Timing Issues

[CPFace]

I hope nobody minds a noobish question.

 

I understand that there can be video problems if drawscreen isn't called often enough. My question is, would these problems be evident in an emulator, or would I have to run my game on the actual hardware to see if these problems are cropping up? I suspect that it's always better to test it on actual hardware, I'm just curious how much I should trust my emulator. I'm running z26 at the moment.

[+batari]

I hope nobody minds a noobish question.

 

I understand that there can be video problems if drawscreen isn't called often enough. My question is, would these problems be evident in an emulator, or would I have to run my game on the actual hardware to see if these problems are cropping up? I suspect that it's always better to test it on actual hardware, I'm just curious how much I should trust my emulator. I'm running z26 at the moment.

With z26, run the binary using the -n switch. The scanline count (around 262) should be constant. If it varies at all, your code is taking too much time.

 

If you are running 0.99b or later of bB, you can use some of the built-in debugging tools to determine how your code is doing. So far, you have:

set debug cycles - will flash the background color if the allotted time is exceeded

set debug cyclescore - shows an estimate of the number of machine cycles available (or exceeded) in the score.

[CPFace]

Cool, thanks.