SurfaceView Fast Enough For Emulation?

Question

For years now I've maintained a Tandy Color Computer Emulator applet on my home page. With the purchase of an Incredible I decided to do a port. Getting it going in Android didn't take long but I'm really surprised how slow it runs. You can literally see the pixels painting. I know there are other successful Android emulators so I must be doing something wrong.

My approach was to use a SurfaceView for rendering. There's a separate thread that runs a virtual 6809 CPU. Whenever that thread updates the emulated video memory, it calls SurfaceHolder.lockCanvas() with a Rect describing the part of the screen requiring a repaint. Then it calls the gfx routines with the resulting Canvas...this is where I did a repaint() in AWT/Swing. The gfx routines are smart enough to just render what's in the clipRect. Perhaps I'm still stuck in AWT but I can't think of any way to make this thing run at an acceptable speed. I tried to coalesce the gfx calls but that didn't work either. Any thoughts?

Answer 1

SurfaceView should be fast enough. All the drawing routines are smart enough to not do anything if outside of the clip region but you can cull the calls ahead of time if you want. It looks like you need to profile your app and see where you spend too much time.