I don't if anybody has ever used that feature, but it was really useful to figure out which functions did eat up how many clock cycles (and to optimize the code as best as possible). Oh, and side note: There's some profiler in no$psx. But then, reducing the sample rate, dropping stereo, unrolling some loops, and optimizing some stuff helped to reduce the audio load.

Okay, maybe I had underestimated something. I didn't believe it, and mounted to audio engine the next day - which dropped the frame rate back to around 5fps. The funny part was when I got it working at 10fps, and then TriMesh mentioned that audio decoding might also consume a lot of cpu load. Changing byte operations to process four bytes at once via 32bit memory access, in some cases also doing multiple 8bit operations via 32bit registers (for color additions & saturations).

Squeezing most variables & cpu stack into the 1Kbyte scratchpad (=fast RAM) memory. So I've blown up some more weeks on optimizations: Using the MDEC hardware. Next, I've ported the 80x86 code to MIPS, aiming at 10fps/mono, and the first built did actually reach around 5fps, which wasn't too bad, considering that it wasn't yet really optimized for the PSX hardware. Then I've blown up a bunch of weeks on learning how to implement the MP2 audio and MPEG1 video decoding, and first implemented it as 80x86 asm code (which is now also included in no$psx, somewhat emulating the SCPH-5903 hardware with 30fps/color/stereo). I finally got two sample VCDs, and -shortly after - four real movies on pressed discs from TriMesh. The first problem has been finding VCDs which are nearly unknown in western world. 5thElementSwDecoder.jpg Some Making Of notes

The fifth element full movie hdd