Does Running Emulators At 266mhz Severly Change Battery Life?

[Radek]

Not to rain on Zektor's parade, but the whole reason I bought a GP2X from (a dealer across the Atlantic) instead of the guys at www.GP32z.com in the US is because I was able to custom order from him and know that the GP2X Mk2 I am getting is highly overclockable.

Why? Because emulation is important to me. As excited as I am over custom content for the GP2X, it will never eclipse the number of games emulators have to offer (mind you, there's the quality versus quantity aspect).

It's hard to disagree. There 1000s of very quality games from all those old consoles and home computers. However more modern content would be nice but the PSP is for that.

As I like my GP2x it's not perfect emulation machine. More like a general purpose handheld with some nifty videoplayback capabilties.

Here comes my point - would be there a market for an ultimate arcade/emulation machine specialized just for that task?
(from every standpoint including controls)

I guess not or going hardwired route would really angry such companies like Nintendo?

When I was trying to understand the sources of Squidge's snes one thing became very apparent to me. The code is spending lots of time in branches, not actual number crunching. Branches aren't exactly efficient on a normal CPU, even on the Arm what have conditional executing. But such logic can fly on the PLD chips.

Today a dedicated ASIC could be produced easily what would have hardwired all those old consoles in a silicon. That would be really great as such chip could run at fraction of energy consumption of CPU and would give a perfect mirror of any older console. But effort of getting all documentation and schematics, then dealing with policies of companies what have rights to those... not realistic.

So it was a rant.

 

[DavidBeoulve]

But one I enjoyed.

 

[sam fisher]

Not to rain on Zektor's parade, but the whole reason I bought a GP2X from (a dealer across the Atlantic) instead of the guys at www.GP32z.com in the US is because I was able to custom order from him and know that the GP2X Mk2 I am getting is highly overclockable.

Why? Because emulation is important to me. As excited as I am over custom content for the GP2X, it will never eclipse the number of games emulators have to offer (mind you, there's the quality versus quantity aspect).

Granted, I paid him extra for his time, so I wouldn't run to him thinking you should pay the man the same amount as you would for "just whatever GP2X gets tossed in the shipping box", nor that he can do that if he suddenly gets inundated with requests

He was nice enough to do it for me, that's all I can say.

Edit: Hmm, not sure I should advertise who. The l33t among you already know

I would of guessed it is EvilDragon but I suppose it could have been Craig.

 

[Winterkid]

An external processor board with a couple CPU's from those systems (self-powered of course) would not only boost the CPU power for emulators but take a lot of the load off the ARM itself, wouldn't it?

While not a hardware genius, I imagine something like this....

+-------+
| GP2X |
+-------+
| <-- External cable, preferably a very short cable
+-----+
| CPU/|
| MMU | <-- Containing perhaps a 68000 or 68020, a midi synth chip, and an MMU?
+------+
|
+--- Headphone jack for emulator audio.


This is just me spiffballing here.

 

[reallynotnick]

^Lets try to stay away from the sega route (32-bit and CD add ons)

It would be a cool idea but the support would probaly be scarce and just cause more paine then good.

 

[Winterkid]

Shame, honestly.. Even something to hand the sound processing off to would be a great boom to speeds.

 

[zektor]

Not to rain on Zektor's parade, but the whole reason I bought a GP2X from (a dealer across the Atlantic) instead of the guys at www.GP32z.com in the US is because I was able to custom order from him and know that the GP2X Mk2 I am getting is highly overclockable.

Why? Because emulation is important to me. As excited as I am over custom content for the GP2X, it will never eclipse the number of games emulators have to offer (mind you, there's the quality versus quantity aspect).

Granted, I paid him extra for his time, so I wouldn't run to him thinking you should pay the man the same amount as you would for "just whatever GP2X gets tossed in the shipping box", nor that he can do that if he suddenly gets inundated with requests

He was nice enough to do it for me, that's all I can say.

Edit: Hmm, not sure I should advertise who. The l33t among you already know

So you got a MK2 that can overclock. I would not have paid someone extra for it. I did own a MK1 that was overclockable to 280, and honestly, I didn't see any drastic speed increase between the 280 and the 255 that I can clock at now. If you got ahold of a MK2 that you can clock to over 255mhz, more power to you. If you spent extra for that, well, you got taken. I would think that any program/emulator that any respectable author writes will be geared to the mass GP2X population. In other words, nobody is going to write an emulator that only plays at full speed on a 320mhz oc'ed GP2X....or at least not on purpose. Like I said earlier, overclocking is just a temporary solution to the problem. As programs get better, o/c'ing will not be a necessity. It's probably not a good thing to do right now...

I guess I come from the old school "what can I do with this?" rather than "I better have a better one than anyone else" philosophy. Man, what we used to do with 4k back in the day...

And this scene is not about "l33tness" or so I thought. It's about community and progression to a common goal of enjoyment on an open handheld console. My l33tness thinking got old after the commie daze sl8tz!