Feedback from a grateful 1964 newbie

Hello. I'm a newbie with 1964, but an emulation veteran. Up until my recent determination to stop the exhasperating Paper Mario flicker, I had been using Project64 for my N64 emulation needs. My quest led me to 1964, and I now feel like an idiot for having missed it all this time. Paper Mario still flickers like mad regardless (aaargh!) but I've gained a lot in other areas.

Up until now, I thought that my system was barely good enough to emulate an N64, because it had so many stutters and thrashing freezes with so many games. Now it's clear that the issue lies in the PJ64 core, because 1964 has *no problem* running at full speed in all games I've tried. This is my system:

Dell Dimension 8100 (Desktop)
i850-based motherboard
1.4 GHz P4
256 MB PC800 RDRAM
GeForce3 Ti200 @220/500 MHz
SB AudioPCI 64V

I'm currently running 1964 with Jabo's 1.4 DX6 plugin, Azimer's 0.40 audio, and N-Rage input. Here's some feedback on what I've found out so far:

Jabo's 1.4 DX7 fails to render near polygons (floor) in Conker (but not under PJ64), and crashes often in Zelda MM ("cannot remove Zbuffer attachment") during scene changes. DX6 works perfectly in Conker, and is more stable in Zelda MM (but still crashes occasionally--can't find error logs for this one). Copying project64.rdb into the 1964 folder solves aspect-ratio problems with my euro versions of Conker and Zelda MM (except for the subscreen with the ocarina music).

I cannot get Perfect Dark to run at the correct speed. It runs at 2X or maybe even 3X normal. Playing with the counter factor has little effect, except for the first entry (half-rate?), which slows it down closer to normal, but makes it stutter horribly. This one I can only play on PJ64, and put up with the frequent slowdowns. Nothing beats playing this game with the mouse and keyboard, though.

Wave Race works well with external transforms--much smoother than under PJ64, although Jabo's plugin has the same "letterbox" screen update problem under both emulators. Gameplay is near perfect. F-Zero X works very well. This ROM crashes under PJ64.

Super Smash Bros. hangs during the intro. It's a section where images change very quickly on a real N64, and where it goes black but makes it through on PJ64.

And of course, Mario 64 works flawlessly. So does Gex 3, but who cares.

I run at 1280x960 32bpp with triple buffering, with forced Quincunx FSAA and anisotropic filtering. The results are gorgeous, and I intend to upload some screenshots to my webspace at some point so I can share.

Audio is near flawless in all games, with significantly less grunge and popping than what I'm used to. In fact, the occasional buffer repeat sounds odd now (except when saving), because it is so rare.

Awesome effort guys. I'll be keeping a sharp eye out for developments, especially now that PJ64 is discontinued.

My Zelda MM ROM is the multilanguage euro one. I can't look at its good name right now (I'm at work), but it does have "[E][!]". It will dump me to the desktop every now and then, and the only feedback I've gotten so far is that log file I mentioned above. This did work OK under PJ64, just kinda slow. It would dip down to 38 vi/sec (should be 50) or so a lot. CF doesn't seem to make any difference, but I'll keep trying.

In no way, shape or form can I stop Paper Mario from flickering after I get to the 1st town. I have tried everything under the sun, on both emulators. Yes, that includes the CF. Oh, well. Maybe next rev. Right now I'm happy playing Conker. The funny thing is that I bought that game recently for $20; yet here I am playing it on an emulator. LOL!

Edit: Nasty typos

Conker screenshots

As promised, here are links to some of my Conker screenshots. The native res is 1280x960, so make sure to view them at that or at 640x480. Otherwise the antialiasing will get screwed up. These are from the euro ROM running in 1964 with Jabo's D3D6 plugin.

The N64 Screenshot submission . . . who, what? Oh . . . Damn n00bs don't know nothin' OK, I'll look into it after I get back to work (which I must now do).

Edit: OK, it's done. They're under FreakySwifty's "The best Conker pictures" thread.

Re: wow

crhylove said:

those are amazing gfx... u get full fps like that?

/me needs a G D athlon already....

rhy:devil:

Click to expand...

LOL! Yup, sure do. The bottleneck is not the 8GB/sec-bandwidth GF3, but the emulation itself. I.e., fill rate is not a problem at all compared to the job of emulating the multi-processor RISC N64 through a CISC 1.4GHz P4. 1964 has helped a lot in some games--Conker most notably. I get lots of loading time and stutters in that game under PJ64, especially during scene transitions. Quite smooth on 1964 by comparison.

I hit the mother-lode of good US roms yesterday, and I need to update my previous comments. Conker (U)[!] does not drop floor polygons under Jabo's D3D7 like the (E)[!] ROM does. Zelda MM (U)[!] seems more stable under D3D7, without any crashes yet--but I haven't played it long enough to be sure. Smash Bros (U)[!] works fine and dandy on both PJ64 and 1964. No more hanging or blank intro screens. The other must be a bad dump. Sin & Punishment is a fun arcade shooter with mouse/keyb control under N-Rage's plugin. Damn Nintendo for not releasing a US version of it. Works great in 1964.

Re: Cobra 95, I hate to say this it's your Pentium 4

RJA said:

At 1.4 ghz, they are much slower than AMD Athlons.
Pentium 4 s at 2.0 ghz are no faster than an AMD Athlon T-Bird at 1.4 ghz. You should have gotten an AMD Athlon.

My AMD Athlon T-Bird at 1.05 ghz (1050 mhz) runs Perfect Dark
98 % perfectly.

I bet you mine still probably will at 900 mhz.

Click to expand...

Mmmm . . . let's leave the CPU holy wars out of the emu scene. Just FYI, an Athlon has 20-25% greater IPC than a P4. That makes my 1.4GHz P4 equivalent to a 1.2GHz Athlon. I've had it for almost a year now too--this is not a brand-new system (although my video card is only a few months old). I may go for an AMD CPU in my next system, perhaps nForce-based.

I have no problems at all with poor speed in PD in this emulator. The problem is just the opposite: it runs TOO fast (2-3X) and can't slow it down enough without making it stutter constantly.

Edit: Oh, you mean PJ64? Nah, there are acknowledged issues with that emulator running on P4s, but that's not Intel's fault. I assure you I have no hardware-related performance issues, and 1964 bears me out on that. It's kind of moot now that PJ64 is dead. 1964 seems the most likely heir to its throne, but we'll see.

I tried the Thrustmaster Dual Power and was extremely impressed at first; but then all sorts of (I assume) driver issues started to crop up. I couldn't keep the thing from eventually losing control of direction. So I returned it, and went back to my old reliable: a Gravis Eliminator Aftershock. What I hate about Gravis is their patented Dead Fish(TM) D-pads, but the rest is sweet. Smooth dual-analog control, with parameters you can set any way you want in the drivers. I use N-Rage's plugins to give me 2 easily switchable setups: one assigns the C buttons to the 2nd analog stick (threshhold set to 25%), and the other keeps A, B, C-down and C-left in their correct relative postitions, with C-up and C-right overflowing into other buttons. I keep the deadzone on he sticks very low--3-5%

Razman said:

In 1964, did you try to enable video speed sync?
I had a similar problem. with Conker going at 130+ FPS.
Also with the Aizaimer's sound 0.4beta, make sure audio sync is checked!
With this options, you shouldn't have any problems slowing the games down.
And for Smash Brothers, I recon that game works smoothest on PJ64 1.4!
By the way use DX 7 video plug in for every game, and set on external the geometry thansforms, 32 bit texture.
That's about it.
If it still goes too fast, please post the game and how many FPS, does it run at!

Click to expand...

I'm going to take the good advice in this thread and try again. The only game that refuses to run well (it's either too fast or too stuttery) so far is PD. I do use the audio alone to provide the speed sync when possible, as it leads to the best results *when it works right*. But when I have to fall back to older audio plugins, or other problems crop up, I'll try the speed limiter instead, or in addition. PD doesn't seem to like what I've dished out for it so far, under 1964. It works fine in PJ64, except that this emu loves to freeze for long seconds and sort itself out now and then--I don't know what's up with that, but I know it isn't audio. I'm now using Azimer's 0.40 with it (RSP->Send audio to audio plugin), and it has improved performance markedly (over RSP+Jabo's lower-level DX sound) in some games; but it has not had *any* effect on these occasional long freeze frames I get in PJ64.

Smiff said:

have you turned off Advanced Block Linking

Click to expand...

Don't know enough about that to mess with it, so no--not yet. I'll try it. Thanks.