Re: [hatari-devel] New option --disable-video and --benchmark

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 23/02/2017 à 21:22, Eero Tamminen a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> On 02/23/2017 08:16 PM, Nicolas Pomarède wrote:
> > I just added 2 new options to Hatari's command line :
> >
> >  --disable-video : don't refresh the screen during emulation. Emulated
> > screen is still updated into Hatari's internal buffer, but the result is
> > never displayed on screen through SDL calls.
>
> You've documented the option as:
>     --disable-video <bool> Run emulation without displaying video
>
> For consistency with other options, I think it should be either:
>     --disable-video
> or
>     --video <bool>

Hi

I thought about this, but --video sounded too generic to me, but why 
not, I have no opinion on this.

> > This can be useful if you just want to listen to Hatari's sound without
> > the extra cpu needed to display on screen (for example a music disk).
>
> I added frame skip feature to Hatari v1.1 to for this purpose.
> It has even SDL GUI settings for forcing a larger than necessary
> frame skip value, if one wants less CPU usage:
> https://hg.tuxfamily.org/mercurialroot/hatari/hatari/raw-file/tip/doc/manual.html#Performance
>
>
> If the video option would skip Hatari window completely and
> allow running Hatari on headless setups, then it would make
> more sense to have video disabling as config file option.

I thought about running Hatari without any window at all, but then more 
code would be needed as it's SDL that handles keyboard shortcut (for 
example handle ctrl+c to exit Hatari).
For now, just creating a window at start and not refreshing after seeems 
enough to get repeatable speed results.

> As it's now, I'd rather remove the config file support,
> as a potential source of user bug reports (when it gets
> enabled & saved there by accident).

I'm lost, which config file option are you talking about ? 
--disable-video is not saved to the config file (on purpose)


> Why not just alias it to fast-forward option instead of
> duplicating code?
>
> Or do you see some potential problem with fast-forward as that
> has also a config file option, user shortcut key, takes audio
> buffering into account, and its value is shown in statusbar?

I see fast forward as on option you can toggle on/off during emulation, 
as it is now --benchmark does the same as fast forward, but in the 
future some more options could be implied by --benchmark, so I'd rather 
separate it from the beginning (code duplication is just 2 "if" for now 
anyway)


> Maybe you could update also:
> https://hg.tuxfamily.org/mercurialroot/hatari/hatari/raw-file/tip/doc/manual.html#Measuring_the_performance
>
>
> Section in the manual?

I will see later once I have some tests results to report.

Nicolas