NES emulator as a screensaver?

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 3:27 pm

OK, one bug before I go to sleep: after the screensaver has been on for a while the screen freezes, i.e. same frame is displayed from there on. Haven't bothered to try out yet how long it takes for it to freeze.

jwdonal · Post by **jwdonal** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:26 am

thefox wrote:OK, one bug before I go to sleep: after the screensaver has been on for a while the screen freezes, i.e. same frame is displayed from there on. Haven't bothered to try out yet how long it takes for it to freeze.

Nice!! I've got the exact same bug. I already emailed Luke about it. Good to hear I'm not the only one. I think it may have something to do with when my monitor tries to go into sleep/standby mode. The length of time it takes the screensaver to freeze is *very* consistent. I bet you could put a stopwaatch by it and it would be exactly the same every time - although I haven't had time to try this myself yet. Oh, and if the screensaver freezes my monitors will not go into standby mode, this is why I think they are related. Also, my monitors are set to go into standby exactly 5 min after the screensaver comes on - and 5 min is about how long it takes the screensaver to freeze.

Fox, do you have your monitors set to go into standby mode? Would be very interesting if you did....

EDIT: Haha, I just thought, why don't I just turn off my standby mode temporarily and see if the screensaver stops freezing - DUH. I'll try it and let you know.

thefox · Post by **thefox** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 2:32 am

jwdonal wrote:Fox, do you have your monitors set to go into standby mode? Would be very interesting if you did....

Yeah, I do. Should go into standby after 10 minutes of inactivity (and screensaver comes up after 5 minutes), so yeah I guess the bug must be there.

jwdonal · Post by **jwdonal** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 3:07 am

And guess what? I turned off the standby mode on my monitors and the screensaver has not frozen once in over 2 hours. Haha, I think we've got this one figured out.

Pz!

Jonathon

Luke · Post by **Luke** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 2:49 pm

Ok, so it seems like the dust has settled and all of the bugs mentioned here (and a few that weren't!) have been fixed, with the latest binary available here. Thanks for bearing with me!

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 3:38 pm

I just finally tried this thing out. It is AMAZING. Only thing is though it could probably use a faster emulator, maybe rip stuff out of LoopyNES or something.

AndiNo · Post by **AndiNo** » Sun Mar 28, 2010 6:09 am

I, too, have to say that this is absolutely brilliant! It's my new screensaver now

(although I wouldn't actually need one).
However if I activate the movie-wall the screensaver is running very slow, either my PC isn't fast enough or you could speed up your emulator.
When I saw this program I thought of having a screensaver that works for all systems (not only NES) by just starting a predefined emulator with a given movie file and ROM. I don't know if any current emulator supports this but it would be cool. However if you created a SNES screensaver I would download it instantly, too

Luke · Post by **Luke** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 7:51 am

I recently posted a new version of the screen saver that addresses the speed issue. After lots of code optimization the emulation core is nearly twice as fast as before. Not sure whether to be proud of the improvement or embarrassed at how inefficient the code used to be.

There is also a new "playlist" function that makes it easy to do fun things like tile your screen with all 6 Mega Man games. The web page is still here or you can just download it directly if you want.

AndiNo · Post by **AndiNo** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:50 am

Thanks for the update! It's nice you were able to optimize the emulation so much.
However nearly everything I set as software up/scaler slows the whole thing down to crawling speed. I can use the hardware settings like "fit to entire screen" without problems, only the software based scaling routines seem to be very slow. Is there anything you (or I) can do about this?

Luke · Post by **Luke** » Mon Feb 28, 2011 12:21 pm

I will look at all of the upscaling and graphics effects code again, but I think I have already optimized that code to the best of my abilities. In the meantime, here are some options you can try to speed things up:

- The biggest thing is turning off all of the post-processing effects.

- You can also experiment with GDI/DirectDraw/Direct2D output; I have seen each graphics API perform better than the others on different machines so it might take a little trial and error to find the one that works best for you.

- The faster software upscaler is nearest neighbor.

- The movie wall window has an option to restrict the number of unique NES instances running. Lowering that will almost certainly improve performance, but games may be duplicated to fill out the contents of the wall.

Please let me know if you are able to get it running better or if you have any other questions.

AndiNo · Post by **AndiNo** » Tue Mar 01, 2011 2:03 am

You are right, after I turned off the screen curvature everything seems to run smooth. That's a bit surprising as up to now I always had this option turned on. Well maybe it's because of the software upscaling. Anyhow I'm now using DirectDraw with "fit to entire screen" and hqx as upscaler with x3 software scale. All the time I have only been using one movie, no movie wall.
Anyway thanks for the help!

Oh and could you please start working on a similar SNES screensaver?

I think I would even donate something if you created that, too. And there are some rather skilled players who already made some cool videos - I mean for the current NES.

Kreese · Post by **Kreese** » Tue Mar 01, 2011 4:11 am

Wow! Had no idea about this screensaver. Works excellent for me. Thanks alot... I'll spread the word about it to all my NES-friends.

Luke · Post by **Luke** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 5:10 am

Sorry again for the bump (has it really been 4 years?!?), but I released another new version of the screen saver this morning. The big news is that this release includes a Mac port along with the standard Windows version! The Mac version ended up taking a hilarious amount of time longer then I expected which partially explains the long gap between releases.

Both versions feature new multi-player support - you can now have separate game "cursors" on the movie wall for each device connected to your PC. Previously, you only had one game cursor and it was always mapped to your keyboard. So with this feature you can e.g. have 4 people playing 4 different NES games simultaneously. Hardly practical but that's never been the point of this software.

There's also some other new features and some significant stability improvements.

You can check out the official website here, or directly download the Mac version or Windows version.

aupton · Post by **aupton** » Tue Jan 27, 2015 11:09 am

Luke wrote:Sorry again for the bump (has it really been 4 years?!?), but I released another new version of the screen saver this morning. The big news is that this release includes a Mac port along with the standard Windows version! The Mac version ended up taking a hilarious amount of time longer then I expected which partially explains the long gap between releases.

Both versions feature new multi-player support - you can now have separate game "cursors" on the movie wall for each device connected to your PC. Previously, you only had one game cursor and it was always mapped to your keyboard. So with this feature you can e.g. have 4 people playing 4 different NES games simultaneously. Hardly practical but that's never been the point of this software. There's also some other new features and some significant stability improvements.

You can check out the official website here, or directly download the Mac version or Windows version.

Thank you! I've been looking forward to a MAC version

nesdev.org

NES emulator as a screensaver?

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