Additional Necromancy...

Richard Bannister

So it turns out that some of the assumptions I made in Emulator Enhancer v3.0 didn't quite hold true on Mojave.

I need some help testing a beta build of Genesis Plus – both on Mojave and on earlier OS versions – to make sure I haven't broken anything.

https://www.bannister.org/gplus.zip

Note that this will not work with the current release build of Emulator Enhancer. I'll have an updated build of that in due course.

Feedback please.

Squirrel

The new build works fine so far, Richard.

But it seems the graphics are much slower. During testing I saw much more stuttering in the video. Using turbo on the current published version I can get 570 FPS, while on this test build I can only get up to 180 FPS (1x video size, no filters). Without turbo, the FPS counter stays at 60-61 FPS (even using HQ3X). There was no difference in CPU utilization between builds.

Testing was done on a MacBook Air Late 2010. 1.86 GHz Intel Core2 Duo. NVIDIA GeForce 320M w/256MB VRAM. macOS 10.12.6.

Take care

Richard Bannister

Interesting. I am not seeing that on my test machines.

Anyone else see the same problem?

Richard Bannister

Right, so after a lot of investigation it seems that OpenGL is already somewhat broken on Mojave.

I have an experimental CoreGraphics renderer running now, though it's considerably slower than OpenGL was.

I'm playing around with Metal at the moment. The biggest embuggerance is that it doesn't support 15bpp packed pixels on macOS for reasons unclear, meaning that I'll have to do a 32-bit conversion of every frame. This isn't particularly difficult (Ive got it in about four lines of code...) but it will hurt performance. I wonder how much of that I'll get back by using it for the render.

Richard Bannister

The answer appears to be "some".

Metal is quite a bit slower than OpenGL was due to the overhead from scaling 15-bit to 32-bit and then pumping twice as much data to the video card.

On the plus side, it works properly on Mojave, and I'm still getting 300fps on my antiquated test box.

Squirrel

Want me to try out something on my MacBook Air? It's been updated with a fresh install of macOS 10.13 (which is the last version it'll run officially).

Richard Bannister

Try this:

http://www.bannister.org/gp.zip

Uses the Metal renderer – will be interesting to see how you get on with it.

Squirrel

It crashes once I pick a game ROM.

Edit 2: How do I upload pictures here? I used to be able to do it.
Now I get "Attachment filename.png not found"

Edit 3: Now I see "Failed to upload file 'filename.png': Unmet Dependencies" at the top of the page

Squirrel

Test. It failed.

Richard Bannister

In retrospect, this is expected. Your Mac doesn't support Metal.

I should add a check to prevent launch in that scenario.