Tuner for PlayStation®2

Overview

SN Systems' Tuner lets you capture and visualize program behavior so that you can eliminate conflicts and bottlenecks in your code. High performance games can now be achieved with less guesswork.

The Tuner products have a highly advanced user interface which provides a great deal of detailed information in an easy to understand and visualize format. Tuner does not require you to alter your game code in any way, and even works on optimized release code.

You can save your captured data and easily compare it with other captures. Finally, a quick and efficient way to see if your code changes have improved game execution or not!

Features and Benefits

Click on any of the bullet points below to view more details.

• No source modification required
  

The Tuner works right out of the box without lengthy source code changes, even works on optimized release code.

• Multiple compatible debug formats (ECOFF/STABS and DWARF)
  

Tuner can analyze ELF files built by various PlayStation®2 tool vendors. ELFs built with both ECOFF/STABS (ProDG and GNU) and DWARF (CodeWarrior) debug formats are supported.

• Real-time data capture and instrumented functions
  

Tuner captures data to a host PC in real-time while you play the game. The instrumented functions feature lets you get accurate timing information for selected functions, as well as all child functions, without impacting on the normal running of your game.

• Frame by frame analysis
  

Analyze data frame by frame and save it for later comparison with your optimized code.

• Extensive data capture
  

Captured data includes: absolute cycle-count timing; instruction count; pipeline utilization; DMA utilization (0-9); I-cache and D-cache misses; address bus busy; total load/store accesses; low and high order branch count; write back buffer full; interrupts generated; vertical blank and path synchronization; profile function usage.

• Fill/Circular buffer support
  

This allows capture of frames that create greater than 64k of captured data (you can specify the buffer size via the Load Elf dialog)

• Advanced user interface and visualizations graphs
  

A simple point and click on the function name is all that is required to instrument code to obtain very detailed real runtime performance counter metrics on any function whilst the game is running.

• Multiple user markers
  

Multiple user markers enable you to zoom in on sections of your code so you can visualize the interaction between subsystems and performance metric data.

• Visual code performance pointers
  

The Tuner displays hardware slowdowns and traps, allowing you to improve code execution by removing bottlenecks and reducing the amount of cache misses.

• Configurable data collection rates
  

Adjust the rate that Tuner determines its metrics. Sample less frequently for low impact, or more frequently to obtain more data.

New features in v1.4.0 released 29th September 2003:

• Option added to group all PC sample hits by the source file that the function where the hit occurred belongs.
• Option added to PC sample trace context menu to copy all function names to the clipboard.
• Added option to launch an external editor from the source view (default is Visual Studio 6.0).
• Mouse-rollover feature added to PC Sample trace - this highlights the line that the mouse is currently over.
• Improved Frame Sync trace in Game View to show Min, Max and Average statistics.
• Improved Frame Time trace to include graph of frame time as well as bar chart.
• sceSifRebootIOP is now detected and handled correctly.

Screenshots

Click on the thumbnail images below to view a larger screenshot.

System requirements

• Windows 2000 or XP Professional
• Sony Computer Entertainment PlayStation®2 Development Tool DTL-T10000 or DTL-T15000.
• Network card

Prices

Please click here to request a quotation, or contact sales@snsys.com for further information.