----- Original Message -----
From: "Mikel Waxler" <waxor@waxor.com>
To: "HpcMIPS" <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 02, 2002 1:59 AM
Subject: Sluggish Performench on a z50


> Why cant my z50 play nintendo games? I'm using darcness to sdo the
> emulation and its unplayably slow. xscorch is also pretty bad. I havn't
> triend much else i nthe way of games. Net hack runs amazingly fast though.

Well, the processor in the z50 is a NEC vr4121 running at 133Mhz.  I'd say
roughly equivalent in speed with a 66MHz 486.  So, pretty darn slow by
today's notebook speeds.

Given that the z50 doesn't have any hardware video acceleration to speak of,
it's no wonder you can't run a Nintendo emulator at speed on the thing.

> Anyway, here are my thoughts as to why it could be:
>
> Video, dont know anything about the graphics chip on the z50 but I'm
> guessing its slow.

Yup.  The video is driven off the CPU into a framebuffer device.  No
acceleration there, and really no possibility for it since there's no
hardware support, IIRC.  The CPU is pushing all the pixels around for you
and is using a portion of the system RAM to do so.  Speed is acceptable for
most desktop-type applications but you're not going to want to play full
motion video on it.

<snip>

- Greg
  (greg@netbsd.org)