GP32 Could Stella Be Ported To The Gp32?

[spongebue]

I was wondering if it would be possible to port the open source 2600 PC/Mac emulator, Stella. It seems to have great compatibility, unlike the ones that are out. (no offense, programmers) I could see how little optimization would be done since PCs are more powerful than a Gamepark (that is, most of them) but it would still be cool to see an emulator based on its source. I know this was suggested briefly when someone asked about a good 2600 emulator, but nobody responded to it, and it was an older thread, so I figured I'll make a new one.

 

[kotd]

Hmm what kind of specs does it run on?

 

[spongebue]

not exactly sure, to be honest, but it has a DOS version if that means anything

 

[ravuya]

Stella's pretty undemanding, and it's done mostly in SDL from what I remember. Could be an easy port.

 

[DaveMan]

Stella's requirements straight from the Docs-

DOS 5.0 or higher
8 MB of Ram
256 color VGA graphics card
486/120 Mhz required; 586/166 Mhz highly recommended
At least 2 MB of hard drive space available
Sound Blaster or 100% compatible sound card
-The rest of the "requirements are just recommendations for various controllers-
-The requirements for the Linux and Unix versions are higher-

I'm not a programmer by any stretch of imagination, but that sounds at least doable. Any takers?

 

[SvOlli]

Hi there!

The port of Stella for the Sega Dreamcast is my other project. If you go for the original current sources to port from them Stella will NEVER run fast enough on a GP32. I'm using the rather old version 1.2 and even this one doesn't run 100% all the time. The CPU on the DC is a 200MHz SH4 which (rough guess) is at least twice as fast as the ARM of the GP32 at 133MHz. From some analysis I can tell that the CPU emulation take up most of the CPU cycles, so I tried to port the one from VICE (Commodore 8-bit emulator suite) to Stella with no success yet.

To make the long story short:

• Yes, it can be ported, as the port is rather straight forward (at least it was on the DC)
• but it will run too slow
• there might be a way to speed it up but that'll involve at lot of work.

If anyone really wants to go for a port I can offer my knowledge gained from the DCStella port and assist in creating something like a Stella-emulation-backend-library for the GP32.

Greetings,
SvOlli

 

[pmpddytim]

What about porting Z26. I'm not sure of the specs on it but its by far the best 2600 emu out there.

-Tim

 

[SvOlli]

What about porting Z26. I'm not sure of the specs on it but its by far the best 2600 emu out there.

Z26 uses assember, 80386 assember. Uses is the wrong word: it's written in assember to over 80%. And that one can't be ported to ARM in a straight forward attempt. If it had been portable code, there'd be a Dreamcast port already. Nevertheless if anyone wants to take look at it there's an x86 to arm assembler converting tool available at http://www.sax.de/~adlibit/ . It might be possible to use this one to convert the Z26 from 80386 to ARM, and go further on from there by hand, but I'm not good at assembler anymore. My last secure steps in assembler were made on a 6502 compatible CPU.

Greetings,
SvOlli