[Scummvm-devel] Slowdowns in SCI and SAGA

[yotam barnoy]

Hey guys

I would like to ask the developers of SCI and SAGA (and any others who would
like to contribute) for some help in making these engines run better on the
PSP.

SAGA already has a bug open in the tracker. I thought it was a regression,
but going as far back as 0.13.0 still didn't make it go away. The engine
takes a minute to load. That's 60 seconds! It then runs absolutely fine with
no hint of slowdown whatsoever. It seems to be reading the whole time. As a
hint, if I run the PSP shell from my desktop, the engine loads up very fast.
I'm guessing the PC's caching somehow makes the difference.

I know SCI is in development. However, SCI0 works so beautifully on the PC,
and it used to work well on the PSP too. I decided to load it up in gprof to
see what's eating up cycles -- the engine simply crawls. Turns out the OPL
code is bringing the PSP to its knees, no matter which OPL driver I use
(Dosbox or MAME). 90% of CPU time is used up handling the OPL stuff. This
doesn't happen in any other engine.

Any idea what's going on with these engines?

Yotam
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.scummvm.org/pipermail/scummvm-devel/attachments/20091125/2c3ec8ea/attachment.html>