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Slow menus?


Yoinx
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So I've gotten my Xbox all setup and am using xbmc-emustation. Which is amazing. However, it seems like my game list menus are a lot slower than any of the YouTube videos I've watched. The videos look like it takes a second or two for the games lists to come up, but mine is more like 30-40 seconds. When exiting a rom (with the option to return to the list enabled) it only stays on the black screen for a second or two then displays the list.

Is it normal for it to hang for 30+ when loading the list from the carousel? I can still hear the button press noises it you press them.

I'm on the latest version as far as any update checking tells me... It scanned everything fine. And the lists look/work fine once they open. 

Thanks in advance for and help.

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44 minutes ago, Yoinx said:

So I've gotten my Xbox all setup and am using xbmc-emustation. Which is amazing. However, it seems like my game list menus are a lot slower than any of the YouTube videos I've watched. The videos look like it takes a second or two for the games lists to come up, but mine is more like 30-40 seconds. When exiting a rom (with the option to return to the list enabled) it only stays on the black screen for a second or two then displays the list.

Is it normal for it to hang for 30+ when loading the list from the carousel? I can still hear the button press noises it you press them.

I'm on the latest version as far as any update checking tells me... It scanned everything fine. And the lists look/work fine once they open. 

Thanks in advance for and help.

The more you have on the HDD the slower it gets.  Do you have fast game parsing on?  settings/programs/advanced.

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2 hours ago, Donnie-Burger said:

The more you have on the HDD the slower it gets.  Do you have fast game parsing on?  settings/programs/advanced.

I did not, I turned it on though and rebooted the Xbox. It didn't appear to make any difference for me. Do you have to rescan the games with that setting on? I scanned game gear as it had the least games. It seemed to scan faster, but the menu was still just as slow to open.

 

The videos I'd watched still seemed like they opened pretty snappily even with thousands of roms in their lists. Like 2-3 seconds maybe... But they may have just been editing the videos or something.

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13 hours ago, Yoinx said:

I did not, I turned it on though and rebooted the Xbox. It didn't appear to make any difference for me. Do you have to rescan the games with that setting on? I scanned game gear as it had the least games. It seemed to scan faster, but the menu was still just as slow to open.

 

The videos I'd watched still seemed like they opened pretty snappily even with thousands of roms in their lists. Like 2-3 seconds maybe... But they may have just been editing the videos or something.

Do you have a shitload (hundreds) of OG Xbox games on the HDD? That causes loading times exactly of that sort of length. Caused by the Dashboard scanning for games every single time. The 2TB Origins install behaves that way. Ever single time the dash boots. Total dealbreaker for me, man.

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3 hours ago, Bowlsnapper said:

Do you have a shitload (hundreds) of OG Xbox games on the HDD? That causes loading times exactly of that sort of length. Caused by the Dashboard scanning for games every single time. The 2TB Origins install behaves that way. Ever single time the dash boots. Total dealbreaker for me, man.

I don't, maybe like 30 Xbox games. But it's behaved like this even when I only had the dashboard and game gear roms loaded. So, I don't think it's an issue of hdd usage.

 

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15 hours ago, Rocky5 said:

Run Emustation from E and have the emulators, media and roms folder on a larger partition. 
 

don’t run it from F and defo not G as the seek times are horrendous the more you fill those partitions. 

That's probably where I'm going wrong. I put the roms on f and put the media on g. Emustation is on E

 

I'm only using a 250gb hdd, with the f/g partitions around 115gb each. If they shouldn't go on e/f/g where *should* I put them for better results?

Or should I have made an extra partition with like 10-20gb to store them?

Edited by Yoinx
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1 hour ago, Yoinx said:

That's probably where I'm going wrong. I put the roms on f and put the media on g. Emustation is on E

 

I'm only using a 250gb hdd, with the f/g partitions around 115gb each. If they shouldn't go on e/f/g where *should* I put them for better results?

Or should I have made an extra partition with like 10-20gb to store them?

Just follow what he said as thats how mine is and smooth as organic butter.

 

put up:

hard drive

addapter

cable

 

models

Edited by Donnie-Burger
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1 hour ago, Donnie-Burger said:

put up:

hard drive

addapter

cable

 

models

The harddrive is a Maxto 4A250J0, which i'm just realizing is an old 5400rpm drive... so I can't expect  much out of it. It's not locked. There's no adapter, and it's just the OEM ribbon cable. (Partition Layout attached)

 

I ended up deleting the XBMC-Emustation folder and copying it back over via FTP and just putting 1 NES rom into the roms folder on 'E' and letting it scan. The menu does come up a lot faster like that, around 3-4 seconds. The gameslist.xml was only 2kb though, so that's not so surprising. It might just be an issue with a slow hard-drive. Though, I thought that the XBOX only gets like 10MB/s through its IDE controller anyway so I wouldn't have expected it to be *that* slow off of a slow drive. 

I went ahead and rescanned them all back in and the gamelist.xml is around 47kb for that system (NES) and it's back to ~25 seconds for the game list menu to open in the basic view. I know that the list has to be processed and all that, but I can't imagine that the hard-drive speed would have that huge of an effect for a 47kb list to be read off of it. Is it trying to validate that everything exists as it processes the list or something (this would make sense for hdd seek speeds and such to slow it down)? Is there a way to disable that so that it just shows the list without validation? Obviously, if something doesn't exist anymore since the games were scanned this could cause a crash... But I'd rather that being a problem and the list opening quickly.

I have fast game parsing on per your previous suggestion.

partition_layout.jpg

Edited by Yoinx
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2 hours ago, Yoinx said:

The harddrive is a Maxto 4A250J0, which i'm just realizing is an old 5400rpm drive... so I can't expect  much out of it. It's not locked. There's no adapter, and it's just the OEM ribbon cable. (Partition Layout attached)

 

I ended up deleting the XBMC-Emustation folder and copying it back over via FTP and just putting 1 NES rom into the roms folder on 'E' and letting it scan. The menu does come up a lot faster like that, around 3-4 seconds. The gameslist.xml was only 2kb though, so that's not so surprising. It might just be an issue with a slow hard-drive. Though, I thought that the XBOX only gets like 10MB/s through its IDE controller anyway so I wouldn't have expected it to be *that* slow off of a slow drive. 

I went ahead and rescanned them all back in and the gamelist.xml is around 47kb for that system (NES) and it's back to ~25 seconds for the game list menu to open in the basic view. I know that the list has to be processed and all that, but I can't imagine that the hard-drive speed would have that huge of an effect for a 47kb list to be read off of it. Is it trying to validate that everything exists as it processes the list or something (this would make sense for hdd seek speeds and such to slow it down)? Is there a way to disable that so that it just shows the list without validation? Obviously, if something doesn't exist anymore since the games were scanned this could cause a crash... But I'd rather that being a problem and the list opening quickly.

I have fast game parsing on per your previous suggestion.

partition_layout.jpg

It could be your old drive.  I always format evenly cause I get corruption after 50% filled if I don't.  I always go back into XBpartitioner and make sure both cluster sizes show for each drive with no graphic glitching.  This always works.  Have any spare drives to rule that one out?  You can also try fatxplorer and copy something to the drive.  If its super slow or slower than normal then its the drive.

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4 hours ago, Donnie-Burger said:

 

I don't have any other drives to test with, but I had no graphical glitching in xbpartitioner that I could tell. I was ftp-ing in xbmc at around 4-5MB/s which seems fairly typical. And like I said, everything plays perfectly fine including Xbox games from the HDD. The only thing that's been slow is the menus. Unfortunately, I also don't have any ide interfaces for my computers anymore... And not to interested in purchasing a usb-ide adapter (this Xbox is just for my daughter to play on, and she has a 360 with pretty much the same stuff on it).

I can live with things as they are, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something dumb/obvious that would cause this as far as settings went.

Edited by Yoinx
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The menu is only combining a couple files. So when you press (A) the script builds myprograms.xml out of the gamelist.xml for that system and loads the menu. 
 

it’s all down to the drive speed, age and where files are on the hdd platter. 
 

Normally E is the fastest as the building of the xml takes longer depending on where it is on the hdd platter. 
 

I mean a 47kb file should be a second or 2, I have over 1500 roms lists loading in 4-7 seconds. But am using a 2.5” sata drive. 

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43 minutes ago, Rocky5 said:

script builds myprograms.xml out of the gamelist.xml for that system and loads the menu. 

Yeah, I was trying to make sense of how that was happening in the scripts. I hate to question how someone does things, especially when I admittedly didn't know much about xbmc... And I'm sure it would break things when the themes changed... but wouldn't it be faster to just prebuild each system's entire myprograms.xml when scanning the roms then substitute the entire prebuilt file in depending on what was chosen rather than combining/rebuilding it each time? IE, store the whole thing next to the gamelist.xml and just soft link it or something when called.

I've looked at a few of the scripts already trying to figure out how it was building them and there is a lot of string manipulation (and in XML) which unfortunately is not super efficient in Python... and that's probably just exacerbated on the Xbox. Even combining the files by looping through them and reading each line for thousands of lines should be expected to take a few seconds at least on Python, especially on the Xbox hardware.

 

amazing work on this and hopefully the questions don't make me seem unappreciative.

 

 

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