Can scraping slow down performance in emulators?

[raspapplepi]

So I overclocked my Pi4 and was getting good speeds on Conker's Bad Fur Day. arm=2000 and gpu=700. I figured my overclocking experimentation was finished and I was happy with the results. I then turned my focus to scraping data to make the collection a bit prettier. I went for the whole 9 yards; I scraped descriptions, videos, the works. So far I've only scraped an almost complete fba romset (I'm doing it over time using skyscraper and adhering to file limitations) and I went back to play Conker. Its now super choppy all of a sudden.

So that said, can scraping slow down the performance in emulators? I'd like to have both performance and flashiness, but performance is ultimately more important.

It might also be worth mentioning I also updated all of the cores today as well, though that should help performance, not hinder.

[pjft]

@raspapplepi That should not have anything to do with it, unless there’s any process still running in the background. Once the media is scraped it stays in the drive, and it’s just used by EmulationStation, not by any emulator in any way.

It might have been something with the cores, but sharing what cores you’re using, the verbose log, etc, might help with diagnosing things.

I am not a N64 expert, though, so I’ll leave that for more knowledgeable people around (of which there are many!).

[Clyde]

Did you by any chance add bezels, overlays, or shaders to your N64 core? Those would slow down the emulator since they're used while playing a game. But Skyscraper doesn't add them, so you'd have done that yourself (and maybe forgot about it?)

[raspapplepi]

I figured out the problem. It wasn't the scraping. Somehow my emulation settings got screwed up. The default emulator had just changed and I didn't realize it. For whatever reason, this game only responds to lr-mupen64plus well. lr-mupen64plus-next just throttles it (even though its supposed to be better?). So yeah, it was my bad.

[Clyde]

Good to hear, and thanks for sharing the outcome, as even "I overlooked something" can be an important hint for others. 👍