Involuntary Fast Forwarding

[Gamesoul Master]

Not very often I come across a problem using pSX. I'd like to say from the start here, that it probably has to do with my video drivers, as I have never had this problem before, and it occurs for me in v1.4 to v1.10, and it only happens fully in full screen. Though the other symptoms occur in windowed mode too.

I'm currently using the Omega 2.5.97a Radeon drivers for my Radeon 9250 PCI 256 MB on WinXP Pro SP2. Changing any other relevant settings in pSX has no effect. At first I thought this was a simple fast forwarding glitch of some kind, and then I decided to hit Tab and look at some things. That's when I noticed something odd...

Pic taken while game is involuntarily fast forwarding:


Pic taken while fast forwarding normally (by holding Backspace):


Pic taken while game is running normally:



That last one was a little trouble to get. Because this problem is always occuring, I noticed that the only time the emulator runs "normally" is for a few seconds after doing a manual fast forward. After those few seconds, it goes back to fast forwarding itself. Observe the difference between the first two pics...

This problem occurs with every game I have, playing from any medium, using any BIOS... like I said, I tried everything I could think of to fix the problem, short of changing the video drivers, and nothing had any effect. The only exception is turning off VSync, which fixes the problem for some reason. I'll give more info when I can charge my phone battery. But right now, it's getting rather low and I don't have the spare phone to charge the battery. Figured I'd at least mention it though... give y'all a chance to ponder over it. Not really a big problem for me, since I normally don't use fullscreen (setting the window size up is good enough for me), but I happened to notice this and thought it was worth mentioning.

I guess I forgot to mention, though I had tested it... deleting psx.ini didn't work either. And upon looking, I'd like to add a detail... once I turn off VSync, the "adj=60.00fps[0]" stays at 0... which I assume to mean "disabled" as opposed to 1 meaning "enabled". So basically, the problem here is that leaving VSync on causes frameskipping to silently enable itself after a couple seconds. The configuration window, however, will still say that it's off, and even if I check and uncheck it, then hit Apply, the value still doesn't change unless I either turn off VSync or do a manual fast forward.

Something else that might be worthy of mention... though I didn't catch it in the pics... the skipscore value likes to run up while the frameskip value is being shown as 0... and then it runs back down to 0 once frameskip kicks in. However, this seems to relate to the actual fps, because once in a while, frameskip will reportedly kick in, but the fps will stay at 60.00... and basically, as long as the fps is 60, the skipscore value will go up, regardless of whether frameskipping is reportedly on or off.

For the record, I will probably *not* change my video drivers, as I am very happy with them, and this problem is not enough for me to start mucking up my drivers again. As I said before, I reported this problem more as a "just-so-you-know". I'm not all too concerned about it, especially since nobody else seems to have reported it.

[pSX Author]

Are you sure you haven't set an option which causes your driver to ignore vsync in control panel?

Most drivers have an option which allows you to force VSync on or off for all applications - forcing it off will cause this problem because pSX thinks that VSync is enabled but the driver has silently ignored it. When VSync is enabled in pSX I allow the driver to handle rate limiting.

[Gamesoul Master]

Hmm... now that you mention it, I forgot to check those settings when I installed these drivers. Upon checking, I see that there is no option for Application Preference... but there is an option to Default On, which is what it's set to right now. I guess I'll fiddle with that and see what happens.

[patrickp]

If that's the same settings as the stock ATI Control Panel, GM, the option for Application Preference is under the Direct3D settings, and it's the default. It's the OpenGL settings that have options for Default On and Default Off (and plain On and Off). ATM I suppose pSX would use the Direct3D and not the OpenGL ones.

Also, since there are also plain On and Off options for OpenGL, I presume that means that in OpenGL an application will always start with Default On or Off if that's set, but can change the setting: it would be plain On or Off that forces the VSync status.

[Gamesoul Master]

Give me a *little* credit patrickp... I checked thoroughly and this is the only place VSync is mentioned at all, with these options shown for it. Changing the option has no effect on this problem, and quite frankly... I'm not going to pursue it much more. There seems to be no way to fix it, and I really don't care. I'm chalking it up as pSX not liking my current video drivers. Unless somebody has some other idea.

The funny thing is... once I force VSync on in the driver settings, the frameskipping sometimes stops, but the value still changes to 1 after a few seconds regardless of if it's actually skipping frames or not (and by "not" I of course mean it's maintaining a rate of 60±0.05 fps). Anybody care to explain that one, cuz it makes no sense to me at all. Unless that value isn't meant to indicate whether frameskipping is on/active or not...

[patrickp]

That's whay I said

If that's the same settings as the stock ATI Control Panel

GM. I suspected they might be different.

That's Omegadrive's version of the same driver I'm using. However, ATI Control Panel shows separate settings for Direct3D and OpenGL and they're not exactly the same options; looks like Omegadrive's version doesn't have separate settings for Direct3D and OpenGL?

Edit: interestingly, although you're using a Radeon 9250, I notice Omegadrive's driver indentifies your card as a Radeon 9200 Pro. Is that a Built by ATI or a Powered by ATI card?

That reminds me, you have a PCI card, don't you? I wonder if that's got anything to do with it?

[Ultima]

zomg I haven't seen the ATI driver settings tabs in the longest time... and TBH, I'm thankful -- it's among the messiest I've ever seen, what with tabs all over the place and all... ;\

*hugs the classic NVIDIA driver settings*

[Deleted]

ultima said:

*hugs the classic NVIDIA driver settings*

Bolded for emphasis, good god the new control panel is horrible. Thankfully they left the old one in as well.

[patrickp]

Ultima: are you talking about ATI's Control Panel or Control Center?

[Ultima]

Control panel as displayed above, but I think the Control Center is pretty ugly too, on top of requiring .NET =\ (you can figure the rest out ). NVIDIA's Control Panel (the new one) is pretty bad as well.

[Gamesoul Master]

patrickp: Sorry... I was not in a good mood when I posted before. Anyway... It's "Built by ATI" as I recall... the reason it's read as a 9200 is because apparently they use the same exact drivers and such, so it defaults to naming it by 9200 Pro instead of 9250, which isn't "Pro". But, Omega's drivers acknowledges that the card is a 9250, as it's available to set under Compatible Drivers in the Device Manager.

Yeah, my card being PCI, it's quite lacking. OpenGL support for the card is very horrible... I rarely use OpenGL because of how little compatibility the card has for it. BTW, the next tab over has separate options for DirectX and OpenGL, mostly pixel and texture options. Nothing really useful to me.

[patrickp]

Looks like ATI's Control Panel divides up the OpenGL and Direct3D options more thoroughly than Omegadrive's version.

But your card is really the only thing I can think of; I wouldn't expect your system to be poorly set up or maintained, and I'm sure you'd also be onto things like background processes, which I might suggest to other people. I know that normally, the card doesn't make that much difference to pSX, but I suppose it's possible that there's simply a volume of information that has to be passed to it, and the PCI connector just isn't up to it - even the rubbish cards people are sometimes running pSX on are usually AGP, at least.

The first mobo I had had a PCI slot for the graphics card, I recall (yes, semiconductors _had_ been invented by then ), and I got an ATI AIW Pro PCI card for it - which worked Ok, but the ATI DVD Player wouldn't install because ATI reckoned the bus wasn't fast enough...

[Gamesoul Master]

Yeah, my old Compaq (the 1 GHz I've mentioned here before) and my current one, both lack an AGP or PCI-Express port. My newer one is a Compaq Presario SR1430NX, in case some of you find it hard to believe that a full-sized tower computer (unlike my older, compact Compaq) made in the last 2 years doesn't have an AGP port. To be honest, I would never have believed it myself without actually checking the motherboard myself. I've always been meaning to build a new computer... something running PCI-Express graphics and a dual-core processor if I can afford it. But *at least* having a fast AGP port. PCI is so outdated... and my current card is probably the best PCI card you can buy now, out of the 2 or 3 PCI cards they still sell new... lol.

[patrickp]

That's the trouble, though, GM - the videocard manufacturers just aren't going to bother releasing their better spec cards in PCI format any more... in fact, I'm surprised that any manufacturer really finds it worthwhile releasing PCI-only boards any more - unless it's a board with integrated graphics and only a few slots, and even then I'd expect the integrated chip to be AGP. The cost saving must be really negligible, especially against what you can sell the board for.