Wiz - screen tearing

[Ian Price]

What's the best way to reduce/erradicate screen tearing on the Wiz? Many of the Wiz emulators have now eliminated it or reduced the problem significantly . What can we do in GLBasic to ease the problem?

[fjsantosb]

Good point here.

Would be great to find something to solve / avoid this problem.

King Regards, fjsantos.

[kaotiklabs]

Nowadays everybody is using the Pollux DPC Set app, from Notaz for tweaking the RAM timings.
It nearly reduces all the tearing. Maybe could be included on glbasic.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi?0,0,0,0,8,154

I hope a new firmware update will fix this, but GPH seems lately to be on holydays...

[Kitty Hello]

Did anyone try these timings from notaz?
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=48038&pid=739137&mode=threaded&show=&st=#entry739137

I'm curious how this might work out.

[Ian Price]

Surely that's something that needs to be implemented from within GLB?

Would it not be possible to render 240x320 then rotate to 320x240 like has been suggested elsewhere on the GP32X forums? Would it really make a difference (other than in speed). Is this what you do with the iPhone/iPod Touch?

Realisticly is this something that can be/is worth getting sorted? Especially with the Pandora just around the corner, you're going to be busy getting GLB ready for that

[Kitty Hello]

The 240x320 solution is a great speed bottleneck. I did that once. If the above works I'll implement it, sure.

[Kitty Hello]

OK, I implemented the 240x320 screen rotation, and it's totally reducing the tearing now.
Please tell me if your games run too slow now. I'll try to provide you soe code to overclock the thing to say 600 MHz, which should pretty much fix the delay then. (Update online... in a few minutes)

[erico]

yep I heard pandora support? pandora looks like a neat plataform... would be nice.

[Ian Price]

Cheers Gernot - I'll test it out tomorrow

[MrTAToad]

Reports are that its now sorted

[Ian Price]

Had a chance to test this now and it does remove screen tearing, but it also slows down the Wiz game by nearly 50% (I was getting a steady 60FPS in one app. - it's now down to 33FPS).

If you can't get the speed up significantly, I think I'd rather have the tearing

Sorry to be a pain.

[Kitty Hello]

No problem. I think I have 2 methods to improve that. First, I try to use single buffering now (because I wait for vblank anyway) and 2nd is to overclock to 600 MHz. Might be worth a try.
I know the tearing issue was a pain and that's why I decided to go the tearing rather than the slow route. I hope I can improve it to get stable 60 FPS, though.

[Kitty Hello]

I made an update. It's quite fast now and no tearing. What do you think?

[trucidare]

there is an update that kills screen tearing. check gp2x.de

[Ian Price]

I can't seen any difference here tbh Gernot

The screen tearing is gone, but my game still runs at around 33FPS.

Not only that, but when you exit the game, the GPH menu is rotated (with a row of pixel crap at the bottom) and the Wiz is unusable.

[EDIT] Honestly Gernot, it's not really worth you wasting your time on this issue. The Wiz was fecked from day one by GPH. Trying to sort out their mess is more hassle than it's worth. Just revert back to the tearing - it's not that bad so as to make a game unplayable. At the current speeds (approx. 50%), I can't even say that. Reading the advice on GP32x there really isn't anything that can be done quickly or easily. Maybe Trucidare's post might help, but if the likes of Exophase etc. can't solve the speed issue, then there likely isn't a readily available and/or quick solution.

Here's a WIP screenie of the game I'm running on Wiz



Nothing too complex. Even with lots of snow it ran at 60FPS.