Daedalus R7 Update: More R7 Optimizations

If you’ve been lurking at StrmnNrmn‘s blog site last week to get the latest news on Daedalus R7, you might have noticed that there’s no post since he squashed the nasty little bug that’s causing Mario 64 to be unplayable – another cause for celebration after he achieved both the speed increase and an increase in stability on 1.00 firmware.

Well, his silence for the past few days isn’t really a cause for worry. It just means he’s hard at work with various optimizations for the N64 emulator for the PSP – and that could only be a good thing for all of us!

In his recent blog entry, StrmnNrmn said that while his main focus is on improving the dynamic recompiler, he’s also looking at optimizing other areas that he considered fairly expensive. He’s been working on the texture cache which is used to avoid  converting textures from the native N64 formats to PSP formats every frame.

StrmnNrmn said, “I made a couple of fixes to improve the hashing function which gives much faster lookups in certain situations (such as tiled backdrops). I also provided an option to change the frequency at which the texture cache checks for updates to the textures. Many roms look fine when this check is entirely disabled, and this can give quite a nice speed boost.”

He’s also done a couple of fixes relating to dynarec issue, but the major new development is on optimising for various situations where the contents of a given register is determined at the time the code is compiling.

We’ll spare you the technical stuff (you can read about it in StrmnNrmn’s blog), but what this all means is that StrnmNrman would be very busy for the rest of the week working on optimizations and features to implement. If everything goes according to plan, Daedalus R7 might just be released next weekend!

If you’ve been lurking at StrmnNrmn‘s blog site last week to get the latest news on Daedalus R7, you might have noticed that there’s no post since he squashed the nasty little bug that’s causing Mario 64 to be unplayable – another cause for celebration after he achieved both the speed increase and an increase in stability on 1.00 firmware.

Well, his silence for the past few days isn’t really a cause for worry. It just means he’s hard at work with various optimizations for the N64 emulator for the PSP – and that could only be a good thing for all of us!

In his recent blog entry, StrmnNrmn said that while his main focus is on improving the dynamic recompiler, he’s also looking at optimizing other areas that he considered fairly expensive. He’s been working on the texture cache which is used to avoid  converting textures from the native N64 formats to PSP formats every frame.

StrmnNrmn said, “I made a couple of fixes to improve the hashing function which gives much faster lookups in certain situations (such as tiled backdrops). I also provided an option to change the frequency at which the texture cache checks for updates to the textures. Many roms look fine when this check is entirely disabled, and this can give quite a nice speed boost.”

He’s also done a couple of fixes relating to dynarec issue, but the major new development is on optimising for various situations where the contents of a given register is determined at the time the code is compiling.

We’ll spare you the technical stuff (you can read about it in StrmnNrmn’s blog), but what this all means is that StrnmNrman would be very busy for the rest of the week working on optimizations and features to implement. If everything goes according to plan, Daedalus R7 might just be released next weekend!