First of all, I love the amount of progress the you guys have made so far! This emulator has come a long way. However, on certain games, namely Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, and Metroid Prime, do not have idle skipping. Is this just a quirk of the game, or is there something I can do to force it? It works in other games such as Super Smash Bros Brawl.
For reference, this is on the windows 32 bit version of build 3402. Does it on both the normal and IL versions.
And bonus secondary question, what exactly is the difference between the two versions?
dolphin IL runs on a faster but less stable core
how do you recognize that idle skipping is not working ?
On Metroid Prime, the title bar always has a zero after the Idle Skip, it just reads 'SVN R3406: GL: FPS: 50.10 - Core: JIT64 | DC - Speed: 495 MHz [Real: 495 + IdleSkip: 0] \ 486 MHz'. Also, when the framerate and 'Real' CPU speed drop, the IdleSkip still stays at 0
i dont got this games, but it is possible that some games never use any idle command on real gc/wii so that there is nothing at all that can be skipped.
in any case, metroid prime seems to run slow even on really good machines.
BTW, What is Idle Skipping? I can find any info on it
I think it's Frame Skipper, but organised to skip specific frames for each game. Some games have it by default on Wii.
not really a frame skipper, as it wont skip any frames to be rendered.
you may know how a cpu goes on idle when it got nothing to do.
this is the same with the powerpc cpu in gc and wii. When the game thinks is has calculated enough for now, it sets the cpu to sleep for lower power consumtion and less heat and to make sure the game runs at the right speed.
but when emulated, the game is often to slow instead of to fast, so with idle skipping the cpu wont go idle but use this time instead.
this all, of course, will only help when in real gc/wii the game needs less cpu-time then the console has AND idle mode is implemented in the specific game.
on frameskip : you can activate that by disabling the watchdog in core/hw/systemtimers.cpp, which keeps cpu and video thread in sync.
It will of course only work in dual core mode and its not worth anything.
With a decent graphic card you wont get any better speed.