Nintendulator extremely slow!

[8bitMicroGuy]

I downloaded Nintendulator from Sourceforge and I'm very happy how I can see everything: CPU, PPU mapped patterns, PPU used sprites, PPU nametables.
Unfortunately, it runs so slow and my ears hurt listening to its slowness. It runs like 10% from normal speed. I tried using the frame skipping, but still no luck. It's still slow.

Am I the only one experiencing this? Is it my PC or the emulator? How do I fix this?

[lidnariq]

Nintendulator ran adequately for me on a 12-year old 1.3GHz athlon, not quite at full frame rate, so ... it's almost certainly your computer ... or maybe your gpu drivers.

[tokumaru]

Nintendulator is slower than most emulators, because instead of performance it targets accuracy. It still should run fine in most computers under normal circumstances, but when the debug windows are open it does become extremely slow on all of my computers. I think that's understandable.

[8bitMicroGuy]

Ok, I closed all the windows and got only the emulator.
Sadly, I cannot monitor PPU or else it will get slow Is there a way how I can decrease the refresh rate of the PPU debugger like in FCEUX so that I don't get so much lag. It's not like I monitor every single frame

Can this be prevented? Can I edit that setting by editing the source code of Nintendulator? Is there a nice documentation on Nintendulator's source code so that I don't get lost while searching for the code I want to change?

And is there another emulator that has a PPU debugger with shown allocated sprites?

[koitsu]

Most emulators will show you this. I recommend trying the following:

- FCEUX (get one of the SVN builds; EmuCR offers them)
- VirtuaNES
- NO$NES (a little finicky, but offers some convenience debugging-esque things that I haven't seen in other emulators (no I will not discuss them here, please stay focused/on topic))

FCEUX offers "refresh sliders" on most of the debugging windows, to allow you to refresh more often or less often depending on what you want.

I make no promises that any of these will do what you need exclusively, or work better than Nintendulator. You'll need to try them out. I myself do development using the above emulators, Nintendulator, and Nestopia as well (not for debugging but just general testing). Once I have something that seems right, I try it out on actual hardware with a PowerPak.

[Quietust]

What version of Nintendulator are you using? If 0.975, is it the latest build?

I ask because there are some versions of 0.975 (and possibly also 0.970) where the PPU debug window will repaint every time memory is written, while I believe the current version makes an effort to not do that.

[thefox]

I have to say I never had any problems with performance of Nintendulator, even with all debugging windows open. And I was running it on a fairly outdated CPU (until recently).

[8bitMicroGuy]

What version of Nintendulator are you using? If 0.975, is it the latest build?

I ask because there are some versions of 0.975 (and possibly also 0.970) where the PPU debug window will repaint every time memory is written, while I believe the current version makes an effort to not do that.

That's exactly what it's doing! In SMB3, each time the bankswitch happens (which is 2 times in a frame. First for level and second for status bar), it refreshes and lags so much.
I downloaded the "latest" version from Sourceforge and it's 0.975. Looks like I'll have to find the actually latest version.

[Quietust]

I downloaded the "latest" version from Sourceforge and it's 0.975.

That can't be right, since Sourceforge should only have 0.970; version 0.975 is only available from qmtpro.com.