Speedups in ARK

[lord_danzig]

Are the speedups that ARK has over TN CEF strictly for PSP games and PSX? Or do other apps (emulators, etc) run faster as well?
I'm mainly wondering about SNES9XTYL and Daedalus. Thanks

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[HaYNigloo]

As far as Snes9x goes, have you tried Euphoria r5 noME? My setting are the same in both EMUs, but Euphoria is a bit faster for me.

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[lord_danzig]

I'm gonna DL that and try it now, thanks I'll let you know

[pridefuldawn]

I mean has anybody come to general consensus on the best SNES Emulator?
It seems that almost every psp/vita community recommends SNES9x(Including Wololo), but I have found that Eurphoria emulates alot of games better, such as Contra 3.
Also the lastest version of SNEX9X didn't work for me until ARC was released, now it works fine.
The emulation is very subpar for the SNES on the psp, which is pretty baffling because of how old the system is(GBA has perfect emulation, but the SNES does not.)

[udo4ever]

I mean has anybody come to general consensus on the best SNES Emulator?
It seems that almost every psp/vita community recommends SNES9x(Including Wololo), but I have found that Eurphoria emulates alot of games better, such as Contra 3.
Also the lastest version of SNEX9X didn't work for me until ARC was released, now it works fine.
The emulation is very subpar for the SNES on the psp, which is pretty baffling because of how old the system is(GBA has perfect emulation, but the SNES does not.)

I second that... I really do wonder why the snes emulator struggles when compared to the gba emulator. The standard answer I get is that emulating the snes is complicated but such an answer seems rather vague and sounds like bolocks to me. Not that I know coding, but emulating the snes seems to work flawlessly on other devices like the wii, while gba emulators struggle to keep up with the same pace. Thus, this leads me to believe that gba is usually more ressource hungry and difficult to emulate. Granted the Wii and the psp ain't the same type of machine...

[eighthdayregret]

I think alot of the difficulty in emulating the SNES lies in the fact that there were quite a few games that had custom chipsets in the cartridge. There's at least 15 different custom chips littered among various games. The SNES was designed to NOT become obsolete when it came to new games, so the main processor in an SNES interacts with the different chips in certain games (like Starfox, Pilotwings, Super Mario RPG) in order to create graphics. Basically like every game having it's own graphics card, so to speak.
Any Nintendo console released after the SNES is going to have at least a slightly higher chance at compatibility with older stuff, mainly because companies usually use similar (or same) programming languages when building their new toys, that way they're not starting from ground zero.
I'd say the reason the Wii does SNES emulation better than the PSP has alot to do with the fact that it's using similar architecture, built to be able to play SNES, GB, GBC, NES, etc... You know, the stuff on the Virtual Console.
I'm sure once the Wii was fully hacked, it probably wasn't a huge stretch for decent SNES capability with emulators because Nintendo planned on taking advantage of it at some point.
As far as a GBA emulator Wii? Well, I'd say that has a lot to do with the fact that the Wii is a sh*tty console, hardware-wise. Nintendo made it just well enough that it looks as good as it does, but didn't really go all out. They just wanted it to do what it does, not be super-powerful. Sony and Microsoft are all about power and beauty, Nintendo's about fun.
I honestly think the Wii simply can't handle what it would take to run the GBA emulator properly, even though it's supposedly got a processor more than twice the speed of the PSP.

Now as for why SNES doesn't work as well on PSP, it's got to do with the custom chips, if anything. There's no "universal" video driver in SNES games. But GBA games don't have those custom graphics chips that the SNES had, making the graphics an easier problem to deal with. With the SNES, you basically have to be able to emulate a whole bunch of different graphics cards. With GBA, it's only one.
That's why when you play GBA games on PSP, the video almost always looks great, but the sound sucks @$$. It cuts out and chops up like when you're trying to watch an HD video on YouTube on a computer that can't really handle processing everything. Most programmers will usually sacrifice sound quality if having to make a compromise in emulation. Graphics and playability come first, at the cost of sound. That's why in most emus (especially on PSP), one of the first suggestions if a game runs crappy is to either lower the sound settings or disable sound completely.

The reason emus run so well on PCs is because, really, the potential power of a PC is virtually limitless in the grand scheme of emulating something as small as the SNES or GBA. You have far more RAM and graphics processing power to work with than you would on a handheld like the PSP. PCs are a ridiculous amount more powerful than the SNES and GBA.

So to sum up:
SNES = Custom Graphics Chips = Mad Difficult
GBA = Better Graphics, but no custom chips = Decent with a sacrifice in sound quality.

[pridefuldawn]

[spoiler]

I think alot of the difficulty in emulating the SNES lies in the fact that there were quite a few games that had custom chipsets in the cartridge. There's at least 15 different custom chips littered among various games. The SNES was designed to NOT become obsolete when it came to new games, so the main processor in an SNES interacts with the different chips in certain games (like Starfox, Pilotwings, Super Mario RPG) in order to create graphics. Basically like every game having it's own graphics card, so to speak.
Any Nintendo console released after the SNES is going to have at least a slightly higher chance at compatibility with older stuff, mainly because companies usually use similar (or same) programming languages when building their new toys, that way they're not starting from ground zero.
I'd say the reason the Wii does SNES emulation better than the PSP has alot to do with the fact that it's using similar architecture, built to be able to play SNES, GB, GBC, NES, etc... You know, the stuff on the Virtual Console.
I'm sure once the Wii was fully hacked, it probably wasn't a huge stretch for decent SNES capability with emulators because Nintendo planned on taking advantage of it at some point.
As far as a GBA emulator Wii? Well, I'd say that has a lot to do with the fact that the Wii is a sh*tty console, hardware-wise. Nintendo made it just well enough that it looks as good as it does, but didn't really go all out. They just wanted it to do what it does, not be super-powerful. Sony and Microsoft are all about power and beauty, Nintendo's about fun.
I honestly think the Wii simply can't handle what it would take to run the GBA emulator properly, even though it's supposedly got a processor more than twice the speed of the PSP.

Now as for why SNES doesn't work as well on PSP, it's got to do with the custom chips, if anything. There's no "universal" video driver in SNES games. But GBA games don't have those custom graphics chips that the SNES had, making the graphics an easier problem to deal with.
That's why when you play GBA games on PSP, the video almost always looks great, but the sound sucks @$$. It cuts out and chops up like when you're trying to watch an HD video on YouTube on a computer that can't really handle processing everything. Most programmers will usually sacrifice sound quality if having to make a compromise in emulation. Graphics and playability come first, at the cost of sound. That's why in most emus (especially on PSP), one of the first suggestions if a game runs crappy is to either lower the sound settings or disable sound completely.

The reason emus run so well on PCs is because, really, the potential power of a PC is virtually limitless in the grand scheme of emulating something as small as the SNES or GBA. You have far more RAM and graphics processing power to work with than you would on a handheld like the PSP.

[/spoiler]

I am well aware of the special chipsets in SNES cartridges(such as the on in SMW: 2 Yoshi's Island), but that isn't really a good reason for the lack of overall support for the SNES, It really seems like the programmers who worked on the psp version of SNEX9X were subpar programmers, because the emulation is perfect on gPSP. Also, Believe me the specs on the Nintendo Wii are more then enough to run GBA games. For the Wii SNES emulation is good, and GBA Emulation is bad. So you can see it all comes down to the programmers to make an emulator that works. Btw, I don't know which emulator you are using, but I get perfect sound, and video running at 60fps on the PS Vita with gPSP Kai

[eighthdayregret]

I am well aware of the special chipsets in SNES cartridges(such as the on in SMW: 2 Yoshi's Island), but that isn't really a good reason for the lack of overall support for the SNES, It really seems like the programmers who worked on the psp version of SNEX9X were subpar programmers, because the emulation is perfect on gPSP. Also, Believe me the specs on the Nintendo Wii are more then enough to run GBA games. For the Wii SNES emulation is good, and GBA Emulation is bad. So you can see it all comes down to the programmers to make an emulator that works. Btw, I don't know which emulator you are using, but I get perfect sound, and video running at 60fps on the PS Vita with gPSP Kai

Yoshi's Island is an example of a game with terrible audio glitching on every GBA emulator I've used on the PSP: gpSP Kai or otherwise, no matter what settings I had for the sound.
And no, gpSP does not work perfectly. Not a single version released. There are always games in each version that don't work like they should.
That is not perfect emulation, my friend.
And I wouldn't be too sure that a GBA emu is something that'd work well on the Wii. I mean, 3DS has GBA games through Virtual Console, as will the Wii U, but not the Wii. The DS was backward compatible, too.
So why would the Wii have been left out if Nintendo thought it was possible? They know more about the Gameboy Advance than we possibly ever could, and they opted not to put GBA games out for the Wii.
That would have been a major selling point, especially towards the end of the Wii's life-cycle. I know the Wii's technically not dead yet, but I consider it so since the Wii U has been released.
And yeah, according to the specs, the Wii should be powerful enough to run GBA games, but if Nintendo didn't utilize everything in the box the way they should have, then it's entirely possible that the system's resource use renders it incapable of proper GBA emulation.
And it's a well known fact that Nintendo cut ALOT of corners with the Wii.
The thing doesn't even play DVDs natively.
Nintendo knows better than us, and they said no GBA on Wii, which tells me they couldn't get it to work right.
You could be right, the programmers that worked on the PSP versions of the SNES emulators may not have done a good job, but neither of us knows enough about programming to say that for sure, now do we?
For whatever reason, the SNES emu on PSP has been abandoned, so unless someone with some technical knowledge about the subject chimes in on this conversation, this is all speculation.
But you have to admit that having to be able to emulate what amounts to several different graphics cards is something that would prove difficult for any programmer, and from what I know, coding for Sony products is kinda difficult to begin with.
I didn't realize this was going to be a conversation bashing the programmers of the SNES emu, I thought someone asked about why it was so difficult to make SNES emulators run properly on the PSP, which is the only reason I even said anything at all.
If I had know this was gonna be just a bunch of sh*t talking about how the programmers suck, I wouldn't have bothered.
If you don't like the quality of the emulators out there, learn how to code and fix them.

[lord_danzig]

eightdayregret you raise some good points. though i'm not sure why the conversation about emulation on the Wii console, it's irrelevant. Also, you fail to recognize that better emulation of the SNES console was already achieved on the 1st gen PSP. the reason why emulation of the SNES is lacking on the vita is due to the limited nature of the exploits, eCFW and ARK. they have very limited access to the Vita's system resources, so the emulators don't have the power they usually would.

it seems programmers are left with two options -- either rewrite the emulators from scratch with the currently limited resources of the vita in mind, or wait for a Userland UVL or Kernel exploit of the Vita, which would give them much more power to work with and make the job a lot easier.

pridefuldawn also makes a good point. if the GBA can be emulated at the speed it is now (not fullspeed, but very close in many games), the SNES clearly can as well. the GBA was the more powerful system. it's just a matter of a very good emu being written, which is not likely at this point IMO.

[HaYNigloo]

Well all these EMUs were written for psp, the coders themselves that made the EMUs, if they were to rewrite the EMUs today I feel would have a lot more compatibility. Tech today is a lot different than it was a few years ago, and using todays tech could possible allow for better compatability(IMO). We're talking about a ground up kinda work, rebuild the EMUs using PSPs CFW resources, then port it over to the Vita. A lotta work.