I'd say "near-realtime saving", because it does take a second or so between saving in-game and having the save written to SD.
I sent ikari_01 a message a while ago regarding clock speed differentiation depending on the game you load as well as overclocking of his SuperFX implementation. I figured I should share just in case anyone might be interested in the information (which is very interesting by the way). "Hi, determining the SuperFX version (=speed) that the game wants is pretty straightforward - the SuperFX has a register where the game software itself has to set or clear a specific bit to change the clock speed. GSU-1 can only run at 10.5MHz; GSU-2, while running at 10.5MHz by default, can be switched to 21MHz at run time. My first priority is to get the thing working at all - it will probably be too fast then, anyway Speed control (read: speed bumps) will be implemented after the core is in general working conditions. Overclocking is an option; I don't know yet how much the clock speed can be increased but there is considerable speed potential in memory access latency (because my RAMs are faster than the original games' ones) and multiplier speed (the original SuperFX could only run the multiplier at 10.5MHz even in 21MHz mode, the FPGA does not have that kind of restriction). Regards Maximilian" Keep up the amazing work ikari, I know many people including me are really looking forward to the day this gets fully implemented.
Interesting, so we could have what, Star Fox and Stunt Race FX running near 40-60fps?? Would this sort of Overclocking be able to be applied to any SNES game in the future...thus removing slowdown in games? Could it be implement as an option in (percentage) for each game??
I doubt it. IIRC, the thing about GSU-1/2 is that (at least with polygon games) they basically did all the graphics work, then fed it back to the SNES PPU on a frame-by-frame basis. So they can be overclocked to do this work faster. I don't see how you'd accomplish this with other games, short of getting the FPGA to emulate a faster version of the complete SNES CPU or something.
Certain games like Star Fox 1, actually rely on the capped performance of the Super FX to throttle the game. If it were actually overclocked the game would run so fast it'd be unplayable if you actually were getting 60 frames a second. Star Fox would need reprogramming to actually take advantage of an overclock. Other games may take advantage of a faster Super FX without becoming totally unplayable. But I wouldn't ever expect super smooth framerates.
I´m sure a reasonable compromise can be made and if player can choose the speed, all the better... I don´t know if this is 60fps but this looks quite smooth and playable to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PRwtrdPkvJA#!
Here's the videos I linked to in the message I sent to ikari. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40kvaFRuPiA (Starfox route 3 - 45 Mhz) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDkdYFJl_80 (Starfox route 1 - 45 Mhz) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NovmZ8PNVDE (Stunt Race FX - 30 Mhz) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTNhccGs-0o (Star Fox 2 - 33 Mhz)
SuperFX will take some more time, sorry about that. I'm trying not to stress myself out too much at the moment. When there's presentable progress I will post about it. That said, does anybody here have issues with Firmware 0.1.5 not booting into the menu at all (stopping at "loading database..." or similar)?
thanks for the news ikari. i bought SD2SNES and the biggest reason was future SuperFX support. will you decide if you will implement SA1 or not, after you finish SuperFX?
It has happened to me a couple of times. Do you think it may be an issue, or just following up from a complaint?
Good to hear from you ikari. Do you have any estimate on when you think the SuperFX support will be ready to try out? No stress or anything, just curious on the progress so far.
nothing on the menu for me. i have some freeze with chrono trigger & area88. But i need to try with an another SD card.
Ikari_01, will you implement a Soft reset button combination to go back to the loader menu in the near future? Or is it ditched from the "to-do-list"
