CLEARLY the emulator everyone should focus on should be.....


drkIIRaziel said:
I did preorder a Pandora, and i do plan to release as soon i get some code running ;)
As someone else said, better not hold your breath though. Working emulator != fun and playable

Awesome! Well one would have never thought it a month ago, but it looks like we'll have some sort of Dreamcast emulator on the Pandora before n64!

I've no idea how DC will pan out but I'm rooting for you all the way drkII!
 
I'm far from a nay sayer when it comes to the possibility for the Dreamcast on the Pandora. While it is technically possible, but the likelihood of 100% compatibility and fullspeed is fairly slim.

The Dreamcast is essentially broken down into 4 subsystems

  • The maple bus (joysticks, VMUs, anything that plugged into the front)
    The SH-4 (16-bit instruction set, 32-bit RISC processor)
    The AICA (the sound chip, includes a 45MHz ARM7TDMI core, 64 channel audio with hardware effects)
    The PowerVR

The first section is easy, it can be emulated mostly passively and so long as whatever game you're using does not require VMU functions the impact should be minimal.

The critical point of the SH-4 is that, while it is slower, it includes a relatively high performance floating point unit. Depending on how good your DynaRec is in the emulator, and the performance of the OMAP3's NEON unit, this may or may not be an issue. The SH-4 has a narrow instruction set, it is minimal and has a similar number of registers as the ARM platform (16). The down side is that the SH-4 also includes a MMU which is used in all titles using the Windows CE layer. That makes dynarec slightly more complex.

The AICA is extremely powerful, and is thankfully underused in most cases. The core speed of this chip is 45MHz, and since the Pandora does not offer any form hardware audio acceleration this chip could easily cripple the system. If someone is feeling industrious and can offload this on the DSP, it should be negligible.

The big thing that everyone keeps quoting is that both systems use the PowerVR chipset. Yes, they use a similar chipset, but that doesn't change the fact that the Dreamcast not only had a dedicated memory space for video memory (unlike the OMAP's unified memory), we know very little about the OMAP3's actual stats. The Dreamcast also had full TDR, something that was sacked from future PVR chipsets (OMAP3's included) so there will be alpha fighting and possibly missing pixels. There is also the problem that there will be no low level API to Pandora's chip sets, leaving 3D performance at the mercy of the driver engineers.


Given all this, it should be theoretically possible to see some games running with Dreamcast emulation. Which games, and how fast they run is entirely up to the complexity of the game and how much work is put into the emulator itself. Don't except to see DOA2 any time soon.
 
Would be nice if some more obscure emulators for old computers will be ported. Zx81 will be on board as I have understood, and his ports are great.
I'm hoping to see a good soul porting a Sharp MZ emulator to Pandora. Pretty sure it will be possible to use it with no or few optimizations.
Especially educational question/answer software and old basic programs will be nice to run on the Pandora with the keyboard.
 
I'd love to see a BBC emulator for the Pandora, but I don't think it's one of the more popular machines, so might have to wait a while for an emulator...
 
kgparkes said:
I'd love to see a BBC emulator for the Pandora, but I don't think it's one of the more popular machines, so might have to wait a while for an emulator...

Yeah, BBC rocks. It's also almost always one of the systems that doesn't get a look in for a while generally... not sure why...
 
I've watched the videos from the PSP port of nullDC, it looks great. The progress in just a few months is immense, I do believe playable dreamcast is (eventually) possible on the Pandora.
 
[youtube]xV3EuUmJIZA[/youtube]

Look at this! This is insane, 10%!
They haven't been working on that project THAT long, this just makes me way more optimistic about Panda dreamcast
 
Dammit, I was beginning to get used to the idea that DC emulation on the pandora was out of the picture, but now there is a twinge of excitement again. :lol:

Dan
 
What's interesting is that I haven't found anything but youtube when searching for a site or even thread about the psp version. Can somebody help me out?
 
demob said:
Dammit, I was beginning to get used to the idea that DC emulation on the pandora was out of the picture, but now there is a twinge of excitement again. :lol:

Dan

That looks really promising, and judging by this extract from the link provided it looks very promising for us too:

After the code is cleaned up/rewriten there are plans to port to pandora ( http://www.openpandora.org, realy cool stuff ) and possibly other consoles (wii seems like a nice target, ps3 if theres a way to get 3D access). ALL THIS MAY(OR MAY NOT) COME AFTER THE CODE IS REWRITEN, SO DONT ASK ABOUT IT NOW(you’l just waste your time, realy). The code will be open sourced as soon as it gets stable.

While i think it is possible to get fullspeed on psp it is quite likely that i will be proven wrong. I CAN NOT MAKE ANY PROMISSES ABOUT THE SPEED, I ONLY PROMISE I WILL TRY TO GET IT FAST.
 
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