MSX emulators performance

By Vampier

Prophet (2415)

29-05-2010, 17:57

Of course, no emu is like the real thing

openMSX is the 2nd best experience to the real thing (c)(r)(tm)

By Manuel

Ascended (19678)

29-05-2010, 20:16

If you want to try the latest openMSX binary for Dingoo, you can always visit our IRC channel and we can make one for you.

We will probably include the Dingoo binary in the next openMSX release (0.8.0), which is going to be released "soon", but it helps if more people test it. It will include quite some useful stuff for Dingoo No crashes. The only drawback is that the startup time is still a bit long (about 8 seconds, if I remember correctly). OTOH: you don't need to start up often

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

30-05-2010, 11:26

You could try nlMSX or if your computer is really old, and runs something like win9x or older, you could try BrMSX (which is fast as it can be!). Both emulators gives reasonable accuracy to play games.

Of course, no emu is like the real thing

The PC is an AMD Athlon XP3000+ computer with 1GB of RAM and Nvidia-based videocard.

I used to run BrMSX and fMSX-DOS in the 90s and mainly for debugging purposes, but I'm looking for something closer to my real A1GT (which I can't use at this moment because it's in my hometown).

Thank you anyway for your suggestion.

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

30-05-2010, 11:31

Of course, no emu is like the real thing

openMSX is the 2nd best experience to the real thing (c)(r)(tm)

Well... according my own experience on it, I would prefer BlueMSX, it looks more realistic to me.

Anyway I love the overall features of OpenMSX, I think it's a great piece of software.

By Manuel

Ascended (19678)

30-05-2010, 13:49

warau: can you give some feedback on openMSX? What can we improve? How can we make the experience more interesting for you? What is not realistic?

By sd_snatcher

Prophet (3675)

30-05-2010, 20:00

warau: can you give some feedback on openMSX? What can we improve? How can we make the experience more interesting for you? What is not realistic?

Hi Manuel!

OpenMSX is indeed a great emulator. But if I may, there are some simple features that could make the experience more interesting for users:

- Windows: Add an easy way to handle harddisk images on Catapult, just like the floppydisk images

- Macintosh: The new apple compact keyboards don't have the insert key. Using the MSX-BASIC without this key quite troublesome. openMSX needs to have a solution for this.

- Windows and Mac: Better native support for international keyboard layouts, both on host and emulated machines. The current solution is still troublesome if the host machine OS uses ghost keys (like US-International, Brazilian ABNT2 and so on)

- Macintosh: Implement set grabinput=auto. Maybe other OSes also need this.

- Development: Add MegaROM and MegaRAM registers available as debuggables and support those registers on pc_in_slot. Its hard to debug megaroms without this.

By Manuel

Ascended (19678)

30-05-2010, 22:57

sd_snatcher: about the US International, you probably mean this: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3009235&group_id=38274&atid=421861

By sd_snatcher

Prophet (3675)

03-06-2010, 18:01

@Manuel

Yes. In fact this bug affects all deadkeys, not only the ' and " and not only the US-International layout. The Brazilian ABNT2 is also affected and probably other layouts with deadkeys (german?) are.

The complete list of US-International deadkeys is: ~ ` ^ ' "
(all of them suffer from this bug)

The brazilian ABNT2 layout has trouble with the same list of keys, but there's one characteristic to take into account: It has the ~ ` ^ ' " keys that are deadkeys (used only to produce accented letters) and dedicated ' " keys that are not deadkeys, used to produce quotes.

By AuroraMSX

Paragon (1902)

04-06-2010, 10:50

- Macintosh: The new apple compact keyboards don't have the insert key. Using the MSX-BASIC without this key quite troublesome. openMSX needs to have a solution for this.Even the non-compact keyboards don't have an insert key! In MSX BASIC you can use the key combination CTRL+R instead. Alternatively you can map any key or key combination to the insert key...

By anonymous

incognito ergo sum (116)

08-06-2010, 22:08

warau: can you give some feedback on openMSX? What can we improve? How can we make the experience more interesting for you? What is not realistic?

Of course :-)

To say why it isn't realistic is not an easy task; the resulting feeling of the whole experience depends on many variables; anyway there are several points that are crystal clear to me:

-Keyboard response: it's true that BlueMSX doesn't work the way I'd like, but I think it's a bit more realistic. In OpenMSX I feel that keyboard response is slow and playing some arcade games is a pain. Did't try with a Joystick though.

-Graphics and animations: the sprites, scroll, etc. move smoother on the real MSX. With OpenMSX I feel that scroll and fast graphics movements flick a bit (I specially experienced many frame drops). It also happens in BlueMSX, but I think that BlueMSX graphics and video sync are more accurate.

-Scanlines: I hate them in both BlueMSX and OpenMSX, but I feel that OpenMSX scanlines annoy a bit more.

-Sound: well... I definitively hate MSX sound emulation, no matter which emulator is been used. I think this could be improved by adding some "analog-sounding" process, similar to the ones used by professional music producers (there are a lot of VST plug-ins offering that kind of features).

Yes I know that MSX audio chips are all of them 100% digital (including our beloved PSG), but the "classic" MSX sound is not only the raw waveform at the output of the chip, since it's modulated by the particular analog circuitry of each MSX machine as well as the old speaker of the TV, etc.

-Debugging: I read something about a debugger inside the OpenMSX... I couldn't manage to use it properly (maybe I didn't spend enough time on it) so I miss a good real debugger "ala Borland" for the Windows edition of OpenMSX.

I hope to be helpful with my opinion.

And thank you all for the efforts in creating decent emulators. I know it's a really hard task. :-)