ZSNES Performance Slow

[Dun'kalis]

I'm trying to get ZSNES to run (compiling is easy), but its slow as hell. In Windows, it ran fast as hell. I'm guessing I need to recompile libsdl for OpenGL, then recompile ZSNES with the new libsdl, but I could be wrong. I'm running an Athlon 1.4 with a GeForce2MX400 w/768MB RAM. I doubt its KDE slowing me down.

Another totally off-topic question: If I want to compile Qt with OpenGL support, do I have to recompile KDE and stuff?

[bwkaz]

I always did, but that was because I was moving to a new KDE version.

I wouldn't think you'd need to, unless your original KDE was statically linked ( :eek: ). Find out where your Qt library is now, and after you recompile Qt (use the same version, obviously ;) ), copy the original libqt-mt.so.x.x.x to a backup and copy the new libqt-mt.so.x.x.x into that directory. Rerun ldconfig.

Oh, you have to enable multithreaded support in the Qt setup, or KDE won't work right (at least, last I knew that was the case).

SDL should be the same. Just figure out where it is now, make a copy of the libSDL.so.x.x.x file, and copy the new one into that directory. Again, rerun ldconfig, and assuming stuff is dynamically linking to libSDL, you should be good.

[LinuxLuke]

I JUST got finished compiling and messing with Zsnes, it runs great on my PII 400 with 160 megs of RAM, and some old 8 meg ATI card, it WAS slow while using the OpenGL screen resolutions...
I'm a super newbie with all this compiling stuff, but I got it to work, but what I'd suggest is that you switch to a non GL resolution, I think the top two on the list are good...

-Luke

[AdaHacker]

That's strange. I have a 500 MHz AMD K6, 192 megs of RAM, and a 16 MB ATI Rage 128, and I find that ZSNES runs perfectly fine in an 800x600 OGL window. It does drag considerably if I do anything else CPU intensive (like compiling, extracting large archives, etc.) while it's running, but when it's just ZSNES it's speed is perfectly acceptable. I'm using the stock SDL package that came with Slackware 8.1, so I doubt that has anything to do with it. I also have the low-latency and preemtion patches applied to my kernel, but I doubt they'd make that much difference.
My guess would be that you don't have your DRI support set up correctly. I can't think of anything else that would make such a huge difference in performance.

[Dun'kalis]

Hmm...DRI? Don't you turn that off when you install the Nvidia drivers? Or am I just confused? Again.

Anyway, in DR (Direct Rendering mode), it works fine, but I have to run it through artsdsp, and some sounds get corrupted on the way...

I'll give SNES9X a try. It's primarily developed in Linux, unlike ZSNES...

[Dun'kalis]

I got it to work. The nvidia drivers installed their libGL.so files, but X was using the ones provided with X. Now, I get 600FPS in glxgears, as opposed to 145...

:D

[LinuxLuke]

and I'll restate... the human eve can only see up to 60 FPS... any more is a waste, I got en explanation for big 3D games, but this is the SNES...

-Luke

[McQuaid]

Actually the human eye can see up to 72 fps. Thats why this 'weird' refresh rate is supported in many monitors. But tv's and arcade games are 60 and thats usually good enough. Anything above 72 though is truly a waste.

But on to my problem. Finally got zsnes compiled. I'm using redhat. Everything seems to work except opengl in zsnes. I have a geforce 4 and the nvidia drivers installed and they work fine in other games like quake3 tuxracer etc. Just not in zsnes. I wanted to try opengl in zsnes in hopes that it stretched to the full screen. Why in the linux version of zsnes is there only DR resolutions and not DS resolutions?

[ape_man]

you just need to kill some programs and free up some space i run 16 meg and it runs perfect