Dreamcast Emulator For Pandora?

[Shiny]

We have mods.

We do?


I highly doubt there will ever be Dreamcast emulation on the pandora at playable speeds; It's just too much. But who knows, it may end up being what PSX was for the GP2X and have a few games playable at near or full speed (I wouldn't get your hopes up).

 

[JakeK]

We have mods.

We do?


Being a forum I assumed so >.<

 

[conso]

the dreamcast is by far my favorite gaming console till now and still connected to my tv all the time
I would be very happy if I could play some of the games on the pandora , esp. crazy taxi 2
until then, I'm helping the supertuxkart devs to implement a crazy-taxi mode. STK will hopefully be ported to the pandora

 

[Game_over]

YAY Another game !!!!
-Thanks for the News Conso


I'd have to say the bottom line is that know one will know about speed or anything, until someone atleast tries to write one. It's nice to talk about weather an emulator is possible for the system, but if no one writes one its pretty much another pointless discussion. I would love a portable nullDC or even Chankast, but whatever.

 

[StealthBagel]

We already know about speed. It will run like shit and will probably never be seriously attempted for that reason. Any of the people with their heads in the clouds saying 'YOU CAN EMULATE A PS3 IF YOU JUST BELIEVE'!! are absolutely full of it.

 

[JakeK]

And who think the DC is emulatable obviously.

I think the consensus from devs (the people who MAKE games and ports) is that it isn't possible. Listen to the more experience people.

 

[conso]

YAY Another game !!!!
-Thanks for the News Conso

I'd have to say the bottom line is that know one will know about speed or anything, until someone atleast tries to write one. It's nice to talk about weather an emulator is possible for the system, but if no one writes one its pretty much another pointless discussion. I would love a portable nullDC or even Chankast, but whatever.


sorry, that wasn't a news. I don't know how hard it is to port an open source game to the pandora, but stk runs on low spec machines and has only a few dependencies. I will try to port it myself as soon as I have a pandora and if I have problems with it, I will lend hiker my pandora the next time he is in germany

 

[x68000]

We already know about speed. It will run like shit and will probably never be seriously attempted for that reason. Any of the people with their heads in the clouds saying 'YOU CAN EMULATE A PS3 IF YOU JUST BELIEVE'!! are absolutely full of it.

The same happened when the GP2X was in the works, with plenty people expecting saturn and jag emulation!

And just as that wasn't possible then, i doubt it will be do-able on this gen of open source handhelds either.

 

[timofonic]

I think Dreamcast emulator could be possible, but in a different approach.

What I mean is choosing the bleemcast! way: specialized versions of the Dreamcast emulators for each game.

One for Shenmue, other for Rez, other for Skies of Arcadia...

Each version is optimized for one game or a bunch of games, so it could run a lot better in the same hardware and even having certain graphical improvements like bleemcast! did.

I think ports of Square games for PC used a similar thing, since they were ported from PSX or PS2 and they used a partial emulator of those systems on them.

What do guys think of this? It could be a possible way of having Dreamcast games on a handheld like Pandora.

 

[craigix]

A high level approach? Depends how the Sega libs worked on the DC, HLE works pretty well on the N64 but I've never seen it done with any DC software.

I'd expect what someone else on here said, any DC emulation would be similar to the PSX emulation on the GP2X.

 

[sephiroth111]

The point made earlier was that the Pandora is better for emulating the dreamcast than the cube because it has similar video technology. We're still dreaming about emulating.

I can safely say that even if they are in the same generation, the Cube runs rings around the Dreamcast. I would even say that the Pandora outperforms it by a fair margin.

i wouldn't call the GCN same gen as the DC really, i'd call it a half jump between the N64 and the GCN.

ok, basic examination shows that the PowerVR series2 in the DC was clocked at 100 MHz, had 8mb of single datarate ram, and ran at 7.0 Mpoly/sec. The PowerVR series 5 (SGX) installed in the Pandora runs at 14 MPolys/sec. has DDR ram also, so we trump it on the graphics part, joy.

next, the DC had 26mb ram total, 16mb system, 8mb video (both clocked at 100/mhz), and 2mb sound (clocked at 66/mhz) pandora has 256mb of DDR2 ram. again, we trump it again, but thats not the point.

after that, we have the SH4 processor. plus the ARM is CISC, and the SH-4 is RISC,* now, the PSX arch ran at 34mhz main + 16mhz video or something, the SH4 runs at 200MHZ. we have around 600mhz to play with here, but looking at the psx/GP2x ratio we got only bare minimum playable performance off that, and that was due to the awesome coders optimizing everything, and probably implementing hacks every which way.

I'm not saying that emulating the DC would be impossible in the least, but unless we have a very impressive dynarec core for the cpu, and something that can map out the older series PowerVR to the SGX530, I'd call it grim at best.

*Edit: disregard that, i'm a dumbass.

 

[StealthBagel]

Since when does the Pandora have 256 MB of RAM? I thought it was 256 MB MobileDDR (not DDR2) RAM, and 256 MB flash memory for onboard storage. Not that it will make a difference for DC emulation.... it's just an observance.

 

[icurafu]

ok, basic examination shows that the PowerVR series2 in the DC was clocked at 100 MHz, had 8mb of single datarate ram, and ran at 7.0 Mpoly/sec. The PowerVR series 5 (SGX) installed in the Pandora runs at 14 MPolys/sec. has DDR ram also, so we trump it on the graphics part, joy.



I would agree. And I still think Sega did more with less.

But the PowerVR SGX does only 10 million polygons a second.

 

[ldesnogu]

Since when does the Pandora have 256 MB of RAM? I thought it was 256 MB MobileDDR (not DDR2) RAM, and 256 MB flash memory for onboard storage.

You meant 128 MB of RAM I guess, unless I missed some news.

Anyway a dynarec of a CPU is the easy part, it's the emulation of HW details that make emulation hard.
Take as an example the software PS2 emulation on the PS3; the CPU of the PS2 is not that a big deal (for a PC I mean ), but when you have to emulate the two vector units and their interactions with the GS in an accurate enough way, it becomes very involved.

 

[timofonic]

A high level approach? Depends how the Sega libs worked on the DC, HLE works pretty well on the N64 but I've never seen it done with any DC software.

I'd expect what someone else on here said, any DC emulation would be similar to the PSX emulation on the GP2X.

Yes, that's was what I meant to explain but my technical skills are very limited.

If HLE works well on Dreamcast too... Do you think there could be a possibility of having Dreamcast emulation on Pandora?

 

[Prophet]

I'd advise people to not think too hard about Dreamcast emulation on Pandora. On the surface, it seems very unlikely.

But as always, I would LOVE to be proven wrong.

I forget where I read it, I think CraigX said it - but from Pandora's specs, I'd agree - PSX emulation is a given, and N64 is a real possibility. But Dreamcast - that's asking a LOT. Check the DC's specs - quite a powerful beast she was! As far as an HLE approach... I would still doubt it.

 

[javaJake]

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We do?


The report button works.

 

[Clad]

I'd expect what someone else on here said, any DC emulation would be similar to the PSX emulation on the GP2X.

Can we expect DC, PS2, GC and XBox emulation on the Pandora 2 then ?

 

[javaJake]

Someone mentioned a rough rule of emulation: you need 5x the power of the original device to emulate it. (Or was it 12x?) Since the Pandora is nowhere near the equivilant of the XBox, let alone 5x that power... well, you get the idea.

(Never mind)

 

[ldesnogu]

Someone mentioned a rough rule of emulation: you need 5x the power of the original device to emulate it. (Or was it 12x?) Since the Pandora is nowhere near the equivilant of the XBox, let alone 5x that power... well, you get the idea.

You should have switched on your irony detector, Clad was having some fun

Anyway 5x is certainly not enough, unless you sacrifice accuracy and the HW is trivial. Even 12x is not enough. Look at the Amiga with its a 68k @ 7.x MHz. Even though the ARM of the GP2X has probably 50x more power (taking into account 1 68k instruction was at least 4 cycles), it's a pain to emulate because its hardware was powerful and used to a point where if you are not cycle accurate enough some programs will never work.