RevEng Posted May 13, 2020 Share Posted May 13, 2020 Just a heads-up that I put together a tool - 7800heat - that can be used for performance analysis of 7800 games. The basic idea is you run your game in a7800/mame with tracing turned on, which logs all executed instructions to a trace file. 7800heat will take this trace file and generate an html disassembly file, with lines colorized based on how many times they were encountered. Less frequently encountered code is blue, and most-frequently encountered code is red. You can then see where the hot spots are, so you can better spend your optimisation time. While it's fairly basic, already I've found it useful. Running the tool against an existing 7800basic homebrew, I already found one area for improvement in the sprite-indexing code I use. Presently only flat roms and SuperGame bankswitching is supported. The generated hotspot assembly is generic, so I find the best approach is to find the hotspot, and then figure out exactly where it is by looking at the corresponding area of my project's dasm list file. A heatmap from salvo is attached, for the curious. Enjoy! salvo-heatmap.html 9 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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