Dcemu Homebrew Article Mentions Pandora

[logokas]

http://www.dcemu.com/the-state-of-the-home...009-187322.html

QUOTE
The Pandora which should be available sometime in April (at this time) looks like a DS but comes with a keyboard, dual analogue and is considered to be the ultimate handheld, this console cum pocket pc hybrid is the most powerful to hit the market and already we have seen many emulators released. The console when released should shake the homebrew scene to the rafters with perfect emulation across most consoles and in time we should see N64, PSX and Dreamcast Emulation, this console is as powerful as the original xbox.


Apparently, they also keep a separate page for Pandora, too. And it looks like they're copying news info off the unofficial blog.

Am i really the first one to notice this?

Not only that, on the right side of the page are links to Buy/Preorder! What the hell. The link, of course, doesn't work.

EDIT: Something's raping my post. Either the forum, or my malfunctioning keyboard. I suspect the first.

 

[Consequence_9]

http://www.dcemu.com/the-state-of-the-home...009-187322.html

QUOTE
The Pandora which should be available sometime in April (at this time) looks like a DS but comes with a keyboard, dual analogue and is considered to be the ultimate handheld, this console cum pocket pc hybrid is the most powerful to hit the market and already we have seen many emulators released. The console when released should shake the homebrew scene to the rafters with perfect emulation across most consoles and in time we should see N64, PSX and Dreamcast Emulation, this console is as powerful as the original xbox.

Apparently, they also keep a separate page for Pandora, too. And it looks like they're copying news info off the unofficial blog.

Am i really the first one to notice this?

Not only that, on the right side of the page are links to Buy/Preorder! What the hell. The link, of course, doesn't work.

EDIT: Something's raping my post. Either the forum, or my malfunctioning keyboard. I suspect the first.

No? They've been up since before the unofficial blog. The dude who manages it constants these forums.

 

[Bramrash]

LOLOLOLOL "console CUM pocket pc"

They're a little optimistic about N64 and especially dreamcast I feel...

 

[NLS]

I actually first stumbled upon the Pandora via that site.

 

[r00tw00t]

QUOTE
... we should see N64, PSX and Dreamcast Emulation, this console is as powerful as the original xbox.


Sure, Dreamcast Emulation...

 

[Consequence_9]

QUOTE
... we should see N64, PSX and Dreamcast Emulation, this console is as powerful as the original xbox.

Sure, Dreamcast Emulation...

I wouldn't rule it out, someone might just have a little something planned ;]

 

[Mithrildor]

LOLOLOLOL "console CUM pocket pc"

They're a little optimistic about N64 and especially dreamcast I feel...

Hopefully not. Id like to play some Sonic Adventure 2 on Pandora.

 

[PoisonedV]

OP: forum is fucked up after software puked all over itself. it doubles apostrophes, fucks up links and formatting etc. put links in code tags
anyway, dcemu owner frequents here, but I think the pandora dcemu source is just a little malnourished. as far as the gp32x-esque realm of handhelds go, why go to dcemu when you could use gp32x, and the sites related to it.

 

[Pleng]

QUOTE
... we should see N64, PSX and Dreamcast Emulation, this console is as powerful as the original xbox.

Sure, Dreamcast Emulation...

I wouldn't rule it out, someone might just have a little something planned ;]


The guy who brought dreamcast emulation crawling onto the PSP has already said that he plans to work on a DC emulator for Pandora.

Who knows what frame rate's we'll see. Being able to play Sega Rally and Daytona on the move would be awesome. Maybe, just maybe, one day it'll happen.

 

[Username]

I do think we'll be seeing some sort of N64 emulation though. I know I shouldn't compare by specs but it looks about as powerful as an Xbox and I remember an N64 emulator for that.

 

[Miner49er]

I do think we'll be seeing some sort of N64 emulation though. I know I shouldn't compare by specs but it looks about as powerful as an Xbox and I remember an N64 emulator for that.

Welll, I remember running HLE with That 3D Mario game and near perfect on my Pentium 233! So I would of thought it was possible on the pandy

 

[Iorgy77]

dcemu has been around forever and covers a wide range of stuff. It's handy if you want gp32, gp2x, pandora, psp, wii, DS and DC homebrew news all in one place for example.

 

[Svartalf]

Welll, I remember running HLE with That 3D Mario game and near perfect on my Pentium 233! So I would of thought it was possible on the pandy

HLE's emulation was limited in which titles it could run. Moreover, it took the complex high-road and tried to effectively detect what the game was asking of the N64 hardware and re-express the whole thing as something different with the same result. Basically something like a dynrec core but instead of emulating an N64, they were doing a JIT porting of select titles to an alternate platform.

 

[Happy]

To clear up HLE just a little bit for some of the less nuts and bolts savvy types, HLE is a legitmate approach but rests on the assumption that you know exactly what the program expects to happen. Even if you had the source code for the game, this can be impossible to determine. HLE has nothing to do with dynarec or JITs. The closest terminolgy would be that it is a static recompilation of an entire library. You could also compare it to different graphic drivers. The graphic driver provides an implementation for an API, but this does not guarantee that two different graphic drivers provide completely identical results. In the case of N64 HLE graphics, the attempt is to provide a graphic driver implementation of the N64 graphics API on other hardware. The discrepencies abound when the API is undocumented and functionality must be guessed. The LLE approach gives less room for discrepencies, if for no other reason than the hardware did not change from game to game, unlike the API.

 

[HackModford]

Blah Blah Blah Which means we'll eventually get N64

 

[Exophase]

Welll, I remember running HLE with That 3D Mario game and near perfect on my Pentium 233! So I would of thought it was possible on the pandy

HLE's emulation was limited in which titles it could run. Moreover, it took the complex high-road and tried to effectively detect what the game was asking of the N64 hardware and re-express the whole thing as something different with the same result. Basically something like a dynrec core but instead of emulating an N64, they were doing a JIT porting of select titles to an alternate platform.


Every publically released N64 emulator uses HLE of Nintendo dubbed "microcode", ie RSP programs and RDP interface for both audio and video. There are low level emulations of RSP out there but they're very slow and buggy and no one really uses them. What is being HLE'd has been refined to the point where most games can be emulated on the "best" emulators, and theoretically every game could be emulated with this approach (barring someone coming out and doing a new game now that uses new RSP code), but reverse engineering some of the custom microcodes is not pretty.

Unfortunately, making LLE of the RSP anything but unfathomably slow, even on a platform with a decent integer SIMD like NEON would be quite challenging. Its SIMD is more of the highly parallel 16x16+48 DSP nature than usual SIMDs on CPUs, so there's a ton of extra calculations that make it impossible to map directly. It would take a very sophisticated recompiler to convert typical RSP code into something that can be executed efficiently enough.

However, a good LLE based emulator would be invaluable in reverse developing HLE. You could even go so far as to just HLE a few of the tightest inner loops rather than the whole interface. This is if the recompiler isn't good enough to do it for you. So it'd be great to have a thorough LLE emulator right now that can be used as a starting point.

The other thing is that the RDP (3D accelerator on the N64) and VI (framebuffer chip that provides a bunch of post-processing) are difficult to impossible to emulate all that accurately by pushing things out to a another 3D accelerator platform, depending on what said platform is capable of doing. So a lot of games have graphical problems ranging from effects not being quite right (like the anti-aliasing or bilinear filtering not being like it was on an N64) to outright glitches due to incorrect blend/combine modes, missing framebuffer feedback effects, differences in Z buffering, nuances in the coverage features of N64, etc.

(btw, thank Happy for this post because he taught me almost everything I know about N64)

 

[Kojote]

dcemu has been around forever and covers a wide range of stuff. It's handy if you want gp32, gp2x, pandora, psp, wii, DS and DC homebrew news all in one place for example.

to be honest, there is not just only place which covers those... if people start discussing they should be fair and mention other sources too... at least we do have enough competition with homebrew pages these days,while thosewere pretty rare years ago.

 

[Happy]

On reviewing my post, I apologize for any wording which may have made it sound anti-HLE and pro-LLE. Neither approach is inherently better than the other. I just wanted to try to clear up some misunderstanding of terms. If anyone wants further clarifcation of the difference, I could explain it with the analogy of making a sandwich. Which while potentially amusing, would also be potentially off-topic. I will return to topic with a hooray for Pandora exposure and a hooray for any Dreamcast emulation progress.

 

[Iorgy77]

dcemu has been around forever and covers a wide range of stuff. It's handy if you want gp32, gp2x, pandora, psp, wii, DS and DC homebrew news all in one place for example.

to be honest, there is not just only place which covers those... if people start discussing they should be fair and mention other sources too... at least we do have enough competition with homebrew pages these days,while thosewere pretty rare years ago.


Emuholic and PDRoms too!!!