Testing on real devices

[adamsoutar]

Hello!

Now that Playdate group 1 is actually shipping, we can hopefully get some Playboy testing on real devices.

My Playdate pre-order is in group 2, so if you get yours first and you run my emulator on it, please let me know how it goes! 😄

I am not certain that a real device is fast enough to run it without more optimisation, so I'm very curious what the real performance is like.

[jjzaab]

Hi!

I ran playboy on a real device and the FPS was very slow and not playable. I'm including a link to a video showcasing Tetris using the Mirror app. Please let me know if I can help out in any way!

[Wowfunhappy]

Just confirming the above, at the moment v0.4 is running at something in the neighborhood of 1 fps. (But cool to see these games at all on the PlayDate!)

[Live-ware]

Running v0.5 on my playdate and experiencing the same as above, 1fps / unplayably slow. With some games the playdate crashed while loading the game

[arlong2]

I'm also seeing the same issues mentioned above: unplayably slow (~1fps) and crashing. Also, the game selection menu has two entries for each game, the normal name and a "._" prefixed version: screenshot. Clicking the prefixed versions crashes the Playdate.

[Wowfunhappy]

Also, the game selection menu has two entries for each game, the normal name and a "._" prefixed version

Clearly, you transferred the games from a Mac computer. ;)

This isn’t quite a bug, or at least, PlayBoy isn’t seeing files that don’t exist. Macs create these ._ files when writing to legacy filesystems like the Playdate’s fat32. They’re used to store metadata, and potentially even resource forks. You can’t see them in Finder because Finder hides them.

[joshferrara]

First of all thanks for doing this! Excited to see this come to life.

Just got my real device and I’m seeing the same, games load but run super slow, maybe 1 fps.

Happy to help with any testing along the way!

[metafishTV]

Same issues over here as everyone else. It runs, boots up roms no problem, but chugs at 1 fps making it virtually unplayable.... but it technically works! Only one entry per game as it should be on my end though.

[adamsoutar]

Updating this thread to say that I do now have my Playdate!

As you've all brought up, the FPS is not exactly award-worthy :)

But now that I have a real device, I can profile and improve the emulation speed, rather than taking stabs in the dark. For example - I've found out that 97% of time is spent running the simulation, and only 3% spent drawing the screen. Because I didn't know this before, I was wasting time optimising the rendering code. Speed improvements should be more targeted now!

[C-Benz]

Hey just wanted to check in on this as I'm so excited to run gameboy games on my playdate. Thanks!!