Dolphin Progress Report

[MayImilae]

Please don't just guess Skylanders games at random.

Also no.

[MayImilae]

So, the header for this report is a tricky one. You cannot see that background exactly in any game - I used the fifoplayer to reveal a bunch of different things and build up that image. It is however all from one game though.

[cheap plastic]

Sorry, I just could have sworn it was one of them.
This time, I’m gonna have to guess skylanders swap force. I think the clouds in game are supposed to be more purple to match the background. If it ain’t that, I won’t try again.

[MayImilae]

Wrong again~

[gamerk2]

Oh, AccurateNaNs and Dragon Ball: Revenge of King Piccolo; I'm the one who reported that...in 2015? Wow, time files when having fun.

Aside from that, one suggestion for the Read from DVDs feature: Is it feasible for machines with the requisite memory to simply pre-cache the entire DVD and run off that cached image in RAM? It's a workaround sure, but would at least allow legitimately made backup DVDs to be read/run. I'll also throw in the feature request of making this an option also for images run off the HDD; mechanical HDDs still do have occasional stutter, and my image backups are on such a drive (external to boot) and would benefit from caching the entire image in RAM.

[MayImilae]

Any modern mechanical hard drive, even a slow 5400rpm one, is fast enough to not cause stutter. Even when used externally over USB! Optical disc drives are just extremely slow.

[Franpa]

(02-17-2023, 09:37 AM)MayImilae Wrote: Any modern mechanical hard drive, even a slow 5400rpm one, is fast enough to not cause stutter. Even when used externally over USB! Optical disc drives are just extremely slow.

Power saving features could potentially cause stutter maybe, though unlikely.

[MayImilae]

Quote:Is it feasible for machines with the requisite memory to simply pre-cache the entire DVD and run off that cached image in RAM?

To answer this, I think I need to give you some perspective of just how slow DVD drives are. So let's do a comparison on how long it would take to copy the entire contents of a DVD to RAM.

• On an 8x DVD drive (10.82MB/s), the most common speed of DVD Drive, a dual layer DVD would take 785.58 seconds, just over 13 minutes, to read entirely. That is the maximum theoretical speed, not what you'd see if you actually tried this with a DVD Backup. That's assuming a flawless not-burned DVD, a new drive, etc etc.
• On a modern hard drive without any SSD cache, you'll be getting a maximum sustained transfer rate over 200MB/s. 225 seems to be averageish. At 225MB/s, it will take 38 seconds to copy an entire dual layer DVD ISO to RAM. Also, 5200rpm and 7200rpm hard drives have about the same sustained transfer rates - the faster spinning platters helps random access times, not sequential reads. I genuinely didn't know that until now!
• On a single Samsung 980 Pro NVME SSD (7000MB/s), you'll be able to copy an entire dual layer DVD ISO to RAM in 1.2 seconds. And you can get that drive right now for 100USD.
  

Yes, we COULD copy the entire contents of the DVD into RAM in order to resolve their stuttering. But having to wait over 10 minutes for it to transfer is not tenable. Once we get into hard drives or SSDs, they are already so much faster than the emulated disc speed that it doesn't matter.

[cheap plastic]

I think the whole process of making a Wii dvd backup just wouldn’t be worth it regardless. You would need to keep a bunch of disks around for each game, or you could just have a bunch of them on a flash drive or external storage, with much better performance

[Franpa]

Wait, 8x is the most common speed for DVD's? All the drives have been at least 16x for around a decade if not longer. That being said it'd still be woefully slow compared to a HDD.