your screen. I've never seen this happen however; the sprites just get drawn in a faster/more efficient way than they were in the original system.

2) The SNES had an alpha blending layer in its graphics code -- this allows fancy effects with water/clouds/etc. where one image could be seen through another. Turning this off speeds up emulation as you don't have to crunch both sets of numbers and merge the images -- but some games require you to be able to see back to the second image layer in order to do something correctly in the game. Plus, transparency effects just plain look nicer.

3) If a pixel is already shaded a certain colour on the screen, turning this on means the emulator doesn't bother to try setting it to that colour a second time. With it turned off, all pixels get updated with every screen refresh.

4) Not all graphics being generated actually get displayed on-screen. Ignoring clip window changes means that off-screen graphics updates are ignored (I think). Enabling this provides a performance increase -- but some games use that clip space to store data or pre-buffer images. On these games, turning that off could really mess up the game (it could look horrible, or even lock up or refuse to run).

5) Now we're getting into the SNES video hardware coding -- the SNES has some speedups for developers like the ability to keep images already on-screen and add/subtract from them based on what is in the buffer. Ignoring this gives a nominal speed increase for games that don't take advantage of this feature.

6) Pretty much the same as 5, but with a different coding feature.

Gens & SNES:
1) Instead of scaling up the blocky image as it would be displayed on an original system, you have the opportunity to "smooth" the scaled up image, so that edges of objects look smoother. This is similar to antialiasing fonts on your computer screen. The more you smooth something, the more CPU overhead you need.

[samphex]

It'd be awesome if you could put that all on the wiki.

[icefire]

BTW, Smoothing is not just for GENZ/SNES, but for all the systems.

[_Em]

Apr 14, 2008 22:39:43 GMT 1 samphex said:

It'd be awesome if you could put that all on the wiki.

I wrote it... you can copy/paste it into the Wiki

[_Em]

Apr 14, 2008 23:47:21 GMT 1 icefire said:

BTW, Smoothing is not just for GENZ/SNES, but for all the systems.

Not true... many of the systems use standard blitters (HQ2X, 2XSAI, etc.).

[icefire]

I wouldn't know, I just use Zodiac smoothing :-)

Isn't that smoothing anyway? It is "smoothing it", right?

EDIT: thanks for that post on the SNES options, i didn't know any of that!

[Tinnus]

It's all smoothing and all filters (2xSaI, Scale2xSaI, HW) are in the "smoothing" category. GB and GG have the 2x ones + Zodiac HW, and other non-2x-alike systems have LJP-cool-asm-smoothing, StretchNesterJ and Scale2xSaI.

Of course LJX can just use HW, Scale2xSaI or any of the 2x scalers for any source/dest values

[icefire]

I like L2QX a LOT, but because of no fullscreen in LJP on Zodiac with it, I cant use it :-(

Another good part of LJX (already!)

[sinnedone]

Thanks for that complete and very full reply _Em. Its appreciated.


SO some speed up and some slow down the emulation process with trade offs in picture quality.

This definately needs to make it to the wiki.

Time to go play with settings on snesand gen