3DO Emulation

drake999

I have a Pi3, maybe I will install it and give it a shot.

ProxyCell

name a 3dO game and i will test it for you

opensourcefan

How about Dragons Lair

ProxyCell

painfully slow
though not as bad as the Jaguar game I just tried...

opensourcefan

Thanks for testing that, guess we need to wait for Pi4.

ProxyCell

yeah maybe pi4 but lets also hope that the new 64bit cpu in the pi3 can be used to greater effect

i had just tested "Tempest 2000" for the jaguar and boy was that terrible. talk about a slideshow. at least dragon's lair kinda moved along

drake999

I suspect the issue lies in the coding of the emulator since PSX emulation is so flawless out of the box. I'm no expert but it seems to me if PSX can run flawlessly and N64 can run acceptably for most games, then a lowly 3DO running at 12.5 MHz should be a piece of cake. I don't think waiting for the CPU power to incrementally increase with each generation of Pi until it runs at an acceptable pace is a solution myself, but I guess we are dependent on the developers of the emulator code for optimizations. Oh well, would be nice to have working 3DO emulation but I guess we can't have everything.

dankcushions

@drake999 CPU speed or system complexity doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how an emulator should perform. a fully accurate SNES emulator needs a 3GHz x86 processor, for example :) i think ultimately the 3do wasn't a very popular system, so there's not too many people working on it, but for all i know the current emulator is actually very efficient for what it's doing.

the majority of the work porting emulators to the libretro API is done by one person so let's not downplay the effort here. if you want to help, get coding :) i can see that on the github page there's some unimplemented optimisations for the 3do emulator if anyone wants to help out? https://github.com/libretro/4do-libretro

drake999

@dankcushions I'm not a coder. I'm a networking and security specialist, and an electronics hobbyist with only minor scripting experience. It was not my intention to downplay anyone's efforts, just express my mild frustration that this feature did not work well yet and to see if their were any ways around it I did not know about. I know a great deal of work has gone into this project to make it what it is and I and numerous others are extremely grateful for that.

drake999

I'm curious how Mega Race performs myself. Has anyone tested it yet? I've used 4DO on PC before and I found it to run quite well on there but haven't tested on the Pi yet simply because of it's experimental status and the fact that it run slow on a Pi 2. Since the Pi 3 is not a huge leap forward in 32-bit mode vs and overclocked Pi 2, I haven't bothered testing with my Pi 3 yet either.

drake999

@ProxyCell Lol, yeah I'm not surprised about your results with Jaguar emulation since the system is such an odd ball from the design perspective. As I understand it, the system is almost as complex as a Saturn.

drake999

@dankcushions I agree with you that there are no black and white / cut and dry rules which dictate that system complexity is directly proportional to emulation processing requirements but I think we can likely agree it is a significant factor. But yes your right, because the 3DO didn't enjoy mass market adoption there has most likely been less emphasis on developing and improving emulators for it. Still it has some great games that would be great to see the Pi run one day.

ProxyCell

@drake999 megarace is terrifyingly slow - the short video clip where the host says his "have a nice death, baby!" was really in slow-motion. with his voice coming across as really deep and guttural. Had I not known what I was playing I would have naturally assumed it was a recording from a microphone lowered into some dark pit to record the sounds of hell and the tormented.

the racing portion was very slow as well, unplayably so.

drake999

@ProxyCell Lol, ok thanks for letting me know. I appreciate you testing it for me.

BuZz

@ProxyCell lol :-)

drake999

I found what looks to be a stable overclock for the Pi 3 where you clock the CPU at 1400 MHz, the GPU at 500 MHz and use an overvolt of 6, but given the results ProxyCell received during his testing, I doubt a 200 MHz boost will make much difference. I guess I will have to hold off on 3DO for the time being. Thanks everyone for your input.

ProxyCell

you're very welcome, i can always test other games assuming they are easy to obtain

ProxyCell

@drake999 I also have tried overclocking the RPi3 and yes, I have used those exact values and many more. Even at 1300 it was not perfectly stable for me. I had it on 1400 for an entire day of constant testing, different emulators, quitting each one, going back through ES to try different roms out, everything was great until I restarted it and suddenly it went into unstable-mode.

It got better but still it scared me enough to give up on OC for now

The dreamcast isn't that bad actually, give that and the PSP a shot. They are just hovering at the borderline.

drake999

@ProxyCell Hi ProxyCell. Thanks for your continued testing. I suspected that 3DO emulation would continue to demand more processing power, beyond what the Pi is capable of. Not being a coder I can only speculate, but I suspect it is because the emulator is not optimized for this architecture. Thanks very much for your efforts in testing though, I'm sure the information you've provided will not only be useful to me, but perhaps the development community as well. Don't push your Pi too hard, I don't want to see you burn out your CPU. Thanks again for your efforts.

drake999

@ProxyCell Lol, sorry I thought you were referring to 3DO emulation specifically. I haven't had the guts to overclock my Pi boards beyond the confirmed stable values. If I were a bit richer I might lol. I imagine that stable overclocking speeds on the Pi3 is extremely variable from chip to chip right now, which is probably why overclocking the Pi3 is not officially supported yet. I'm just guessing though.