A few questions, most importantly for ZSNES sprite rendering.

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PetMetroid

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I have a few emulation questions.

First off, and most importantly, I'm having sprite limit issues on ZSNES. What I mean is that the emulator lags when there are too many sprites, or too much sprite activity on the screen. A good example of this is in Super Mario RPG. In the first area on my way to Mushroom Kingdom, there are quite a few enemies, and it goes SUPER slow. This happens in some other games as well when there are too many sprites. Shouldn't there be some kind of sprite limiting thing, or an over clocking capability during those occurrences? This is getting pretty irritating, I don't remember this happening when I used to emulate years ago, this is a great laptop that runs N64 and PSX games almost flawlessly, and I would really like to play Mario RPG without four times the wait.

Another question. PSX games run almost flawlessly here on my laptop, except for its occasional two-second pause (when I play a game from the CD drive). Is this related to the CD drive, with drive buffering perhaps? I don't mind this problem, but if it could be fixed easily, I would like that.

One more question. N64 games run almost flawlessly on my laptop (actually PSX games (I think) run better, how is that?). The only thing is that every now and then (ie, in Star Fox during menu transitions with ambient music) the sound is a little clippy. This might be natural, which if it is, I don't mind; but just in case, what is the best sound plugin for PJ64 that syncs with game actions?

That's it for now. Mainly, why are my SNES games lagging so much through sprite overloading?
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> First off, and most importantly, I'm having sprite limit
> issues on ZSNES. What I mean is that the emulator lags
> when there are too many sprites, or too much sprite activity
> on the screen.

posting your PC specs would probably be a good thing, since it could be quite possible that poor PC performance might be to blame. A good way to check this is to have ZSNES show FPS on emu load *in options under config* if the FPS drops during those "laggy" scenes, it's your PC

> Another question. PSX games run almost flawlessly here on
> my laptop, except for its occasional two-second pause (when
> I play a game from the CD drive). Is this related to the CD
> drive, with drive buffering perhaps? I don't mind this
> problem, but if it could be fixed easily, I would like that.

it's usually better to load the game from a CD image(ISO). A tutorial for making an ISO from here.

> One more question. N64 games run almost flawlessly on my
> laptop (actually PSX games (I think) run better, how is
> that?). The only thing is that every now and then (ie, in
> Star Fox during menu transitions with ambient music) the
> sound is a little clippy.

I'll let someone else handle this, but for the time being see if that's a sound buffer option and increase it slightly and see if that helps.
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> First off, and most importantly, I'm having sprite limit
> issues on ZSNES. What I mean is that the emulator lags
> when there are too many sprites, or too much sprite activity
> on the screen.

Well...the system tends to lag at those times sometimes as well. How's that for emulation accuracy?
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> Well...the system tends to lag at those times sometimes as
> well. How's that for emulation accuracy?

yeah I figured. That's why I mentioned the FPS trick to see if it's a system or PC issue... then again, frame skip would kick on and speed wouldn't be affected. It would just get choppy. That just dawned on me, whoops.
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I'm running off a 1.7 Ghz Core Duo processor and about 2 gigs of RAM. I'm not entirely sure how to find the graphic specs on this computer, but I am running off an Dell Inspiron 640m laptop, and the graphics card is a Mobile Intel 945GM Express. It looks like it says it has 224MB of RAM (huh!?) I looked at the problem again, and I realized that it's not that much of an annoyance. What confuses me is that the next gen games run flawlessly but these SNES games lag.

I know why the Play Station games are pausing when they do. I figured that, yes, ISOs go faster like the Reaper said, but it's a preference that I have right now that I would rather load from the drive. The PSX consoles drive spun constantly, didn't it? The emulator is set up to spin only when it needs to, then it spins again and buffers up some more information. Is there a way, or a setting, or a preference that may allow for constant drive spin, or allow buffering to be less frequent?
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> What confuses me
> is that the next gen games run flawlessly but these SNES
> games lag.

Go to that part in the game with Zsnes, hit F1, and display the FPS. If you are running an NTSC game (ie, anything from Japan or the US) then it should read 60 FPS at the most if you are getting the highest framerate, Europe (PAL) games will read 50 FPS at the most.

Probably if those read high, it's just a limit of the SNES. The SNES hardware can't display unlimited sprites, as I'm sure you know. To display more tricks have to be used that may dip the framerate a bit (or at least seems to generally).
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> Probably if those read high, it's just a limit of the SNES.
> The SNES hardware can't display unlimited sprites, as I'm
> sure you know. To display more tricks have to be used that
> may dip the framerate a bit (or at least seems to
> generally).
>
Yeah, the framerate does lower in those places. Normally, I would just accept that this computer just isn't quite powerful enough and doesn't perform at ten times more power than the SNES, but the N64 and PSX are running perfectly! How is this? Unless this is just an emulation development problem where ZSNES is still in it's stages to getting perfect emulation.
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> Yeah, the framerate does lower in those places. Normally, I
> would just accept that this computer just isn't quite
> powerful enough and doesn't perform at ten times more power
> than the SNES, but the N64 and PSX are running perfectly!
> How is this?

Well, if the framerate really is going down, it could have to do with your settings, or it could have something to do with emulation of the extra stuff used by Super Mario RPG. I can't remember what it's called at the moment....but I'm pretty sure this is one of the carts that essentially has a more powerful version of the SNES's processor contained in the cart. I seem to remember there being some bugs in Super Mario RPG (don't know if they have been fixed), so maybe emulation isn't perfected yet. I have not tried this game lately though, so for all I know it's been fixed up by now.

Also make sure you don't have any graphical filters turned on...see if this fixes it, if you have them on. You could always play with the video modes, too, one might work better for you than another.
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