Heavy slowdown with ECA in latest release

[Calavera]

I've been using an older build of Supermodel for quite awhile now. I believe it is SVN 626 from around August 2017. It has always worked so I never bothered updating. Recently I found my old Sidewinder Force Feedback usb wheel and wanted to try it out with Supermodel since it supports FFB. The main game I'm wanting to play with it is Emergency Call Ambulance. In SVN 626 it worked fine with Daytona 2 but no FFB in ECA. So I figured I'd try out the latest release.

At first nothing would load due to it immediately crashing when doing the netboard stuff. I found a post saying to add
port_in = 0
port_out = 0
addr_out = 0
to supermodel.ini to disable Netboard Emulation. That worked but then came another problem, when loading ECA it would give an error saying that epr-19338a.bin was missing from the zip. I tried both the export and USA versions and got the same error. I solved it by copying the epr-19338a.bin from Scud Race into eca.zip. After that it finally loaded up and the force feedback was even working!

Then came yet another problem. ECA has horrible slowdown all over the place when I play it in the latest release (SVN 775). On SVN 626 it would start having slowdown towards the end of the third stage but I fixed that by running it with -ppc-frequency=75. I tried running it like that on 775 but it was still filled with slowdown.

Am I doing something wrong? I really want to play ECA with a FFB steering wheel but I don't know what else to do to get it running properly. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Bart]

Try increasing the PowerPC frequency above 75 MHz.

[Calavera]

Try increasing the PowerPC frequency above 75 MHz.

I'm not sure if there is a limit but I cranked it way up just to see if it would make any difference but no luck.

My system specs are
CPU: i5-3570k @ 4.2ghx
GPU: R9 290X
16GB Ram

Everything ran great on SVN 626, I'd be fine with keeping that version but I really want to be able to play Emergency Call Ambulance with force feedback. Even though it is a short game it is my #1 Model 3 game. Do you happen to know what was the first SVN to support FFB in ECA? I could try that and see if it has any of the same slowdown problems.

[Bart]

It has always “supported” force feedback. The ROMs just weren’t defined in Games.xml. You can remove them there. But that is almost certainly not the issue.

When you say slow down, does the frame rate dip?

[Ian]

The problem is the renderer runs like absolute shit on amd gpus. Even mid range intel integrated gpus get a solid 60fps. I filed a bug report with amd about it. They have actually tested the project and found the same performance issue , but have yet to hear if there is any work around or fix. But someone here reported older drivers don't have this same problem.

[Calavera]

It has always “supported” force feedback. The ROMs just weren’t defined in Games.xml. You can remove them there. But that is almost certainly not the issue.

When you say slow down, does the frame rate dip?

I tried copying the games.xml from the newer version to the older version and the force feedback worked but with the same slowdown. So it isn't the newer version that is slowing it down it is the FFB. When I disable it the game runs fine but as soon as I enable it the game suffers from slowdown.

When I tried the newest release ECA wouldn't load at all because it said epr-19338a.bin was missing. To fix that problem I took the epr-19338a.bin from Scud Race and put it into ECA.zip. I didn't realize it before but that file is for the drive board which is needed for force feedback. So I'm guessing I'm having the slowdown issue due to using a drive board rom from a different game. *update I don't think this is causing the problem, I've read other places where it says several games use the same rom so it is perfectly fine to take the file from Scud Race.

*UPDATE I've discovered something odd about the slowdown. It mainly only happens when I turn the wheel to the right. When I'm going straight or left the game runs fine but whenever I turn to the right at all the game slows to a crawl. So for some reason turning right initiates the slowdown.

[Bart]

That is quite unexpected. We would have to do some profiling to see what’s going on. I didn’t write the force feedback code so it is hard to say whether I could fix anything. Do you see anything being printed to the console window?

Also, are you comfortable building Supermodel according to the instructions on the Help page?

I will try it tonight and see if I have the same problem. You can edit Supermodel.ini and disable forcefeedback for ECA. Just set ForceFeedback=0

[Calavera]

That is quite unexpected. We would have to do some profiling to see what’s going on. I didn’t write the force feedback code so it is hard to say whether I could fix anything. Do you see anything being printed to the console window?

Also, are you comfortable building Supermodel according to the instructions on the Help page?

I will try it tonight and see if I have the same problem. You can edit Supermodel.ini and disable forcefeedback for ECA. Just set ForceFeedback=0

Nothing being printed to the console window. Another thing I discovered after posting this was that disabling the force feedback through the games test menu also removes the slowdown. It has a setting called steering reaction which is basically just the strength of the force feedback. The default setting is 4 and with that the game slows to a crawl when turning to the right. I've found that turning it to 1 or 2 will allow the game to be played with FFB with no slowdown. The only problem here is that the FFB is pretty week at 1 and 2. Turning it to 3 or higher makes the right turn slowdown happen. It seems to slowdown just as much whether it is on 3 or 7 (7 is the max)

Just to be sure I tested Dirt Devils with FFB as it also requires you to use the epr-19338a.bin from Scud Race. It worked with no problems at all. It is so strange that only ECA seems to have this odd problem.

[Bart]

Without knowing exactly what is happening, I'm going to venture a guess that the game is sending too many commands per frame. It probably means we don't fully understand the protocol the Z80 uses to write to the motor controller. I'll have a look but I don't have the time to dig deep into this. It seems like you've found an acceptable solution for now.

[Bart]

Just tested this with XInput and I don't see it happening at all. No slow down and when I log the motor commands, I don't see much data per frame. Are you absolutely sure you've diagnosed the problem correctly? Can you record a video of your desktop with Supermodel in a window (run it with -show-fps so we can see the frame rate) when this occurs? You may need to record with a mobile phone if you don't have a screen capture program that can record the full desktop while Supermodel is running (FRAPS, as I recall, will capture only the OpenGL frame buffer).

The other thing that would be helpful would be figuring out at which SVN release it broke.