Glide64 uses an excessive amount of memory when emulating Mystical Ninja

[paul248]

After approximately 20 minutes of standard play, over 2gb of memory will be allocated to Glide. Once all the available memory on your system is exhausted, the plugin will terminate. At certain sections in the game, memory usage increases at a rate of over 15mb/s, making the game impossible to play for any considerable length of time without a copious supply of memory.

I have attached a save state created by mupen64 that will take you to a point in the game where this problem is particularly noticeable.

Simply load the US version of the game and the attached save state, open a resource monitoring tool, such as task manager, and watch the designated memory soar.

Needless to say, if you have a solution to this problem, it is welcome. If you do not see Glide behaving in the way described, please reply with the name of the emulator, plugins, and operating system that you used.

[NES_player4LIFE]

very interesting. Have you reported this problem at the official glide64 site?

[paul248]

very interesting. Have you reported this problem at the official glide64 site?

I have not. That forum has not seen any activity in months, and unfortunately the lead developer has stopped working on the project.

It seems to me, and this is purely conjecture, that the plugin stores certain graphical elements (textures?) in memory and never discards them. In most games, this does not present a problem because there are few textures. In Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, however, an unusual method is employed to render the sky, which results in glide interpreting and storing each change as a new graphic.

My hypothesis might be completely wrong, but the sky is definitely the source of the problem. The allocated memory grows rapidly only when the sky moves. While indoors, memory increase is negligible.