1964Video - official DevTalk & Release thread

[Kodiack]

No. Turning of caching results in indexing the textures when the rom is started. If caching is enabled, they will not only be indexed but also loaded to RAM. Thus, if caching is disabled, the rom starts faster as the plugin doesn't have to load the textures at rom start. But with caching disabled, the plugin will have to load the textures everytime they are needed during gameplay. This can lead (especially for large textures) to delays during gameplay. With caching enabled, the textures are only loaded once and therefore don't cause any delay during gameplay.

This is e.g. recognizable in the intro movie (where the credits occure) of Castlevania LOD and most probably also in the Zelda Community pack as both are using huge textures.

Ah, I see. I did notice some pretty painful halts when loading new environments in Ocarina of Time. Is there any workaround to get this to work? I have a 24 GB page file and 12 GB of memory. I doubt the plug-in's the issue, but there must be some way to get it to store the textures into RAM. Smoother gameplay is well worth the initial delay.

[microdev]

Ah, I see. I did notice some pretty painful halts when loading new environments in Ocarina of Time. Is there any workaround to get this to work? I have a 24 GB page file and 12 GB of memory. I doubt the plug-in's the issue, but there must be some way to get it to store the textures into RAM. Smoother gameplay is well worth the initial delay.

Oops, seems like I misread something. If caching works or not should only depend on your amount of system memory and not on the memory of your graphic card. The textures will be cached to ram and not to your graphic cart (well at least not all).

Having said that, I'm really wondering why turning off caching solved your issue then.
Hmm, you're using 1964Video r35, right? What error message occures, when the plugin crashes? Could you please open your task manager and have a look at the process of your emulator in the process tab? Than start the rom with caching enabled and watch how memory occupation by the emulator process rises. How much memory is occupied, when the emu crashes?

Normally caching should work fine for you as you have more than enough memory (RAM).

[Kodiack]

Oops, seems like I misread something. If caching works or not should only depend on your amount of system memory and not on the memory of your graphic card. The textures will be cached to ram and not to your graphic cart (well at least not all).

Yeah, I kind of hoped it worked that way, otherwise it'd be quite limiting. =P The only textures that should be in the GPU memory are those that are in immediate use or are withing a set cache pool (i.e. up to 128 MB of textures may be cached in video memory or something).

Having said that, I'm really wondering why turning off caching solved your issue then.
Hmm, you're using 1964Video r35, right? What error message occures, when the plugin crashes? Could you please open your task manager and have a look at the process of your emulator in the process tab? Than start the rom with caching enabled and watch how memory occupation by the emulator process rises. How much memory is occupied, when the emu crashes?

Yes, I am using 1964Video r35.

Here's an image of the crash:

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/o...ntimeError.png

The crash also happens in the 1964 emulator, as previously stated. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Microsoft Visual C++ and the service packs, but to no avail.

Memory usage does continually go up. It was around ~1.7 GB in use for the OS before all the textures were loaded, and before the crash it hits 2.7 GB, with the emulator using 1.1 GB.

Normally caching should work fine for you as you have more than enough memory (RAM).

Definitely. 12 GB is really more than enough for anything out there. =P

Good luck with working out the issue, or finding what would be causing it. =)

[microdev]

Yeah, I kind of hoped it worked that way, otherwise it'd be quite limiting. =P The only textures that should be in the GPU memory are those that are in immediate use or are withing a set cache pool (i.e. up to 128 MB of textures may be cached in video memory or something).

It uses as much GPU memory as available.

http://i357.photobucket.com/albums/o...ntimeError.png

Hmm, does not really contain any information about the crash

Memory usage does continually go up. It was around ~1.7 GB in use for the OS before all the textures were loaded, and before the crash it hits 2.7 GB, with the emulator using 1.1 GB.

1.1GB? That's a lot. Which hires pack are you using? Could you please provide a link to this pack? Maybe I can reproduce your problem with that pack...

[Kodiack]

1.1GB? That's a lot. Which hires pack are you using? Could you please provide a link to this pack? Maybe I can reproduce your problem with that pack...

I use the latest version of this:

http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=45875

And come to think of it, 1.1 GB is absolutely insane. O.o The emulator should use ~5-50 MB itself, the ROM 32 MB, and the texture pack is 692 MB. Even though that ~750 MB of usage is still pretty high for an emulator, it's still below the projected 1.1 GB.

[Nintendo Maniac]

Alright. One more suggestion, because I'm a huge jerk:

Back in '07 when Mudlord was working on this plugin, we had a very nice discussion about how best to force a game's viewport aspect ratio. Cyberman came up with this idea for how to handle it intelligently, though I can't say for sure how much of what he said was feasible (it sounds good to me!).

I DO know that it's possible because our pal Jabo implemented it years ago in the public version of his video plugin (the one that comes with pj64 1.6). Basically, Jabo's plugin renders the game in widescreen resolutions instead of stretching the image when a widescreen resolution is specified, so that the viewable area of the game is actually wider.

Would be pretty great to be able to render games in true widescreen instead of pillar-boxing them or resorting to hideous stretching, is what I am getting at. If I need to provide a more thorough explanation of viewport/screen aspect ratio, I will. <3

PJ64 1.7 beta has an improved version of said "force widescreen hack" FYI. Also nullDC and Dolphin implement force widescreen hacks as well.


Also, I'm getting an error as well, but a different kind of error. In PJ64 1.6 I get "Failed to load plugin" when I go to Options -> Settings... This happens with both r30 and r35. I haven't a clue why, and I can run both Jabo's Direct3D6 1.5.2 and Jabo's Direct3D8 1.6 just fine.

Interestingly enough, I also get an error in 1964 1.1 with the included 1964video plugin, saying it too couldn't load the plugin (though right when opening the program).

GPU is a Radeon 7000 64MB PCI (NOT PCIe, but the original PCI). While an older GPU, it handles N64 graphics just fine (I do have to lower the resolution a bit for Perfect Dark though ).
OS: Windows XP Pro SP3
DirectX: 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
CPU: Pentium 4 @ 2GHz
RAM: 256 MB (reported as 254 MB)
HDD: 41.9 GB (37.5 GB Free)

[GEROSENE]

nice plugin. good job. the problem i'm having, well more of an annoyance really, is that when i go from fullscreen (1680x1050) to windowed (640x480),
it crashes pj64 1.6. i read through the lists and couldn't find the solution. any ideas?

[microdev]

In PJ64 1.6 I get "Failed to load plugin" when I go to Options -> Settings... This happens with both r30 and r35. I haven't a clue why, and I can run both Jabo's Direct3D6 1.5.2 and Jabo's Direct3D8 1.6 just fine.

Interestingly enough, I also get an error in 1964 1.1 with the included 1964video plugin, saying it too couldn't load the plugin (though right when opening the program).

Did you do that?:

Requirements: MS C++ Redistributable Package

[GEROSENE]

Did you do that?:

long time ago.
I went from DirectX 10 to DirectX 11.. could that be the problem?

[Nintendo Maniac]

HOLY CRAP I GOT IT TO WORK!

What I did was go to the older version of the plugin, that is Aristotle's Mudlord & Rice Video. That didn't work - it said I was missing msvcrtd.dll, so I checked the post again. It said I needed Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 so I got that, but it still said the DLL was missing. So I got the DLL and even though I wasn't getting the error anymore, the plugin wasn't listed... HOWEVER, 1964video WAS listed!

So it looks like you need Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 and/or msvcrtd.dll to use this plugin. You might want to mention that in the OP. ;P