High FPS but stuttering and lagging, music tempo varying

[Petroleus]

Hey guys,

Looked to see if any posts adressed my issues, but didn't really find it.

Just got my Desire Z (G2) in monday and have been tryin different emulators, including FPse. What I notice is first of all very high fps, 45+ without frameskipping, which I had not expected, but still an awkward type of lag kind of like the emulation speed is defined by a sine-wave or something. Music does not stutter, but it speeds up randomly and slows down, very slightly, but incredibly annoying. I've used three roms that I created according to the instructions on here somewhere for CloneCD, crash 1, crash 3 and ctr, the first two have the music issue, and the latter didn't run at all. Crash 1 actually worked quite nicely, high fps, good responsiveness, but I was just too annoyed by the music to play on. Crash 3 was alot harder on it, with the game at 43 FPS but skipping to 4-6 fps when it got complicated, and the music like crash 1, would speed up and slow down. I've played both these games alOT on the ps so I know exactly what they are supposed to sound like.

I haven't gotton to try other roms yet, but I was hoping some of you had ideas as to the problems I'm having. I would be perfectly fine with 30 fps, if that would result in a smooth emulation, but instead I get 45 and stuttering. Setting frameskip to 50 seemed to help a bit with crash 3, but the music issue remained.

I've heard people hinting at changing ini files, but with a non-rooted phone i can't find it so far :\

Playing without music kind of ruins the deal for me, it's everything or nothing.

hope to hear from u guys Will try tomb raider 3, croc and Mobil 1 rally championship roms when I have time to rip them, and will update how they run.

Petroleus

[EDIT]: just remembered, with the later roms i deviated from the tutorial by setting audio quality to high, to see if that helped.

[Petroleus]

Hey, thanks for the reply

Could you maybe link to the crash rom you used? I tried ripping my own, but perhaps you have a more solid one. And also to the tekken rom?

I've tried tomb raider III. It worked quite well, except that the background sound, be it music or fluttering trees had a crackle in it. Also the framerate would drop at points.

I don't see why my phone would be the problem. If wiki is correct PS only has 34 Mhz, and my phone has 800, and runs other games fluently and without dropping in FPS or sound being any issue whatsoever. Of course PS is a dedicated system and doesn't have to sync my email, keep track of the time and what not, but still.

I used to have a windows mobile 6.1 (Xperia x1) device, and it was a gazillion times slower than my desire Z, yet if I am correct FPSe was originally made for winmo, so again, I can't imagine the Desire Z underperforming any winmo 6.1 device. Rephrased: if my desire is having trouble with it, my Xperia would probably have 0.1 FPS, yet the xperia is named as example for 'actual device' in the compatibility list.

So unless FPSe is a hugely intense program, I would suspect either some setting being wrong or my roms being bad. I've tried all the settings I could get to, but unfortunately I can't get to the ini's as of yet. Also I tried a few ways to rip the rom, but none with smashing succes. Also, like I said, I don't need 50 FPS, so I would hope that FPSe would, like any other game I know, spend resources on making it fluent before cranking up the speed.

I wantz play!

EDIT: played a few more games just now.

Crash 3: works ok-ish. Without frameskip it hovers anywhere between 30 and 50 fps, occasional spikes over or under. Annoyingly the music tempo is directly tied to the framerate. At 50 fps the music is just about right, but it slows down and speeds up 1:1 with framerate. I play the bass and the drums, so I can't stand it XP. For the rest, quite fluent, no glitches, no lag. With frameskip the game feels ADHD, it music will skip, animations look awkward, the speed is more or less constant, but the way it plays is alot worse.

Croc: The game seems to run well, but at some point trips over its shoelaces or something. It will run well, then stutter untill you pause the game, then run well and start stuttering again. the stutter is like a 10-20hz freeze and unfreeze of the entire simulation (audio and control), effectively slowing the entire simulation down to half normal speed. At this time it is running at 40 fps, with about 5 to 10 fluctuation either way. With Frameskip the game recovers from this tripping, but with any frameskip setting the screen flickers (10hz alternating green or black screen with normal screen), and occasionally speeds up to 60+ fps (with framelimiter) which increases the frequency of the music as well. It is playable, but not very enjoyable.

Mobil 1 rally racing: the game seems to be working best of all games I tried. For some reason though there is no music. Most of the simulation seems to be running fine, althoug sometimes I think the game overregisters keypresses. Perhaps I just suck though

[Petroleus]

Yeah, sorry about that. I read some other posts and realized my error on that part . It is because I do actually own the games I talked about that I was not really considering anything legally, but I totally understand your position .

actually the desire Z has a 800 Mhz processor, or according to reviews a 1 Ghz processor downclocked to 800 for battery-life. Many reviewers however note that it at least seems as fast or perhaps even faster than ghz counterparts when it comes to games, and I have not noticed any problems myself. I could try closing more programs in the background, but it seems many of them reopen themselves as they see fit :\

But aside from that, why does FPSe, or perhaps the playstation itself, so directly link simulation speed and framerate? Maybe I am ignorant, but being mostly a computer gamer I have never noticed such relations. In fact I play most of my games around 20 fps, because I favor the graphics over the framerate, and love to push AA and AF to the limit of playability. None of the games I ever played had any issues aside from the obvious limitations of having half the nominal framerate. So why is it different for FPSe?

Also I wonder about the settings, as the documentation all seems to be for winmo. My processor is ARMv7, but I haven;t been able to see if that means it can run ARMv5, although generally such things are backwards compatible. Yet I do not see this option in FPSe, and I can't seem to acces the ini's file location. Also I have tried running Mdec and Gte accelerations, but I don't see any differences in performance nor any changes in the issues I described, and I don't know what Boost mode implies either. I understand HLE is basically bios simulation? Talking about bios', could a bad/old/non-european bios be causing any trouble? As I own a PS, I used the same philosophy as mentioned earlier, since I heard it is a great hassle to extract one.

Perhaps what I would want is a more comprehensive documentation including the options given in the android version, most specifically the 'system' and 'video' options, and I mean more than just 'choose when needed, but it will cause slowdown'. I'm a curious guy, I want to know what I am messing with . Also, I don't want to have to look for ini files, which I can't seem to acces anyhow, when it would be just as easy to include it in the options menu :\. Finally: why do I keep having to load my default config, isn't it obvious that the default config should be loaded when it starts?

ok, that is enough nagging . I think it is awesome that this is even possible, and all I hope is to be more able to enjoy the features I tried enduring crash 3 a bit longer and it was doable. Like I said, I love music and I play music, so it just hurts to hear it change rithm like that, but when the game is running well it only varies from 45-55 hz, which is not impossible to ignore. The only problem is when it slows down to 20-30 hz right before a crucial control input is needed to not fall into a pit or something

[shade]

Hey guys,

Looked to see if any posts adressed my issues, but didn't really find it.

Just got my Desire Z (G2) in monday and have been tryin different emulators, including FPse. What I notice is first of all very high fps, 45+ without frameskipping, which I had not expected, but still an awkward type of lag kind of like the emulation speed is defined by a sine-wave or something. Music does not stutter, but it speeds up randomly and slows down, very slightly, but incredibly annoying. I've used three roms that I created according to the instructions on here somewhere for CloneCD, crash 1, crash 3 and ctr, the first two have the music issue, and the latter didn't run at all. Crash 1 actually worked quite nicely, high fps, good responsiveness, but I was just too annoyed by the music to play on. Crash 3 was alot harder on it, with the game at 43 FPS but skipping to 4-6 fps when it got complicated, and the music like crash 1, would speed up and slow down. I've played both these games alOT on the ps so I know exactly what they are supposed to sound like.

with my Desire Z (t-mobile poland) i have the same issue, to be more specific, the game tekken 3 despite of having around 45-50 fps it's really slow and lagging and i notice something strange: that sometimes like a few seconds before camera zoomimg to the characters before fight it's playing smooth but only for a few seconds (1-2s)

[Petroleus]

Lol, in dutch it's just 'ritme' so I never knew it was greek 'makes mental note'.

ah well, I guess I'll just have to keep stalking you then

@shade: I know what you mean. actually the 'inconstantness' is what is most annoying, constant crappy performance would probably be nicer from gaming standpoint