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Guwanges

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  1. The system is bare bones. Disabled almost everything on startup other than what's required. No antivirus. 0-2% idle CPU usage. Nothing's interfering. I don't know what the majority of people are experiencing because you'd have to poll a considerable amount of users to get a sample on that. Lack of complaints isn't evidence of absence. To me it's a big deal and even I almost decided not to bother with signing up on this forum and mentioning it. I don't use any videos, so VLC is of no consequence. Otherwise my setup is pretty spartan. Maybe 100 games spread across 8 systems or so. Minimal image's downloaded/cached. Low graphical settings. Again, most of it can't be a system issue as I'm running my emulated games and steam games no problem. No throttling issues of any kind. Also, the user above had a GTX1060 and reported the same issue, so. And I decided to install the update when "wheel optimzation" (or some such note) was mentioned in the change log.
  2. @fromlostdays Good to hear! The guy who replied before, though helpful, shrugged it off as mainly a problem with my system specs. I knew it didn't add up. And, from the looks of your system, you'd think it should have performed perfectly given it's at least 4 times more powerful than mine. I totally know what you were experiencing. It got to the point where I was very deliberate with every tap on the joystick, or used the mapped page-up/page-down buttons. I still get a few hitches here and there. And sometimes I end up with the wrong box art left over on whatever I selected. But it's miles ahead of what I was experiencing before.
  3. Just a quick update on the original problem of laggy system/game cycling in BigBox. I downloaded the update yesterday and - I don't know if someone was listening to my concerns or it was just happenstance - but everything has been fixed! The wheel/images behave far smoother. Almost flawless. Certainly on par with what I would expect from my aging system. I knew there were performance gains still to be had. Kudos to the developer for finding them and double kudos for (it seems) listening.
  4. Thanks for the tip, but the trouble is this crashing bug happens on any executable I run. Some scenarios don't have an easy exit option (like Fightcade) and so it's nice to be able to just do back + start. But most of the time it freezes bigbox - even if I do it properly - putting BIgBox to 50% CPU usage and requiring a Ctrl+alt+del to kill the process. Real bummer. It's the only real "immersion breaking" bug that I've come across but it's a big one.
  5. In BigBox you can set the hotkey automation for exiting. I set the "hold" button to the X360's back button, and the combo button to the start button. Works every time. Though I've noticed a bug where if you spam these buttons it does a gnarly crash (sometimes I absentmindedly hit these buttons in haste when impatient).
  6. Glad you got it figured out! As for the mod, google "Mayflash Sanwa Mod" and you'll find lots of videos to guide you, but it should be pretty straightforward. I would stick with what you see other's doing as they're probably selecting the best parts for your situation. Different sticks have different lengths and it's possible you won't have enough room if your stick enclosure is too shallow. By going with the standard other's used, you'll know everything fits. With that said, sticks aren't that different for the most part so there is usually a way to make it work, but might take a bit more ingenuity on your part. If I had to guess, most mods would use the Sanwa JLF. It's a lovely stick - top-3 you could get for sure - and not expensive: https://www.focusattack.com/sanwa-jlf-tp-8yt-joystick/ Buttons are standard and fit the same diameter holes, but do watch for weird case scenarios like Happ buttons that have very long screw shafts. If you stick with sanwa obs buttons, again, the best and not expensive: https://www.focusattack.com/pushbuttons/popular-brands/sanwa/obs-series/ I recommend going with the screw-ins as the other's have a tendency of snapping when removing.
  7. Haha. Ok, sure. I just posted here because it was a rolling conversation and it seemed you were interested. I don't think there is a bottleneck, but, duly noted
  8. I decided to do a frame-by-frame analysis test of GPU Sync 3 Frames vs GPU Sync 0 Frames. I was hoping it would be definitive by eliminating subjective experience, but unfortunately I could only record at 30FPS and the results were not conclusive. However, the analysis results (admittedly crude) between 3 vs 0 frame in this test were pretty much exactly the same. My test case was ESPrade which has a notorious 3 frames of PCB lag. I was happy to verify that I eliminated that lag entirely and got next frame results, even with Vsync enabled. Now, of course it's a 30FPS test and so it's possible that there's still 1 frame of lag that I'm not noticing, but since the results were consistent against many button presses, I think this is not likely. Probably the average lag was something like 8ms total. Subjectively, I still feel the difference between 0 frames and 3 frames is much more favourable when set at 3 frames. I notice this mostly with joystick movements in shoot-em-ups. Blazing Star in particular is a noticeable difference. I've attuned my sensitivity to movement in these games over decades, so I do trust my experience. It doesn't appear subtle to me, it's around 1 frame of (perceived) lag. I notice this on both of my emulation systems, so it's unlikely the results are completely setup specific. My theory is either GPU sync is poorly documented (indeed, I see the same lines being parroted about setting to 0 frames, but never traces back to an official documented source), or something about setting to 0 adds variable fluctuations in the results. Just like how the brain can lag compensate, it can also probably produce the perception of increased lag if it doesn't have a steady source. This would make sense as our brain's lag compensation (along with its other pattern based systems) are heavily dependent on consistent patterns.
  9. Yeah, thought you'd mention that. I know that's what everyone says, but I am absolutely certain it's the reverse for my setup. I've experimented a lot with this and it's definitive that the higher setting reduces lag for me. I've not seen a technical description of what this does exactly so it's possible people are just floating around the same bad information on this. By the way, just tested reducing image quality to medium and it does seem to make things load snappier. And I was a bit surprised to see the visual hit wasn't that bad at all. Thanks for the tip!
  10. Agreed that removing 4ms isn't very much (maybe it compensates for the USB controller lag). However, the differential on the system you're quoting is 8-10ms, which is just over half a frame. And the cost is probably 1000% of my system cost. I think the lag reduction goes like this in terms of value: 1) Runahead. At minimum 16ms. In some cases 50ms+. Very cheap. 2) GPU Sync, 3 frames. This for me almost removes vsync induced lag. Probably another 16ms-32ms on average. Also cheap. 3) Frame delay 15. Can remove no greater than 15ms. Expensive. And useful only if there is further lag at the hardware level to be removed that (1) and (2) didn't reduce to 0ms. Come to think of it, this poses an interesting question whether Frame delay can compensate for vsync lag. If so, then it certainly can be made more useful. As it stands I don't notice its impact. I can detect as little as 1 frame (16ms) of lag quite easily, but less than that is very hard to notice.
  11. It's an HD6410D + HD6450 Total performance is probably not much better than a single GTX460. I'm able to set Frame delay to 6 by default for almost every game. I came across one game that buckled: Espgaluda. So I set it to 4 as default to cover my bases (and, honestly, 1 or 2ms doesn't produce benefit as much as the cost demands). And actually I mixed up my systems when it comes to CPU. Turns out it's an ever older CPU. A4-3400 So, you can imagine how happy I am with finally getting a lagless setup that can play all of my games on this discarded little PC. Super impressed with Retroarch!
  12. It's kind of funny what you said about the myth of not needing a beefy system. It's funny because it's the reason I made the post to begin with. I was simply blown away at how I could run all of my cores for all of my games at max, no frame drops, vsynced and perfectly smooth. On top of that, I've eliminated all lag by implementing runahead along with GPU sync, and even (very costly) frame delay. Honestly, my 7 year old budget system is performing incredibly. It's the cycling of a few image assets choking Bigbox in contrast to this performance that made the matter stand out to me. I should point out that all of my cores that I run are for games previous to 2002. PSX, Saturn, and even some Wii games run perfectly fine but not with runahead implemented. Fortunately for me that's not much of a concern as these systems don't interest me as much. I saw your previous posts on the matter and honestly, though it was extremely helpful and thank you for that, it just highlights how absurd the situation is to me. I do appreciate your input, however, and I will try running the images to medium quality again to see if it makes a significant difference at little or no cost (but I'm gaming on 43" TV so, I'm guessing not). Thanks again.
  13. OK, first, I know this is an issue that's been touched upon. I've read many of the replies to these concerns. Most of the replies are in the form of "trim down your image cache" or "upgrade your system." I am very pleased with BigBox, so I'm commenting on this because I want to see it get better and think it should be better in this regard for the several reasons. A) Let's recall why people are using BigBox. It's mostly to catalogue and launch old emulated games. Most of these games can be emulated on hardware from a couple of decades ago (as I did on my machines in the early 2000's). B) It's reasonable to assume most people choose old systems, hand-me-downs and so forth to run these old games, reasoning that they don't need a powerful/expensive computer which will be costly to maintain. C) There should be ways to optimize image display considering that similar cataloguing apps and, indeed, websites running in browsers, function perfectly fine on far less powerful systems such as my old iPad mini. Of course I don't know how BigBox was developed under the hood, so by definition I'm speaking without knowing. However, I'm also a developer myself and understand these types of bottlenecks always have some solution which doesn't involve absurd amounts of compression. One big optimization I feel is obvious is delaying populating game data (images and text) until the wheel stops cycling for a set interval (.5 seconds, perhaps). As it stands, BigBox is constantly trying to load selections... even when I haven't stopped long enough to imply a selection was made. This slows things down considerably. Another is to use predictive caching so BigBox pre-loads only the most likely data to be called next (EG: the adjacent games to your current position). Another is asynchronous loading using multiple cores, removing a big cpu bottleneck. My point isn't to tell the dev how to do their job or even how exactly to solve the problem but rather to dig a bit deeper into these optimizations which I'm sure are still there to be made. My development philosophy is to develop for the lowest most common target group; the hardware specs which are at the lowest end of the most common setup. I think it's safe to say this would be somewhere in the realm of a dual core computer that's about 8 years old. Being that that's less than the power of my current machine and BigBox is struggling to keep up, I think more work towards supporting this lower end needs to be done. EDIT: I should probably mention my setup specs: CPU: AMD FX6300 GPU: Dual HD6150 RAM: 8GB HDD: 120GB Sata SSD
  14. lol, not sure how I missed this post. I had much the same issue just a few posts up. No real solutions, but hopefully it helps seeing what issues I came across with a similar setup:
  15. Put in some more work on this and finding the answer is not so easy, perhaps even impossible. One main problem is most console games don't allow player2 to start the game. So, mapping to player2 as an alternative controller is a bad idea for this reason alone. The next possible solution is to take my alternate controller (PS4) and simply unplug the main controller and replace it with the alt whenever I want to use it. But then, the mappings are still totally different. So, for this it seems I should use something like DS4Windows or InputMapper to trick the emulator into thinking It's a standard Xbox360 controller. Except, the mappings are still going to be different from the stick as the buttons aren't laid out the same way. Best solution I can think of to this is to remap the buttons in retroarch for each game that I intend to use the pad with. It's a bad tradeoff as it disallows me to luxury of deciding, on the spot, if I want to use a pad or arcade stick. It requires planning ahead and per-game mapping. Putting this out there in case I forget why this turned into a rats-nest of issues and to help others if they travel down the same road.
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