Understanding the PowerPC Clock Speed.

[Bart]

Supermodel now behaves like any ordinary emulator, including MAME, does: it emulates the number of CPU cycles per frame that the hardware actually ran at. Model 3 has 3 board revisions all with different CPU clock speeds.

The reason CPU speed was configurable in the first place was primarily because the PowerPC emulator in Supermodel is slow and written as a very straightforward interpreter. There's no fancy JIT compilation happening as in other emulators, like Dolphin. In the Mesozoic Era, when Supermodel first appeared, PCs were slow and the CPU emulator ate a surprising amount of time. Most Model 3 games spend a considerable amount of time doing nothing, spinning in a loop waiting for the Real3D board to finish rendering, which just burns CPU execution time. In these cases, we could reduce the PowerPC frequency -- reduce the number of emulated cycles, since many of them were spent sitting in an idle loop -- and therefore the burden on the host CPU, increasing emulator performance and overall frame rate.

As the intricacies of Model 3 frame timing became clear and emulated properly, this started to make less sense. In order to get rid of various timing-related hacks, we want to run the full frame of cycles and trigger events at the appropriate times. But most importantly of all, PCs now are more than fast enough to handle emulating even a 166 MHz PowerPC (Step 2.x games) without breaking a sweat. Arguably, the clock speed option should be removed entirely. It was nothing more than an ugly hack to begin with.

[Ferrarifan]

Thanks for the detailed info . This is great for some folks who don't understand why the CPU is adjustable in Supermodel. I know about it when I first discovered Supermodel, I started to understand it on the Supermodel back in 2012 on the website which took myself time to understand

My first PC was a HP Pavilion Desktop with a 2.8 Ghz Pentium with a AMD Radeon HD GPU with 8GB of RAM. It ran okay during the time on my setup but, the fps kept fluctuating around 45 to 60 or sometimes 55 while adjusting the PPC Frequency. My second PC was a HP Envy Laptop with a 2.5 Ghz I5-3210m with Intel HD 4000 integrated graphics with 6GB of RAM. The early days using that laptop to play Daytona USA 2 and SCUD Race was great and the average fps was around 59 to 60 but, later years, my laptop was starting to become weaker because of that stupid Win 10 update and it started to slow my laptop down and Supermodel wasn't running these games very well later on. EDIT: I noticed that when I boot up and ran Windows 10 on my flash drive, somehow it ran better than I expected but, the fps kept bouncing around 55 to 60 for the most part.

And my latest PC I put together was phenomenal. I was very impressed that I chose the right CPU and GPU. My system has a i5-4670k at 3.4 Ghz with a Nvidia GTX 1060 3GB with 16 GB of RAM. Supermodel still runs very well on my current setup especially using the New 3D engine. I had her around 7 years ago and she's still going strong

[Bart]

I had to delete the OP because his account was sending spam DMs apparently.