r/emulation

I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding around ReXGlue, and sometimes people seem to associate it directly with bad ports or poor performance.

ReXGlue is a tool/framework used in the recompilation process. The final quality still depends heavily on how the developer implements, optimizes, and maintains the project.

If a project has poor performance, missing shaders, bugs, or other issues, I don't think it's fair to automatically blame ReXGlue without looking at the actual implementation.

I'm using ReXGlue in my own recompilation, and I've been able to optimize and improve the project considerably as development continues. That experience is part of why I'm curious about the community's opinion.

Info/screenshots + download: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=112722

In this video, it runs under DOSBox-X: first with the software renderer, then with hardware rendering on an emulated 3dfx Voodoo (Glide) https://youtu.be/KK65ccNZhUY

Features:

• MIPS R3000 dynamic recompiler to x86
• VGA 320x200, mode X 320x240, VESA 640x480 (65536 colors)
• 3dfx Glide renderer: Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 (SLI)
• Sound Blaster 2.0 / Pro / 16, CD audio and XA
• Menus drawn over the game, in homage to Genecyst

The first ready-made release of prospero win: https://github.com/mpereiraesaa/prospero-win/releases/tag/v0.1.0

###What prospero win is:

Runs Windows games directly on a PlayStation 5. It carries its own copy of Wine, so there is no PC streaming involved: the game runs on the console.

• 64-bit Windows programs run natively on the PS5's x86-64 CPU. 32-bit games run through prospero-win's own x86 translator.
• Direct3D 8, 9, 10 and 11 games draw through DXVK and Vulkan. Older OpenGL games are supported too, and so are 2D games and Windows programs that draw with GDI.
• You can play with the DualSense (Xbox-style XInput, analog sticks, triggers and rumble, plus custom mappings for keyboard-and-mouse games) or with a USB keyboard and mouse.
• Game audio comes out of the PS5's own audio output.
• A launcher lists your games. Each game has a profile with its graphics and control settings.
• It's experimental. Some games work well, and many haven't been tried yet.

The thing I can't stand about emulation is the shader compilation stutter. I can handle low resolution/fps, but if the game stutters like crazy for the first hours I simply turn it off. Ubershaders in Dolphin is a godsend and is one of the best technologies I've ever known. If there's a similar function in other emulators I'd be beyond happy. I'm not really up-to-date with emulators these days, so can someone chime in and tell me what stutter prevention features there are nowadays?

I ported gpSP to the ESP32-P4 and wrote a RISC-V JIT for it. The first-party Nintendo games I've tried so far run at full speed (59.7fps) with no frameskip. Even the heavy scenes in Metroid Fusion take about 14ms per frame, so there's still some headroom.

Board is a Waveshare ESP32-P4-NANO-WIFI6-DB (P4 rev 3.x, 400MHz). Controller is an 8BitDo over its 2.4G USB dongle.

I tried the Zcmt instructions that came with rev 3.x but they didn't help much, and they're a bit buggy too (from the chip itself). Haven't used SIMD yet because the renderer does a lot of scattered palette lookups. Still thinking about how to make that work.

Games that generate code in RAM and keep modifying it, like Doom, are still really slow. Planning to fix that over the holiday and put the code up on GitHub right after.

Also curious about the new S31, but it has less RAM, no L2 cache and a lower clock (320MHz), so not sure it can hit full speed. Probably need to move rendering to the other core for that one.