In my experience the visual output will usually match Nintendulator if you're within the tolerance range. (With enough leeway you can get it to work universally across hardware and many emulators too.)tokumaru wrote:The problem is that a pixel timing feature doesn't mean much if the visual output doesn't match what the hardware shows. It's not that Nintendulator is way off, so it's debugging features are indeed *very* useful, but in my old tests, Nestopia consistently outperformed Nintendulator for tiny timing issues like this, even if not by much, so I thought I'd mention it.rainwarrior wrote:Yeah, what I'm vouching most for is Nintendulator's debugger's pixel timing feature. Like, don't try and do it by just visual output alone
If you're at the edge, that's where you tend to get problems. ...and if you're just going by visual you can't tell the edge from the middle of tolerance. The debugger makes that easy to target.
That's the problem with Nestopia for testing. Whether or not is has more accurate timing (unsure), it has no debugging features.
Of course, you could try to feel out the edges of the timing by writing a ROM that lets you adjust it on the fly (and outputs the relevant), and you could find the low/high point where it breaks. That'd probably get you the best info from a hardware test, and you could evaluate emulators with it too... (maybe one of us should write something like this... an hblank timing explorer ROM)