What's up with my mupen64plus graphics?
 

Some time ago I used an earlier version of mupen64plus (1.5 I believe) on a fairly good computer with barely any issues. I just installed the latest (1.99.4) on my netbook (Atom N450 1.66GHz 1GB RAM) and every game has strange graphics (see attached image as an example).

In this example the character flickers. Sometimes the character is visible but usually is invisible or only partially visible with lots of strange flickering on the right of the screen. What could be wrong?

I've tried different resolutions, full screen and windowed; nothing seems to help. The game play is smooth otherwise.

Thanks

Yeah, I know, the authors of mupen64plus have completely f'd up the latest version. It's very difficult to use and configure, and has gone down in performance, graphics, etc. It's sad. I just use 1.5 until they release something better than that.

Thanks, just grabbed 1.5 and all OK! Hopefully someone will continue to maintain that; mupen64plusplus?

Actually after playing with it some more, I find there is still some flickering when there is a lot of movement on the screen. Turning on "Skip frame" fixes it completely but then the game play is not smooth. hmm...

If you have an nvidia video card, make sure to enable vsync and use the right nvidia driver in the rice plugin options. I mean, with vsync on, all games run at the right FPS, i.e. 50 or 60 FPS depending on region.

Onboard Intel graphics; does the same apply?

Thanks

In man intel I see:

Thanks for that info. The flickering seems to affect some of the background (landscape) and not the whole screen; does that make any difference?

What options are you using for the rice graphics plugin ?

I began using the defaults, but have tried toggling every setting. At the moment everything is unticked and all drop-down boxes set to what seems to be the lowest/fastest setting. Here's my .mupen64plus/RiceVideo.cfg:

WinModeWidth 640
WinModeHeight 480
FulScreenWidth 640
FulScreenHeight 480
EnableHacks 1
FrameBufferSetting 0
FrameBufferWriteBackControl 0
RenderToTexture 0
ScreenUpdateSetting 2
FPSColor -1
OpenGLDepthBufferSetting 16
ColorQuality 1
OpenGLRenderSetting 4
NormalAlphaBlender 0
EnableFog 0
WinFrameMode 0
FullTMEMEmulation 0
ForceSoftwareTnL 0
ForceSoftwareClipper 0
OpenGLVertexClipper 0
EnableSSE 0
EnableVertexShader 0
SkipFrame 0
DisplayTooltip 0
HideAdvancedOptions 1
DisplayOnscreenFPS 0
FrameBufferType 1
FulScreenHeight 480
FastTextureLoading 1
RenderEngine 0
ForceTextureFilter 1
TextureQuality 2
TexRectOnly 0
SmallTextureOnly 0
LoadHiResTextures 0
DumpTexturesToFiles 0
TextureEnhancement 0
TextureEnhancementControl 0
FullScreenFrequency 0
AccurateTextureMapping 0
InN64Resolution 1
SaveVRAM 0
OverlapAutoWriteBack 0
DoubleSizeForSmallTxtrBuf 0
ShowFPS 0

I've just noticed the flickering is only present when the computer opponents are visible. When they are not around it seems fine. When I do a time trial (solo) it is also fine.

Ok, it seems to be a problem with the rice plugin, use the glN64 one, I just tried MK with it and there is no flickering.

EDIT:
Glide64 also works fine, it's the Rice plugin that has problems with mario kart. (I don't play mario kart, so I didn't know it was specific to this game).

I tried glN64 but when I try and load a game it says:

[glN64]: (II) Initializing SDL video subsystem...
[glN64]: (II) Getting video info...
[glN64]: (II) Setting video mode 640x480...
Starting r4300 emulator
R4300 Core mode: Dynamic Recompiler
R4300 core: starting 64-bit dynamic recompiler at: 0x3d43da0.
mupen64plus: main/texenvprogram.c:195: translate_source: Assertion `0' failed.
Aborted

I then tried the Glide64 plugin and the graphics are completely messed up (I can barely make out anything).

That's weird, did you compile this yourself ? I have an nvidia card, dunno if that makes the difference.

Yes I compiled it myself.

I wonder if it's something to do with running 64 bit?