Bring Back Gpfce! (zodttd? Anyone?)

[Tootai]

It's strange to me how the only decent NES emulator for the GP2x seems to be discontinued. The last update was almost six months ago and the author seems to have dropped the project because of some idiots bothering him about the license. (http://www.unicorn-jockey.com/news.html)

I'm hoping someone, anyone with any coding skills will take the time to improve this fine piece of software, with a little work it could be great! Here's some things I thought would be great to have:

-Load game data into ram to stop the occasional stuttering (the biggest problem right now, imo)
-Fake stereo option (a la ccovell, http://disgruntleddesigner.com/chrisc/nesstereo.html)
-Fix the occasional sound panning issue
-Some kind of GUI to manage the save games and options (would probably be easy to rip from some other emu)
-Mappable keys

What do you all think?

 

[epitaph]

IIRC that emulator had "fake" stereo sound originally, but it was buggy and sound constantly fluctuated between the two channels, which resulted in him making it mono.

 

[wipeout2000]

I agree. I don't see why we can't have an emulator just as nice as drmdx or pico drive for nintendo.

 

[b._.o._.b]

What do you all think?

Nah... I think it is better to let Zodttd continue working on gPSP. Or even have a couple of days off, so he can continue working on gPSP refreshed , or even have a sabbatical of 1 year to continue working on the gPSP after this period.

 

[vampire8bit]

What do you all think?

I'm surprised it's been one year and by now I would have thought we'd have a perfect/complete nes emu, pcengine (supergraphx cd,supercd), vice2x (without pauses in gameplay) and atari 7800, as they the most popular and best retro machines ever. Telengard is doing work on atari7800 which is good but what about the others? If we do then I'll be happy with that and consider the gp2x as a great success as a retro handheld. If we don't then it'll be a big dissapointment as they should be well within the capabilities of the gp2x to emulate perfectly

 

[QuasaR]

When will people get it, that the C64 NEVER will be 100% emulated... VICE needs at last a 500Mhz to run fullspeed with FS0, not mentioning the very bad SID emulation...

Just my two cents about perfect emus...

 

[vampire8bit]

When will people get it, that the C64 NEVER will be 100% emulated... VICE needs at last a 500Mhz to run fullspeed with FS0, not mentioning the very bad SID emulation...

Just my two cents about perfect emus...

oh well perhaps not perfect, but at least up to the standard of drmd and picodrive.

 

[b._.o._.b]

There's only one way to have perfect emulation.. buy the original.

I can play 95% of the games pretty good on the best Emus: NES, PCengine, C64, Atari-ST, Genesis, Arcade, GB/GBC.
We are talking about thousands of games here!

Stop whining and start playing

 

[QuasaR]

The C64 is a quite hard computer to emulate, especially because of it's custom sound chip (SID) and the custom video chip (VIC), while the actual CPU (a 6510) is quite easy to emulate. Beside these two chips, you have to emulate the floppy drive (mostly a 1541), too, which has a 6502 (quite like the 6510).
So there is the "dynarec" (don't know, if it's actually one...) with FRODO, means speed but less compatibility. Or the "interpreter" VICE, slow but nearly 100% of the games work on it.
Like said in my earlier post, you need at least a 500 Mhz CPU to emu the C64 in fullspeed with bad SID-emulation (try fast-SID and reSID on you PC in VICE, you'll notice the difference!). So with the GP2X we will be always stuck @ fs1 with 250Mhz... Just believe me, I'm still coding on the C64 and always test my demos on the realthing because the emus just aren't perfect...
Beside that, I'm still very happy with having VICE in my pocket when I have to catch the train...=8)

 

[Tootai]

You guys are missing the point. I'm not expecting Nintendulator here, FCE Ultra would be ideal for portable NES emulation and well within GP2x's capabilities. These topics always go off-topic real quick. What does perfect C64 emulation have to do with someone updating GPFCE?

 

[Godmil]

Back to Gpfce, I'd love it if someone could touch it up a bitty. It's so close to 'perfect' . If someone could just get the stuttering out of it I'm sure we could call it done. Here's hoping

 

[b._.o._.b]

You guys are missing the point. I'm not expecting Nintendulator here, FCE Ultra would be ideal for portable NES emulation and well within GP2x's capabilities. These topics always go off-topic real quick. What does perfect C64 emulation have to do with someone updating GPFCE?

It could be going off-topic because most people think there are a lot of emulators in worse shape than gpfce.

 

[Hooka]

Sorry to interject like this when I'm not too familiar with the subject and am in no way a good coder, but...

1. Just because it uses a dynarec doesn't mean it has to sacrifice compatibility, it's just that it probably has some bugs in that case.

2. Things like picodrive and DrMDX have had years of work put into them behind the scene and are technical achievements for the quality on such low end hardware. Reesy's work has continued from DrSMS on the GBA to GP32 and GP2X in the form of DrZ80.

I dunno, anyways, yeah it would be cool to see everything mature to finished products but sometimes it's a waiting game. Or you pick it up yourself...

 

[Epicenter]

Just for the record here, no emulator is perfect (and probably never will be, since of the hardware is actually analog, or not even fully understood or documented) and the ones that get close (for the MegaDrive, KEGA Fusion gets the closest) take very high-end hardware to run. Granted they are not optimized for speed with ASM CPU cores, either, this drags down their speed a bit. Fusion will chug a good bit on any CPU lower-end than a 1 GHz AMD K7/K8, 2 GHz P4 or ~1 GHz Pentium-M processor. This is a 200 MHz ARM920T and a partially-crippled ARM940T-- you really can't GET an emulator that is very accurate for most systems running on such a CPU. The sad truth.

As for GPFCE, all it needs for proper SPEED (its current performance is appallingly slow, requiring OVERCLOCKING for many games [Armadillo comes readily to mind]) is an ASM CPU core. Right now, the whole emulator is C and very close to a 'copy-and-paste' PC->Linux/SDL port. So, it is highly unoptimized and will continue to run slowly until that rather dire issue is addressed.

 

[fargo]

Just for the record here, no emulator is perfect (and probably never will be, since of the hardware is actually analog, or not even fully understood or documented) and the ones that get close (for the MegaDrive, KEGA Fusion gets the closest) take very high-end hardware to run. Granted they are not optimized for speed with ASM CPU cores, either, this drags down their speed a bit. Fusion will chug a good bit on any CPU lower-end than a 1 GHz AMD K7/K8, 2 GHz P4 or ~1 GHz Pentium-M processor. This is a 200 MHz ARM920T and a partially-crippled ARM940T-- you really can't GET an emulator that is very accurate for most systems running on such a CPU. The sad truth.

As for GPFCE, all it needs for proper SPEED (its current performance is appallingly slow, requiring OVERCLOCKING for many games [Armadillo comes readily to mind]) is an ASM CPU core. Right now, the whole emulator is C and very close to a 'copy-and-paste' PC->Linux/SDL port. So, it is highly unoptimized and will continue to run slowly until that rather dire issue is addressed.

I cannot get you Epicenter! What would you gain from bashing gp2x in almost every post you make in this forum? :huh:

We have already heard from you about slow, weak, and crippled CPUs inside gp2x. You have expressed yourself very well in that regard, so, please stop discouraging coders and start enjoying your console!

 

[sand_man]

He's not bashing the gp2x at all. He is stating the facts.

 

[Tobriand]

Must say, I agree there... that was far from 2x-bashing. It is absolutely true that we'll not get perfect (in the sense of not only every game for a given system working, but any hypothetical game written at any time at all) emulation of any system on the 2x. And that's fine, imo.

On the other hand it would be very nice for someone to take up one or other of the various NES emus that are sitting around and just bring it together into a nice state .

 

[QuasaR]

Just a short question (to get back to the original C64 topic... ): Would it be nice to have a 6502 ARM asm core like Cyclone/FAME for the M68000 or DrZ80 for the Z80? It has not that much instructions (I think, about 60-70) so it would be quite easy to code an ARM core. The 6502 and his (easy to do) derivates are quite a commonly used chip among the 8-bitties of the 80ies (e.g. NES, C64 and it's floppy, Apple ][, BBC Micro, Atari 800XL, Atari Lynx, Atari 2600, PET, VIC-20). I don't know how much this would bring to emulation because mostly the GP2X power is used to emulate the custom-made chips...
More about the 6502 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502

 

[messiah]

nes 6502 cpu is custom build. IIRC they cut out some things from the cpu and added some other (interrupts?) So - typical 6502 cpu core would not be sufficient for nes emu.

BTW - epicenter got it right - gpfce is highly unoptimized. If some skilled coder with a bit of time could optimize it - we could have wonderful NES emu. Current one is OK but only OK. Let's put it straight - nes emulation on gp2x is.... a bit crappy. Especially when you compare with such gems like picodrive, gp2xengine and snes emu...

 

[daclassicgamingmaster]

Speaking of which...Fishybawb has apparently vanished from the face of the planet.

I guess it's time to ask this once again; Is fishy ok? He was having like heart surgery or something iirc

On a lighter note, I agree that this should be picked up and made playable. It's strange that we have psx (as slow as it is), and now gba, but nes remains to be somewhat perfected.