, "HpcMIPS <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
From: Greg Hughes <gl2hughes@uwaterloo.ca>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 05/02/2002 03:30:10
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mikel Waxler" <waxor@waxor.com>
To: "HpcMIPS" <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 1:59 AM
Subject: Sluggish Performench on a z50
> Why cant my z50 play nintendo games? I'm using darcness to sdo the
> emulation and its unplayably slow. xscorch is also pretty bad. I havn't
> triend much else i nthe way of games. Net hack runs amazingly fast though.
Well, the processor in the z50 is a NEC vr4121 running at 133Mhz. I'd say
roughly equivalent in speed with a 66MHz 486. So, pretty darn slow by
today's notebook speeds.
Given that the z50 doesn't have any hardware video acceleration to speak of,
it's no wonder you can't run a Nintendo emulator at speed on the thing.
> Anyway, here are my thoughts as to why it could be:
>
> Video, dont know anything about the graphics chip on the z50 but I'm
> guessing its slow.
Yup. The video is driven off the CPU into a framebuffer device. No
acceleration there, and really no possibility for it since there's no
hardware support, IIRC. The CPU is pushing all the pixels around for you
and is using a portion of the system RAM to do so. Speed is acceptable for
most desktop-type applications but you're not going to want to play full
motion video on it.
<snip>
- Greg
(greg@netbsd.org)