SNES9X full screen

[frankprogramer]

when I try to run the snes9x emulator full screen, it goes very sloooooooooooow. To the point where it cannot be played. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Ram: 221mg
CPU: Intel Celeron 400 mhz
KDE 3
-Frankie

[mdwatts]

I have no idea what snes9x even is.

Do they have a website where they may have suggestions on how to speed it up?

[AdaHacker]

Originally posted by mdwatts
I have no idea what snes9x even is.
It's a Super NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) console emulator.

I haven't used snes9x in a while. Once ZSNES was ported to Linux, I switched to that and never looked back. In my opinion, ZSNES was always the better emulator, but that's another discussion.

Emulators tend to be pretty big CPU hogs. If it slows down too much when you run it full screen, then the only thing I can tell you is, don't run it full screen. Scaling up the picture only increases the CPU load, and I'm betting it doesn't run like greased lightning on your system to begin with. If you really want it full screen, you could turn off things like sound support, joystick support, and transparancy. At least, that's what the README recommends, but I doubt you want to make that compromise.

Before upgrading to a video card with OpenGL support, I had the same problem with ZSNES. My solution was to scale down the resolution on the X server rather than scale up the window. I added a 400x300 resolution in my XF86Config and used the [ctrl]-[alt]-[keypad+] trick to switch to it when I wanted to use the emulator. The window would still fill most of the screen, but I didn't get the slowdown of scaling it. Once I broke down and bought an ATI Rage128, though, I found that using the OpenGL graphics mode was so much faster that that trick was no longer necessary.

[frankprogramer]

how do I do that resolution thing? I don't really have any idea to start.
-Frankie

[AdaHacker]

In your XF86Config file, you can specify more than one resolution for each color depth. For example, I have

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 16
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "400x300"
EndSubSection
EndSection

This sets up 3 resolutions for the 16bpp color depth. The X server will try them from left to rght, so my default resolution is 1024x768. You can cycle through these resolutions while the X server is running by holding down Ctrl-Alt and pressing the + or - key on the numeric keypad. So, when I press Ctrl-Alt-KP+, my resolution will change to 800x600. If I do it again, it goes to 400x300, and if I do once more, it wraps back around to 1024x768. Note that there is an option "DontZoom" in XF86Config that can be used to turn this off. Make sure that that line is not in the file, or that the option is set to false.

[frankprogramer]

thanks, it worked