Yay, lots of questions.
Farox said:
Is needed a 1Ghz Pandora to play the games on that video or my CC (256MB ram) could play it well ?
I tested entirely on my CC Pandora, so I can confirm you don't need more than 256MB RAM. However, you may need it to load large zipped ROMs. Up to 128MB works fine here (I haven't tried larger), but 128MB ROMs take a while; they may be thrashing memory while unzipping.
Farox said:
Are you going to partecipate at the ED competition ?
mcobit said:
You should really participate in the dragonbox compo with this. Will be a really good entry for best emulator
Sorry but I'm keeping the emulator closed source for the foreseeable future and therefore can't enter it in the competition. If I make it open source other people will start selling it on Google Play and Cydia.
UPDATE: Okay apparently the final rules don't require source so I'll think about doing it.
Farox said:
If you can keep for (some months) a Pandora exclusive only...i think this could increase sales and help Pandora.
I hope so, even if it's just a little bit.
Askarus said:
1: Games like Yoshi's story are great. Will it ever be possible to get the screens above each other. Especially for Games that use both screens it would be great (even if the screens would be smaller then).
2: Will it be possible to shrink one screen (like map screen) and make the other one bigger?
Neelix said:
I second Askarus' questions, and am also wondering if displaying both screens stacked vertically and unscaled would allow any (minor) performance gain due to the lack of scaling.
Currently the emulator supports horizontal and vertical rendering, and both with or without stretching to fill the aspect ratio (even with vertical this helps). I spent most of the development using vertical unscaled, but I set it on horizontal scaled since I thought it'd be better for the video.
I'm also working on another mode that has one screen at 2x scaling next to another at 1x; the 1x one will be positioned above or below center based on if it should be top or bottom, which should help give some illusion of vertical positioning. This mode would use the most screen real estate, and is good for games that use one screen much more prominently than the other (which is most of them).
Askarus said:
3: Does touchscreen work?
Yes. I think slaeshjag said that with TV out he got nothing on his Pandora screen which would make it hard to use it. I haven't tested TV-out at all personally so it's something I'll have to look into.
Askarus said:
5: Is it still playable with scale 2x?
Scaling doesn't seem to really impact the performance at all, thanks to using the Pandora's scaled overlay.
Askarus said:
4: Will the Castlevania Games and Children of Mana run?
The Castlevania games use 3D heavily for 2D, so they don't run well right now (also, Order of Ecclesia needs some level of wifi emulation to go in-game at all). Some of those extends beyond basic 2D-style blits, like shading in the opening level of Dawn of Sorrow. There's also occasionally 3D models in the background. So getting any of it to run fast is a long term challenge, getting all of it might not be possible (although maybe if it helps some stuff can be added to cheat on the 3D to render it at a lower quality)
Askarus said:
6: Do you also have a PSP Emulator ready?
Not yet ;p
Askarus said:
7: Will you also add cheat support?
I actually haven't thought about it. It'd be pretty low priority.
ParadisoShlee said:
Have you tried any NDS homebrew?
A little bit. Especially since some is more useful for testing. This includes some test ROMs that a friend wrote for me, and some I wrote as well. Just in case this was what the question was getting at - I don't use any HLE for ARM7 emulation so homebrew isn't locked out.
magic_sam said:
Will it use any hardware acceleration (OpenGL ES 2.0, DSP, etc...) or will it be 100% software ?
PokeParadox said:
Iwould like to know you rplans for screen positioning, hiding unsused screen etc also if 3D is inyended to be done in software or GLES
Right now it's 100% software, not counting the screen scaling anyway. It's possible the DSP could help with either 2D or 3D emulation, but it'd probably take heavily optimized code (maybe even hand-written C64x ASM which is a nightmare). Since this coding would be very Pandora specific I'm not sure I want to allocate that much time to it, especially if it might end up not working well in the end.
OpenGL ES 2 is not really a good fit for 3D emulation on this. There are a lot of features it doesn't support or doesn't support well. Moreover, you need to blend 2D and 3D together which means you have to read the framebuffer back, which is going to be really slow, in addition to having to upload textures a lot.
