Naruto 3 Progress

[SWario]

Despite the fact that I already own Naruto Gekito Ninja Taisen 3 for GameCube, I am currently at college and left my game at home by accident (and I also don't have access to a Freeloader disc for the time being). So, I searched and searched for a Freeloader disc. Then, someone suggested the Phantasy Star Online route, except finding someone who actually owns the game for GameCube is easier said than done (plus the other hardware requirements). I went the emulator/rom route, since I already own a legal copy of the game. After quite some time of searching, I finally found Dolphin, some obscure site with Naruto 3, and this forum. Then, I had to tinker with Dolphin to actually get it to run on my system, and shrink the Naruto 3 .gcm a couple times.

I was trying to run Dolphin with Naruto 3 (a difficult game to run, it seems, plus graphically complex) on:

• A laptop (fire hazard)
• Pentium 4 @ 1.7 GHz
• ATI Radeon 7500 (16 MB of onboard RAM)
• 640 MB of PC2700 RAM

Needless to say, it ran SLOW. In-game fights ran at about 1.6 FPS. It hurt, bad. I had told an older friend about this who has much more computer experience than myself, and he advised, "Dude, don't do it. Your computer will melt, literally melt." I'm probably lucky that the darn thing ran, and didn't kill my processor or video card.

Another friend of mine (and a fan of the Naruto series and game) heard about my limited success, and offered to try it on her computer. I'm not 100% sure of the specs of this computer, but I'll post what I think they were, and update it later when I can confirm it (Specs have been updated). Her computer:

• A desktop (not a fire hazard)
• AMD Athlon 64-bit 3200+
• Nvidia GeForce 6600 (128 MB of onboard RAM)
• 1 GB PC3200 RAM

It ran plenty better than on my computer, but the animation was still very slow, and the sound was choppy. Once we turned Dynarec on, it improved greatly. The in-game menus moved smoothly and matched the sound, the music and sound effects smoothed out, and the FPS averaged around 7 - 8. There are some other high-end computers in the dorm I live in, so we might test it out on a few others until I get my game back and a new Freeloader disc.

I noticed a couple issues in the game, mostly the same ones already mentioned, but I'll list some things that I noticed:

• Sometimes the screen goes black or gets choppy due to the camera zooming out far
• The ground in the stages doesn't always render (the characters walk on black nothingness)
• The option in the game for "Music On/Off" does not work through the emulator (music will play regardless of this option's selection, and also continues playing when the game OR the emulator are paused)
• Enabling Dynarec greatly improved the performance for this game, both for video and sound

It seems, as is also the case with programs whose purpose is to render images/videos, that the emulator relies more on the CPU (it used 100% CPU time on both machines) and the video card's onboard RAM. On both systems, there was additional main RAM that wasn't being used, so it seems like Dolphin does not utilize the main RAM to run so much as the Video RAM (this was also the case with a program I used in a high school drafting class, it was a program used to render 3D images/animations, it never properly utilized the main RAM to enhance its performance - since I am not an experience programmer, I do not know if Dolphin would benefit from drawing more on the main RAM or not).

In any case, I just felt like sharing this experience and information to let everyone who was interested know what kind of PC is required to run Naruto 3 (and probably most other GameCube games) on a GameCube emulator for PC.



EDIT: Wow, that turned out a LOT longer than I originally intended. Oh well, hopefully someone finds this useful or informative. ^^;;

EDIT2: Fixed the computer specs to what they really are (for the second computer).

 

[Pky]

"Dude, don't do it. Your computer will melt, literally melt."

I don't know why it should do that, the program can be very "powerful" but i don't think it would harm the computer... maybe i'm wrong. And yes, with dynarec i think that almost all the games run better, but with another graphics bugs.

 

[SWario]

I don't know why it should do that, the program can be very "powerful" but i don't think it would harm the computer... maybe i'm wrong. And yes, with dynarec i think that almost all the games run better, but with another graphics bugs.

Because all of the components in a laptop are closer together, meaning the heat from one component can influence the temperature of another. Also, laptops don't get as much airflow as a desktop, and so aren't cooled as efficiently. That combined with the fact that Dolphin pulls 100% CPU time constantly and most likely does the same of the video card, it's entirely possible that something in my laptop would burnout, or even catch fire if it was left running for any extended length of time.

In any case, I've updated the computer specs in my first post, and we've found a more powerful computer to try it on. Once we've tried it out on this new computer, I'll post the specs of THAT computer, any new observations, the FPS, and maybe some screenshots if it runs well.

 

[SWario]

I apologize for the double post here, but I think that new test information for Naruto 3 warrants its own post, not an edit (if the mods/admins/ops really feel that I should not post in this style, please let me know, and I will oblige). Besides, it's not like I'm posting a repeated question a million times in a bunch of different threads, I'm reporting progress.

The computer that we managed to get a hold of this time was:

• A desktop (with a nice looking case)
• AMD Athlon 64-bit 3400+
• Nvidia GeForce 6600 (256 MB of onboard RAM)
• 1 GB of DDR400 RAM

This computer ran the emulator beautifully. For movies (not gameplay), it ran between 35 and 60 FPS, both at 640x480 and 1024x768 emulator resolutions. The in game menus for the game were almost flawless, and the sound was in near-perfect sync. The character and stage select screens ran fine, with no problems at all. However, once we got in game, the magic ended. The FPS once again dropped down to about an average of 7 - 8 FPS. One noticeable difference was that the levels rendered much better on this computer than on the last one in this test.

Some observations:

• Dynarec once again improved movie play speed, and the game menus
• The levels were fully rendered, with few flaws, but the "characters walking on nothing" flaw from before did not occur
• The emulator still ignored the game option for "Music On/Off" but acknowledges the option for "Sound Effects On/Off"

I'm not a very experience programmer, but it seems that the 7 - 8 FPS limitation is something related to the actual code of the emulator, than the amount of processing and graphics power available. It is also possible, that the differences between the two most recent systems was just not large enough to make a noticeable improvement, but I also know that the code for the emulator isn't perfect, so perhaps it is a combination of both.

That's all for now. As I stated in another thread, as long as we can get a hold of more powerful computers here, or if there is an updated version of Dolphin released, I will continue posting progress updates of this type. Although I suspect that it will be some time before we can get a hold of a computer that overpowers the most recent test subject.

 

[Clements]

• Dolphin needs a graphics card with Pixel Shaders to render the graphics properly, so a Radeon 7500 will render stuff incorrectly since it does not support Pixel Shaders at all.
  
• No PC in the world has a fast enough CPU for Dolphin, as soon as any 3D is displayed, the frame rate drops to unplayable levels with all computers no matter how powerful they are. This is likely a limitation in the software, since emulating a powerful system on a completely different architecture is incredibly difficult (maybe even impossible on current hardware, we don't know yet).
  
• The faster the console, the harder it is to emulate, and the higher the requirements. Dreamcast emulation with Chankast (an optimised emulator) needs a 2GHz AMD CPU with SSE to run well (some games are still too slow), and the Gamecube is probably more than twice as fast as a Dreamcast. Gives you an idea of the scale of things.
  
• Any emulator will steal all the CPU cycles it needs to get fullspeed. As Dolphin does not have any 'frame limiter' or allow idle option, it will always use 100% CPU. This may be dangerous with a poorly cooled system such as a laptop.
  
• GPU power is not really important at all in this kind of emulation, as long as you meet the minimum requirements, since almost all of the work is done primarily by the CPU.