MiSTer FPGA Forum

Hi, maybe I'm just not seeing the option to display FPS (frames per second) but is this possible in any of the console cores? Specifically NES, SNES, Genesis, and TurboGrafx-16? I suppose I'm used to this in emulators where you can turn on FPS and see the current frame rate. Just curious as I tried to search the forum and look through the core options but didn't turn up anything. Thanks!

There's no such option since the FPGA is essentially running all the console components just like the original console did, and they weren't based on frames that you can count; they all run at the display frequency because their sprite engines are chasing the electron beam of a CRT. In this regard, a console core is always at either 30 or 60 FPS (or 25/50 FPS for PAL machines), at least until the 3D generation of consoles such as the PlayStation and Saturn, at which point they were frame-based instead.

Hi, thanks for the explanation. It was just something I thought about when playing Phantasy Star II on the Genesis core. The game play was smooth until I got into a battle and it seemed to be running slow (the fight animation was slow). Turning on the turbo option (high) fixed it. But during the slowdown I thought it would be nice to check the frame rate (thinking that with emulators in mind). With what you said I'll hook up my real Genesis and play PSII again on a CRT to check the fight animation speed. I haven't played the game on original hardware since middle school so maybe I'm just not remembering the pace of battles. Thanks again for the reply!

Retroarch would show roughly 60 FPS in those scenes too, for 2D games the reported FPS only drops if the emulation itself cannot keep up with the original system, they don't measure the original system itself running slowly. Only 3D-accelerated cores have a concept of FPS that is related to how often things are actually rendered.

That said I wish we could bind something to display video info on demand, instead of having to catch it the moment resolution changes.