Adventus' Pandora Review

[DaveC]

Adventus has included such details of the clock speed and optimisations on his previous videos on YouTube. That is if his account is called JudasAdventus. Can't wait to see this video.

Yep. I always try to include the clockspeed, frameskip and rendering resolution in my videos. This one is at 800mhz, No frameskip or sound, 640x480. It irritates me when people omit these details from daedalus PSP videos.

Hey Adventus: What speed were you running your Pandora at when playing N64? (was it Full Speed?!?!)

Zelda is fullspeed in some places, its about 85-100% in the 1st dungeon but the town is slower, maybe 60-85%. Sin and Punishment is not fullspeed in general, it jumps between 60 - 100% depending on how many enemies are onscreen. Both games are fun, though sin and punishment is alot easier than i remember .

@DaveC: If you want I can send you the newest binaries, I think the one Pickle supplied has old graphics plugin (i dont use a .vsh file anymore).

Thanks very much for the offer but I think I will wait. I don't want to run it at 800 Mhz and risk damage before I know if it is safe or not, and no sound is no fun to me . Hopefully the performance is just because of the fact that it is still early. If the hardware won't be powerful enough to run N64 at a normal clock speed with sound that is kind of dissapointing. Do you think the hardware will eventually be able to run N64 well at say 600 MHz WITH sound? Or is that just beyond the current tech?

Thanks for the offer, if you have anything you want tested let me know.

 

[Adventus]

I don't want to run it at 800 Mhz and risk damage before I know if it is safe or not, and no sound is no fun to me

I hope its safe too, I've been overclocking the devboard to 850-900 Mhz for awhile now . I haven't noticed it getting hot or even warm. I'm pretty sure these chips can withstand a fair bit of heat anyway, I work on an iPhone at work and it gets pretty hot to hold (probably uses the case as a giant heatsink) but it doesn't crash or anything.

Do you think the hardware will eventually be able to run N64 well at say 600 MHz WITH sound? Or is that just beyond the current tech?

It is very difficult to say, the dynarec by Ari64 is very good and i haven't been able to squeeze much more out of the graphics plugin recently. But I think there is significant gains possible in using the VFP/Neon for FPU emulation. At the very least we could statically alloc FP registers so there would be less pressure on the ARM regs (so it would speed up non-fp operations aswell).

I think the vast majority of games will require an overclock to be what i regard as playable. This application is pushing the limits.

 

[kingoddball]

@ Adventus: Is the Pandora as good as the guys are saying? You're a fellow Aussie.... Gotta trust you!

 

[ari64]

If the hardware won't be powerful enough to run N64 at a normal clock speed with sound that is kind of dissapointing. Do you think the hardware will eventually be able to run N64 well at say 600 MHz WITH sound? Or is that just beyond the current tech?

I've run it at 600Mhz, and sound is mostly okay if no graphics rendering is done. I think if you want sound, you'll have to put up with some frameskip.

It is very difficult to say, the dynarec by Ari64 is very good and i haven't been able to squeeze much more out of the graphics plugin recently. But I think there is significant gains possible in using the VFP/Neon for FPU emulation.

There are a few games that will crash if the FPU isn't 100% accurate. Luckily OoT isn't one of them. It could be an option I suppose.

 

[Adventus]

There are a few games that will crash if the FPU isn't 100% accurate. Luckily OoT isn't one of them. It could be an option I suppose.

What are the incompatibilities exactly? I would think the VFP-lite supports a greater subset of the IEEE spec (rounding modes, etc) than the n64. They wouldn't be as fast as runfast mode but it could be an option at least.

BTW, I noticed my Super Mario 64 PAL rom enables TLB emulation, this game worked before you made these changes. This probably unnecessary slows it down, maybe we can add an option to force it off.

 

[ari64]

There are a few games that will crash if the FPU isn't 100% accurate. Luckily OoT isn't one of them. It could be an option I suppose.

What are the incompatibilities exactly? I would think the VFP-lite supports a greater subset of the IEEE spec (rounding modes, etc) than the n64. They wouldn't be as fast as runfast mode but it could be an option at least.

I'm not sure what all of the possibilities are, but I can confirm the reported issue with South Park Rally. It appears to convert a float to an int and use it as an array index. If it's off by one the game will crash.

BTW, I noticed my Super Mario 64 PAL rom enables TLB emulation, this game worked before you made these changes. This probably unnecessary slows it down, maybe we can add an option to force it off.

Yes it does enable the TLB, and actually uses it. If you force the tlb mode off, then the range check against 80000000-80800000 will cause these memory accesses to call read_nomem* through the readmem arrays, which will do the memory mapping. This is slow, but if the virtual memory usage is minimal, then it might be advantageous to do it that way.