Why is FCE Ultra so slow?
FCE Ultra is much slower than emulators like LoopyNES and NESA. These emulators are written in assembly, which gives them a definite advantage over FCE Ultra, which is written in C. FCE Ultra is also more accurate that these emulators, and some accuracy can only be achieved by taking more CPU time. FCE Ultra could be faster than what it is now. However, this is not a high priority. FCE Ultra should run full speed, with sound disabled, on a Pentium 2 300MHz machine, or an “equivalent” processor. I have run *older* versions on Pentium MMX 200MHz machines. Recent versions of gcc produce executables that seem to perform poorly on AMD Athlon processors, so it may be beneficial to download the source code and compile a version of FCE Ultra with CPU-specific optimization flags. FCE Ultra will perform fastest on older systems(or systems with limited video acceleration) when using an 8BPP video mode. 16BPP video modes come next in terms of speed, followed by 32BPP, and lastly 24BPP. Avoid 24BPP
