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Dolphin/Melee Emulation Discussion Thread

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
After talking with KevinM he has agreed to let us have one thread to discuss the progress of Melee emulation and possibility of kailara support for Melee.

There are a few rules to follow when posting but the main rule is:

DO NOT POST ANY INFO ABOUT ROMS.

This is pretty obvious. Check your links to make sure you aren't posting a link to a site that is supplying roms, (try to avoid links if possible)

The only other rule you really need to make sure to follow is to stay on topic. If you are trying to set up a kailara test with someone do it through pms and not through this thread. We would all love to know the results of your test though.

I'll try to guide the thread along to gather information we need about how the emulation is coming along.

-------------------------

With all that taken care of, lets move to the first subject we need to cover.

Minimum Requirements:

We need to know how powerful of a computer you need to be able to get a steady 60fps while playing melee before we start looking for ways to play online. If you can achieve this, then post your pc specs and DETAILS about any special settings you are using for your operating system or for Dolphin. Also supply some details about how the game is running, does it slow down anywhere, and just miscellaneous info.

-------------------------

Try to format your information like this:

CPU: Intel Extreme x9000, duel core 3.0ghz
GPU: 512MB Nvidia 8800 gts, Overclocked to 625/900/1525 (core/mem/shader)
RAM: 4gb (more details if you have them)
OS: Windows 7 x64 Build 7100
Windows Tweaks: None (stick anything you use to increase performance here)
Dolphin: 64bit (insert dolphin build here and 32 or 64 bit) I'll put in my build once I get home.
Dolphin Settings: Duel core activated, 1200x900 fullscreen resolution (put any settings you change from the default)

(\/Put details about how the game runs here\/)
The game seems to run at 60fps across the board, sometimes in single player, the fps will drop when you get 4+ characters on screen. During multiplayer frames will drop sometimes when playing 1v1 on Fountain of Dreams, but with no problems on any other stage. 3-4 player matches will make the fps drop sometimes on the semi graphically advanced stages, and it will always slow down on fountain of dreams with 3-4 players. The sound will cut off in the middle of a fight every 3-4 matches but it will not crash the system. The biggest drawback so far is that the game lags for about 2-3frames around every 30seconds.

-------------------------

If we get a few more people posting what their config is, we can see if any settings will help melee emulation, and what kind of a system you will need for playing.

And make sure to thank KevinM for letting us get the ball rolling.
 

LLDL

Smash Hero
Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
7,128
sweet, Hold on, I'll try and gather my stats

Also, the reason there may have not been success on kaillera is because the images have to be the same versin (1.2 to 1.2, 1.1 to 1.1 and 1.0 to 1.0) It will desynch otherwise.
 

Skrlx

Smash Champion
Joined
Jan 18, 2008
Messages
2,673
Search for the thread "Will YOU Make The Switch" -- Lots of people posted on that

Also as for a kaillera server. My website is gonna get it's own kaillera server running on a GAMING server not a home connection. Click my name and go to my "homepage" and bookmark it if you want to be up to date with when it's coming etc. (not advertising btw just letting people know of a future kaillera server)
 

TheManaLord

Smash Hero
Joined
Jun 4, 2006
Messages
6,283
Location
Upstate NY
What sort of lag is there? Is there input lag (press button see it happen later) or glitchy lag where **** just goes nuts but you move normal (most of the time) (like halo LOL)
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
Its more like a .1 second freeze of the game. Not noticable to anyone watching the game, but enough to screw up a short hop lazer.

edit: I've seen your site before, one of the things I really don't get is the whole 0 ping your talking about. There is going to be ping even if you use a lan to set up kailara, but it's always good news to see a central server to host kailara for the game.
 

Mic_128

Wake up...
Administrator
BRoomer
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It's basically the same thing.

Either way, no discussion of either please.
 

Skrlx

Smash Champion
Joined
Jan 18, 2008
Messages
2,673
Its more like a .1 second freeze of the game. Not noticable to anyone watching the game, but enough to screw up a short hop lazer.

edit: I've seen your site before, one of the things I really don't get is the whole 0 ping your talking about. There is going to be ping even if you use a lan to set up kailara, but it's always good news to see a central server to host kailara for the game.
Yes it is a hacked kaillera client to make your ping 0 no matter where you live.
after testing the client it only works(without lagging your game badly) if your ping is normally low
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
Yes it is a hacked kaillera client to make your ping 0 no matter where you live.
after testing the client it only works(without lagging your game badly) if your ping is normally low
So are you just editing the client to always show 0 ping? Because 0 ping is a physical impossibility, it will always take time for data to transmit through the wires. Even going from your ram to your cpu there is a latency that is taken into account. (Just very very small)

It's not a ROM.
It's an ISO
ROM just means Read Only Memory. A .iso file is just a package around information. Either way like mic said, we don't want any of it here.

edit: Also I'm going to be trying the latest build of dolphin to see if there are any improvements in stability with melee.
 

Zhamy

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Joined
Apr 22, 2008
Messages
2,088
Location
NorCal
I wonder if he's talking about how GGPO gives the illusion of lag-free gameplay? It uses a lot of very clever latency hiding, which is great. But as far as I know, you can't reproduce that on kaillera.
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
I wonder if he's talking about how GGPO gives the illusion of lag-free gameplay? It uses a lot of very clever latency hiding, which is great. But as far as I know, you can't reproduce that on kaillera.
GGPO is pretty much exactly how a kailara client works. Both computers have the game running at the same time, and only send controller inputs across the net to each other. This makes any random element of the game (items) unable to be used on this system. Different items would be falling on the two seperate games.

It also is making save states while you are playing, if it sees some unsyncing then it will loadstate to a position where the two games match again. The problem is that doing an entire save/load of the memory would take way too long to keep fluid gameplay.

I have been considering a system like that to customise a kailara client solely for melee use. Instead of doing a loadstate of the entire memory, we could identify which parts of the memory would unsync from gameplay. Then we could only sync those parts of memory every 5-10 seconds to make sure both games are still synced. Pretty much it would be pointless to save which character/costume you are, and what stage you are playing on, since that will never become unsynced from each others game. Positioning, and the timer are much more likely to become unsynced between the two games, so we could save/load that data alone to keep both games in sync.

edit: after trying the new build of dolphin, it performs a bit worse all around, but it's much more consistant, I run at full speed during 1v1 on all stages except Fountain of Dreams and that one will run 50fps no matter what I do. Music still drops sometimes as well.

Next thing I'm gonna try is the latest stable release of dolphin instead of the weekly builds, maybe that one will get me some more performance.
 

SUNG475

Smash Ace
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Messages
637
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I think fod is messed up because you have randomized platform rising/dropping right?
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
If it's random then yea, we wouldn't be able to do online with fod. Not to mention its the most graphically intense level there is, making it hard to actually get the emulator to run 60fps on it.
 

Eggm

Smash Hero
Joined
Aug 29, 2006
Messages
5,178
Location
Neptune, NJ
Its more like a .1 second freeze of the game. Not noticable to anyone watching the game, but enough to screw up a short hop lazer.

edit: I've seen your site before, one of the things I really don't get is the whole 0 ping your talking about. There is going to be ping even if you use a lan to set up kailara, but it's always good news to see a central server to host kailara for the game.
Kinda like lag in starcraft?
 

LLDL

Smash Hero
Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
7,128
here's a test I uploaded a while ago on my old pc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlKYggAJ_pk see . I recorded with Camstudio, it ran much more smoothly than what was shown in the video, basically near full speed. I forget the stats on my old computer but it was something like

Windows XP media center edition
1.00gb ram
Dolphin: 64bit
Version - SSBM PAL
 

person701

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Joined
Sep 18, 2007
Messages
405
Location
Orlando, FL (or at least close enough)
here's a test I uploaded a while ago on my old pc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlKYggAJ_pk see . I recorded with Camstudio, it ran much more smoothly than what was shown in the video, basically near full speed. I forget the stats on my old computer but it was something like

Windows XP media center edition
1.00gb ram
Dolphin: 64bit
Version - SSBM PAL
Hmm, yea. Really laggy =\. I think we should avoid using on screen recorders (like CamStudio) to get better frame rates not just ingame, but also on videos like that. Just my 2 cent.

Also, would having an HD computer screen still cause slight lag as if it were an HD TV?
 

Fenrir

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NNID
FenrirW0lf
3DS FC
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If it's random then yea, we wouldn't be able to do online with fod. Not to mention its the most graphically intense level there is, making it hard to actually get the emulator to run 60fps on it.
That's true. FoD even lags on the GCN/Wii at times.
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
here's a test I uploaded a while ago on my old pc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlKYggAJ_pk see . I recorded with Camstudio, it ran much more smoothly than what was shown in the video, basically near full speed. I forget the stats on my old computer but it was something like

Windows XP media center edition
1.00gb ram
Dolphin: 64bit
Version - SSBM PAL
Yea that movie was too laggy to be able to see how much fps you are actually getting in the game. Also 1gb of memory might be pushing it when trying to use dolphin. I need to know a little bit more about your computers hardware and configuration, but you might be very close to what the minimum specs needed for running melee are.

Also, you are running a very old version of dolphin. If you google 'Dolphin' the main website will be a few links from the top. They have all the shadows fixed up.

Also, like person said, we might need to avoid screen cap programs that are going to slow down the frame rate of what we are trying to record, kind of screws up the whole reason why we are trying to record it. If anyone knows of a better program that can capture the screen without killing all our fps that would be very beneficial.

Also, would having an HD computer screen still cause slight lag as if it were an HD TV?
Are you talking about connecting a computer to an LCD or other TV? If so then:

Depends on how you connect your pc to the screen. If you connect using an S-Video cable that a lot of laptops carry, then yes you will get more lag then when you use a gamecube. Pretty much your computer converts a digital signal to analog to send to the tv which changes the analog signal back to digital which displays on the screen.

If you have an HDMI cable or an RGB port on your screen then it should have less lag than when using a gamecube. The signal just stays digital through the whole transmission.

If you're talking about using your monitor, then there won't be any noticeable delay. Most monitors nowadays have around a 3ms response rate, compared to the 8-15ms response rate most lcd tvs have.
 

person701

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Joined
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Messages
405
Location
Orlando, FL (or at least close enough)
Yea, I was talking about the computer monitor. Also, since we're trying to find how to emulate Melee with great frame rate, why don't we use the hardware in the gamecube (listed here) as a good starting point? I'm sure if we noesed around those some of you more technical people could figure things out. Just a hunch thogh.
 

LLDL

Smash Hero
Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
7,128
Gotcha, I'm afraid I can't offer any more specs for that particular video (i dont use that computer anymore), But I will use a digital camera to record another test very soon, that way there will be no framre rate decrease, My current pc also has only 1.00gb of ram. I'll get back to you on that,
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
Yea, I was talking about the computer monitor. Also, since we're trying to find how to emulate Melee with great frame rate, why don't we use the hardware in the gamecube (listed here) as a good starting point? I'm sure if we noesed around those some of you more technical people could figure things out. Just a hunch thogh.
Those specs are what the people who are developing dolphin started with. Emulation is getting an ia32 or ia64 processor do do the work of a PowerPC processor. The problems come in since our computers are going to have to use ram to simulate some of the processes that the PowerPC cpu use.

As a rule of thumb most people say that you will need 5x the cpu speed to be able to emulate another at full speed. Which is still hitting pretty close to the mark. The gamecube PowerPC cpu runs at 485mhz and dolphin seems to need about 2.5ghz duel core to get a good stable framerate. I don't know exactly what they do with the duel core setup, but if its like the PS2 emulation, they are using one of the cores for cpu emulation, and the other for gpu emulation.

Also if you want to know a bit more into the junk, PowerPC's have a much shorter pipeline than x86 processors, this means that the 485mhz on a PowerPC processor could probably do more calculations than 1.0ghz x86. This also makes it so that you need a much faster processor to emulate the PowerPC. PowerPCs also have 32 general registers to store data compared to 8 that the x86 has. Which means that the excess data is going to have to be sent to the ram. Since this means sending data along the front side bus which is usually going to be running 667mhz or 800mhz, this slows down the whole process down to about 1/3 the speed just using the processors.

Gotcha, I'm afraid I can't offer any more specs for that particular video (i dont use that computer anymore), But I will use a digital camera to record another test very soon, that way there will be no framre rate decrease, My current pc also has only 1.00gb of ram. I'll get back to you on that,
Thats fine, just make sure you are supplying as much info as possible, and I'm just as interested if not more interested in what doesn't work than what works. If you need help finding any of the specs on the list of my initial post, just pm me and I'll try and direct you. Sometimes finding the clock speeds of your graphics card is a bit difficult, but it's much more helpful than how much vram it has.
 

MattNF

Smash Lord
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Mar 11, 2007
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Location
Florida
My PC specs are:

Vista 64 bit
4 GB RAM
9800GT Graphics card
Core2Duo 3.2 ghz

Yet I only get 45fps while playing... what's the deal?
 

LLDL

Smash Hero
Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
7,128
I guess it has been a while since I have used Dolhpin, I just got the latest version of Dolphin, but I am using Windows 7 beta build 7057.winmain.090305-2000 on my current desktop. When I tyr to boot SSBM I get two errors, cannot init the core, and Pal_pluginSimple.dll, and can't init DSP plugins. This does not happen when I launch the old version, but the fps is like 20 on that version. How did you get your dolphin working on windows 7? I've tried downloading new plugins, but the same thing keeps persisting.
 

Narukari

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Nov 11, 2006
Messages
225
My PC specs are:

Vista 64 bit
4 GB RAM
9800GT Graphics card
Core2Duo 3.2 ghz

Yet I only get 45fps while playing... what's the deal?
I don't want to sound like an Operating System basher, but it's probably vista that is killing your processing power. Vista has many problems in how it regulates its background processes that are fixed in Windows 7. For example, it will keep the bluetooth software running 24/7 even if you don't have bluetooth capability in the computer. I definitly suggest moving either to Windows 7 x64 build 7100, or back down to Windows XP 32bit.

I guess it has been a while since I have used Dolhpin, I just got the latest version of Dolphin, but I am using Windows 7 beta build 7057.winmain.090305-2000 on my current desktop. When I tyr to boot SSBM I get two errors, cannot init the core, and Pal_pluginSimple.dll, and can't init DSP plugins. This does not happen when I launch the old version, but the fps is like 20 on that version. How did you get your dolphin working on windows 7? I've tried downloading new plugins, but the same thing keeps persisting.
There could be a few problems, first you want to make sure you've upated your directx9. A lot of random errors can be fixed by this. Just google directx and find the 'Direct X End User Runtime'. Also, build 7057 of Windows7 was one of the most unstable versions of the beta. I'd suggest updating to build 7100 which is a much more stable build of Windows7.

I'm almost 100% positive it's that you don't have directx installed/updated.
 

Superstar

Smash Champion
Joined
Feb 9, 2007
Messages
2,351
Location
Miami, Florida
Probably MattNF's problem was that he didn't enable dual core. It was like that for me.


CPU: Intel E8400, 3Ghz Duo
GPU: 512MB Nvidia 9600GT
RAM: 2GB DDR2 1066 [set to 800, too lazy to fix it].
OS: Windows XP x86 Build I dunno [couldn't find an x64 copy]
Dolphin: 32bit build 3089
Dolphin Settings: Dual core activated, basic windowed

It runs sort of stable. 60FPS at almost all time except when it's loading the menu, and during the beginning of a match where it dips hardcore. Ingame it jumps from 60FPS to 53FPS every so often, but it's almost always 60FPS even on Fountain of Dreams.

EDIT: On DK's Waterfall course [whatever it is], it runs at 50FPS with 4 players [single player]. Runs Mute City 4 player at 40FPS when one is a giant Captain Falcon [single player].

Sound is another issue, it goes away a lot.

What's the difference between Dolphin and DolphinIL?
 

EC_Joey

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May 30, 2006
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何?
Are there any base specs determined yet, such as minimum requirements for memory or processor?
 

Superstar

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Messages
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Miami, Florida
Oh, and about random and online, at least for SSB64 many random elements are synched. All except Random Stage.

It depends on how the seed is determined I feel. Probably by the time on the Gamecube clock [if so...client should make sure time is synched too].
 

MattNF

Smash Lord
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Mar 11, 2007
Messages
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Location
Florida
I downloaded the newest Dolphin and everything works fine.

What's the best deadzone for the gamecube controller? Mine's at 50% now, but it feels a little off...

BTW - All stages work fine at 60fps with 4 characters for me.

BTW2- Anyone want to play me? I haven't tried online yet, but I hear it works fine!
 

person701

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Sep 18, 2007
Messages
405
Location
Orlando, FL (or at least close enough)
I downloaded the newest Dolphin and everything works fine.

What's the best deadzone for the gamecube controller? Mine's at 50% now, but it feels a little off...

BTW - All stages work fine at 60fps with 4 characters for me.
Could we get your system info then? And there's a server set up? Cool, I suppose I could check it out later. Even though my comp prolly wouldn't run Melee very well (**** finding it's hard enough <___<; )
 

Spife

Smash Master
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Neriak
What are you guys using for controllers at this point? Or thinking of using?
 

MattNF

Smash Lord
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Florida
Could we get your system info then? And there's a server set up? Cool, I suppose I could check it out later. Even though my comp prolly wouldn't run Melee very well (**** finding it's hard enough <___<; )
Vista 64 bit
4 GB RAM
9800GT Graphics card
Core2Duo 3.2 ghz

You can use any server, but p2p is the best way to play with the least amount of lag. The server "Emularena Grounds" is usually the most popular SSB64/SSBM server. The SSB64 forum has more info:

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=208132

I also use a GC/PS2/XBOX adapter, I bought it on eBay for $15.
 

Spife

Smash Master
Joined
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Messages
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Neriak
Gamecube controlers. All you need to do is go online and look up a USB cable that connects the GC controler to the computer. USB on one side, GC port on the other.
That's what I thought

Found a few on Amazon, any suggestions?
 

Skrlx

Smash Champion
Joined
Jan 18, 2008
Messages
2,673
LOL don't go to Emularena Grounds.

i hear it has a really bad community and a bunch of 12 year olds with anger problems (not kidding)
 
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