PCXS2 Roadmap?

[hahnchen]

Guys, I'm a big fan of PCXS, and was wondering if you had an internal roadmap for PCX2S development.

I know that 0.9.7 will be improving usability, and that you're looking into utilising >2 cores.

I understand that open source development means that you have many different streams of thinking. But do the development team have a high level roadmap of where they want the emulator to go? Are you looking at specific "high target" games to make compatable? Working on general performance issues? Leveraging more from graphics cards?

I think this would make an interesting news post. I'm sure others will feel the same.

[rama]

We have the ToDo List ™.
Everything we ever thought useful lands in there, and it is rumored the list goes into the hundreds of kilobytes..

No really, we have general goals that, of course, include compatibility fixes and emulation improvements.
We also want to optimize a few things yet, especially how the GS is emulated right now.
Then there's usability (cheats, ease of use, how "smooth" everything works, etc) to work on.
And of course the stuff you people ask for a lot.

[jglx30]

We have the ToDo List ™.
Everything we ever thought useful lands in there, and it is rumored the list goes into the hundreds of kilobytes..

No really, we have general goals that, of course, include compatibility fixes and emulation improvements.
We also want to optimize a few things yet, especially how the GS is emulated right now.
Then there's usability (cheats, ease of use, how "smooth" everything works, etc) to work on.
And of course the stuff you people ask for a lot.

good to know that Rama... especially the GS part... i think most of the current issue come from that... but anyway.. you guys already did a great job so far!!

[sakraycore]

rama do you know anything about whether or not quad core support is being worked on?

[Bositman]

For the billionth time NO. NO! It will take a HUGE rewrite of the emulator which will take at least MONTHS by itself and in the end we don't even know what kind of new bugs will come up or if the speed gain will be anything significant.

[mantasuk]

I think people who ask about Quad core (Or multicore) support think that it is a simple operation where you have to flick a swich somewhere in the code from 0 to 1, and things start working with as many cores as possible. For some applications it is easier to get threaded code than others. Some workloads are inherently threaded (like Photoshop, 3D Rendering, etc) , so this is not a problem. PCSX2 and any advanced emulator is a disaster to code in a multi threaded way because of all of the sinchronisation required. PCSX2 tries to emulate MULTIPLE physical chips. To to that, some tight sync is required, and you can not split one chip's work into 2 parts to be emulated by 2 threads.

Disclaimer : this is as far as I know, I may be wrong. When I say "can not" I probably mean "it is very very very difficult and requires a major rewrite".

Hopefully someone who is willing to ask this question again reads this thread.

[sakraycore]

so this is not a problem. PCSX2 and any advanced emulator is a disaster to code in a multi threaded way because of all of the sinchronisation required

This may be true if PCSX2 wasn't already multi threaded. 2-threaded is still multi threaded.

[hahnchen]

Sorry for mentioning many core support, but thanks for the update rama.

I'd really like to hear more, what are your current concerns with GS emulation? Do you guys have a hitlist of games you want compatible? Or is development driven some other way?

[rama]

Sometimes we all work on fixing specific games (hoping that the fix will help other titles as well),
sometimes we work on implementing known to be missing components.
Depends on the mood and / or weather

For the GS, there's talk of caching data transfer to it. Could be a pretty nice speedup. Maybe.