FPS - some suggestions to improve playability.

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What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Run any game which the device can't keep up with, FPS goes above 6 and the 
game becomes unplayable due to excessive frameskip.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

If you look at source code for x-mame0.35.1 you should find there's some 
modifications to the frameskipper code which improve performance and 
playability.  MAME itself was written for DOS when version .37 was being 
developed and the MAME devs didn't consider threaded performance.  The main 
problem is that the frameskipper does a while loop to wait for next frame, even 
when it is skipping frames, which is... silly at best.  So maybe that patch 
could improve your performance too.

Another good thing is to limit the maximum auto frameskip to 6.  Past frameskip 
6 the game is already very unlikely to keep real time, and frameskip jumps to 
10 and 11 frequently making the game unplayable when instead if it were stuck 
at frameskip 6 the FPS would stay around 8-10 and the game would just slow down 
a tiny bit more.  I think most people would sacrifice realism for playability 
in this case.  Besides, at frameskip >6 "realism" has already gone out the 
window.

Lastly, on LG P500 touching the screen takes about 70% of the CPU :( (estimated 
from FPS drop when I start touching)  If it's possible to set a higher priority 
for the emulator then a lot more games would become playable with touch 
controls.  Right now even galaga hardware games are lagging with touch on this 
phone, yet the CPS games like MSVC run 98% speed in attract mode.  It's not the 
emulators fault, just gotta steal some core time back from the OS, lol.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

1.02, Android 2.2 Froyo, LG Optimus One 600mhz Arm 11

Please provide any additional information below.

Thanks for porting to Droid.  I would love to join in hacking at this but I 
don't even have time to play it at the moment.  Maybe in a few months.  =)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by w.bar...@gmail.com on 12 Sep 2011 at 5:01

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[deleted comment]

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Thanks... I'm going to dig in your suggestions

Any contributing is welcome anyway... I'm going to pause  develop   two weeks 
after the first release... I'm only fixing... But I have some things to do in 
future versions... The most important is the analog touch part that I develop 
to iPhone version... Far way from android control... I study your suggestion 
then  

Original comment by seleuco....@gmail.com on 12 Sep 2011 at 6:55

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Original comment by seleuco....@gmail.com on 27 Sep 2011 at 6:17

• Changed state: Accepted