Re: Aw: Re: [stella] The future of Stella (i.e. debugger needed)

[Glenn Saunders <mos6507@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 08:45 PM 5/20/2004, you wrote:
> Yes, it falls behind more and more as time passes.  If it were behind the
> same amount at all times, that at least would be tolerable.  As it is,
> the longer you play a game, the more the sound goes out of sync.  Now,
> the sound itself would 'sound' fine; it just wouldn't be synced with
> video.  If I paused the emulation and waited until the sound finished
> playing and then started again, all would be well (for a time).

This may sound naive, but I wanted to mention something about emulator 
timing in general.

One thing which is commonplace in emulators is a tearing effect where the 
framerate of the emulation does not match the framerate of the monitor and 
you can see half a screen of one frame and half a screen of another 
frame.  This is especially noticeable with games that flicker at 30hz like 
Asteroids.

I wish emulators could really try hard to lock their refresh to monitor 
refresh.  If you are at some odd monitor refresh rate, figure out the best 
interval to refresh the display to avoid artefacts.

If an emulator has the ability to pick a custom screen resolution and 
refresh, then it should try to set the PC monitor to 60fps (assuming NTSC) 
and lock the emulation directly to the monitor.  That's as close as you are 
going to come to the real thing, I think.



As far as sound goes, I think one of the reasons Brad was working on the 
sound was to add Pitfall II support to Stella.  (He wound up talking to 
David Crane directly about the DPC chip at one CGExpo)  I think most of the 
ideas he was working on for ActiveStella like the high-score save or his 
dynamic recompilation approach he was going to use for the PS1 wound up in 
the GBA port of Activision Anthology.

http://www.gamespot.com/gba/action/activisionanthology/printable_6085734.html

Brad probably isn't in a position to release some of this code back into 
the Stella distribution, although he can probably give hints on how to 
approach them.


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