Emulators, From Average To Excellent.

[Tetsuro]

I would like to know what do you think about emulators on Wiz/Caanoo. I think it would be good for newbies to understand what to expect from these two consoles.

The emulators are SNES, Mega Drive, MAME, Neo-Geo, Super Nintendo, DOS, Amiga, and PlayStation.

Rating will be AVERAGE, GOOD, VERY GOOD or EXCELLENT. A brief explanation/comment on the vote is welcome.

es. SNES - GOOD, MAME - VERY GOOD, etc. A comment could be like: 'Good controls, bad interface, crappy audio', and so on..

Thanks to anyone that will partecipate.

---

[Wiz] Super Nintendo - VERY GOOD

Comments:
glezmen - the emulation is good, for complex games (like PilotWings, Star Fox, etc) setting framedrop, turning off transparency and scaling helps (but Star Fox is still unplayable )

[Caanoo/Wiz] MAME - VERY GOOD

Comments:
glezmen - most of the games is perfectly playable, a few games have graphical glitches or missing sound

[Wiz] Mega Drive - EXCELLENT

[Caanoo/Wiz] Neo-Geo - EXCELLENT

[Wiz] DOS - POOR

Comments:
glezmen - DosBox is too slow, a few games are more or less playable, but it's still far from even the speed of an AT286

[Wiz] Amiga - AVERAGE

Comments:
glezmen - few games work, others not, try and see... the touchscreen can't be used as mouse (it's impossible to aim)

[Wiz] PlayStation - POOR

Comments:
glezmen - most of the games are too slow, but others work quite well

[Wiz] Gameboy Advance - VERY GOOD

Comments:
glezmen - almost all of the games work, but most of the 3D games are too slow, turning off scaling makes it better

 

[glezmen]

what about the GBA or C64 emulators? (GBA is my personal favourite)

 

[Tetsuro]

what about the GBA or C64 emulators? (GBA is my personal favourite)

I would not like to include them because they are 'guaranteed', since their hardware isn't complex enough to pose a problem for the SoC inside the two consoles. Anyway if you think it could be useful for newbies we could add them.

 

[glezmen]

SNES - VERY GOOD the emulation is good, for complex games (like PilotWings, Star Fox, etc) setting framedrop, turning off transparency and scaling helps (but Star Fox is still unplayable )
MAME- VERY GOOD most of the games is perfectly playable, a few games have graphical glitches or missing sound
MegaDrive - EXCELLENT
NeoGeo - EXCELLENT
DOS - POOR DosBox is too slow, a few games are more or less playable, but it's still far from even the speed of an AT286
Amiga - AVERAGE few games work, others not, try and see... the touchscreen can't be used as mouse (it's impossible to aim)
PlayStation - POOR/AVERAGE most of the games are too slow, but others work quite well
GBA - VERY GOOD almost all of the games work, but most of the 3D games are too slow, turning off scaling makes it better

Super Nintendo? that's SNES... (Super Nintendo Entertainment System)

 

[Tetsuro]

SNES - VERY GOOD the emulation is good, for complex games (like PilotWings, Star Fox, etc) setting framedrop, turning off transparency and scaling helps (but Star Fox is still unplayable )
MAME- VERY GOOD most of the games is perfectly playable, a few games have graphical glitches or missing sound
MegaDrive - EXCELLENT
NeoGeo - EXCELLENT
DOS - POOR DosBox is too slow, a few games are more or less playable, but it's still far from even the speed of an AT286
Amiga - AVERAGE few games work, others not, try and see... the touchscreen can't be used as mouse (it's impossible to aim)
PlayStation - POOR/AVERAGE most of the games are too slow, but others work quite well
GBA - VERY GOOD almost all of the games work, but most of the 3D games are too slow, turning off scaling makes it better

Super Nintendo? that's SNES... (Super Nintendo Entertainment System)

Yes, it was a typo.
It's discouraging to know that a 286 isn't emulated well... For what I know a 286 with VGA is simpler to emulate than an Amiga (perhaps the 286 is a more complex CPU than a 68000 but the OCS chipset must have been so much more complex than the VGA).

 

[Optimus]

Dosbox was still so slow. I would have hoped for an emulator that at least emulates the 8088 and 286 fast enough.

Recently I have seen DSx86 on the NDS. The focus in this was to write an emulator from scratch and only 286, focus and try to optimize this with only the essential, VGA, Sb-Adlib. So it's not like dosbox emulating everything to pentium, it's limited and focused to at least give enough performance for the very old stuff and it actually works quite well for some games. In the DS which has an ARM at 66Mhz some games play so well with sound not stuttering (in the GP2X/Wiz no matter how old game that only needed 500 cycles I was trying, the sound always couldn't make it ;P), most are slow, but there is finally hope for very early 286 games.

So I thought, wouldn't it be great if this was ported in GP2X/Wiz? Finally, some DOS stuff would run well with sound and be totally playable. I am only wondering if the author has the code somewhere around lying and how easy would it be to port.

 

[glezmen]

It's discouraging to know that a 286 isn't emulated well... For what I know a 286 with VGA is simpler to emulate than an Amiga (perhaps the 286 is a more complex CPU than a 68000 but the OCS chipset must have been so much more complex than the VGA).

it's not always about the complexity of the original hw. anyway, what do you call complexity? a hw that looks easy to emulate can be much more complex than you'd think.
i guess the Playstation emulator on WIZ runs better than dosbox, but if you compare a 286 game (for example Stunts or Prehistorik) with a PSX game (Gran Turismo, Crash Bandicoot) you can see the difference is HUGE

 

[Tetsuro]

Dosbox was still so slow. I would have hoped for an emulator that at least emulates the 8088 and 286 fast enough.

Recently I have seen DSx86 on the NDS. The focus in this was to write an emulator from scratch and only 286, focus and try to optimize this with only the essential, VGA, Sb-Adlib. So it's not like dosbox emulating everything to pentium, it's limited and focused to at least give enough performance for the very old stuff and it actually works quite well for some games. In the DS which has an ARM at 66Mhz some games play so well with sound not stuttering (in the GP2X/Wiz no matter how old game that only needed 500 cycles I was trying, the sound always couldn't make it ;P), most are slow, but there is finally hope for very early 286 games.

So I thought, wouldn't it be great if this was ported in GP2X/Wiz? Finally, some DOS stuff would run well with sound and be totally playable. I am only wondering if the author has the code somewhere around lying and how easy would it be to port.

The thing is that there is so much good stuff for 386 that would be wonderful to play, I don't like much the 286 era.. even Monkey Island, Doom or Rise of the Triad, required a 386.

This is the tipical 286 game:
http://www.angelfire.com/games3/classicgames/cheats/keen1_3/

Would be great to port that emulator to the Wiz, but it's a shame Dosbox isn't optimized enough for the Wiz.

x glezmen: I'm thinking just at the type of the architecture (CISC) and the number of transistors. PSX uses a RISC architecture that is easier to emulate.

 

[Exophase]

A DSx86 port would be great, but highly non-trivial. Everything about it is written for DS.. it doesn't run on an OS (uses interrupts directly), uses ITCM/DTCM, uses the DS video modes, and so on. Wiz is a really different environment. I doubt you'll get the guy to do it.

The thing is, DSx86 uses a pure interpreter, while DOSBox uses a recompiler. You'd usually expect even a poor recompiler to beat a great interpreter, especially in the case where there's a lot of decode overhead like in x86. One difference is that DSx86 emulates as many cycles as possible and completely decouples real time events, while DOSBox counts cycles and throttles them to some number of your choice. The former really makes more sense for "platform" emulation as opposed to "system" emulation, but unfortunately on x86 you have some old games that won't work if the machine gets too fast, or worse, times by themselves counting cycles, so you do need to have throttling in some form at some point.

 

[Tetsuro]

A DSx86 port would be great, but highly non-trivial. Everything about it is written for DS.. it doesn't run on an OS (uses interrupts directly), uses ITCM/DTCM, uses the DS video modes, and so on. Wiz is a really different environment. I doubt you'll get the guy to do it.

The thing is, DSx86 uses a pure interpreter, while DOSBox uses a recompiler. You'd usually expect even a poor recompiler to beat a great interpreter, especially in the case where there's a lot of decode overhead like in x86. One difference is that DSx86 emulates as many cycles as possible and completely decouples real time events, while DOSBox counts cycles and throttles them to some number of your choice. The former really makes more sense for "platform" emulation as opposed to "system" emulation, but unfortunately on x86 you have some old games that won't work if the machine gets too fast, or worse, times by themselves counting cycles, so you do need to have throttling in some form at some point.

We need Guru's like you to make it happens. :excl:

In Dosbox there are things one could change for optimizing the execution of the emulator. One could exclude double buffering, could choose vga or ega (it goes until VESA), could set frameskip, could set specifically a 386 cpu to emulate (it goes until Pentium), could set cycles to 'auto' to let the emulator choose what it think is best (it is very good on predicting), could choose the appropriate soundblaster (if there is not enough juice there is the simple sound blaster 8-bit)... so maybe it isn't so impossible to make a good port.

You seem to understand a lot of things on programming, maybe you could make the community happy.
It's not like writing an emulator from the ground up, it's about porting and optimizing I think.

P.S.: I thought the (developing) community would have been larger, it seems that the scene on emulators is stalled with the Caanoo, seems to be just a bit of support from GPH (just MAME) and everything else is delegated to the community that seems to have fled to Pandora's development (?). Am I wrong?

 

[Exophase]

There's no Caanoo emulation scene because the hardware is barely different from on Wiz, Caanoo gets what Wiz gets... it would be silly to develop for one and not the other.

And there wasn't that much of a Wiz scene because the hardware wasn't that radically different from what was on GP2X, but with 4 emulator releases from a recent contest you can't really say there's no support. No point blaming Pandora for any of this.

I'm not working on DOSBox ;p

 

[Tetsuro]

There's no Caanoo emulation scene because the hardware is barely different from on Wiz, Caanoo gets what Wiz gets... it would be silly to develop for one and not the other.

And there wasn't that much of a Wiz scene because the hardware wasn't that radically different from what was on GP2X, but with 4 emulator releases from a recent contest you can't really say there's no support. No point blaming Pandora for any of this.

I'm not working on DOSBox ;p

But isn't it terrible that the hardware is very similar and in weeks no one ported any emulator to the Caanoo? There is just the MAME from GPH.
And Pollux is nearly 3 times more powerful than the SoC inside GP2x, I don't think 'it's just the same hardware'.
And don't think the Pandora is so much more powerful, it's just the 3D core that make the difference (unuseful for emulators until PSX, unuseful for DOS).

Can you link me at those 4 emulators? I know nothing of them.

Why not? You could always start... maybe we can sing a song in chorus mfor you if you done it.

P.S.: I could send you 10$ if you do it in your spare time (a good DOS emulator obviously, better than that on the Wiz.. optimized).

 

[EvilDragon]

There's no Caanoo emulation scene because the hardware is barely different from on Wiz, Caanoo gets what Wiz gets... it would be silly to develop for one and not the other.

And there wasn't that much of a Wiz scene because the hardware wasn't that radically different from what was on GP2X, but with 4 emulator releases from a recent contest you can't really say there's no support. No point blaming Pandora for any of this.

I'm not working on DOSBox ;p

But isn't it terrible that the hardware is very similar and in weeks no one ported any emulator to the Caanoo? There is just the MAME from GPH.

In weeks? The Caanoo just shipped one week ago...?

And Pollux is nearly 3 times more powerful than the SoC inside GP2x, I don't think 'it's just the same hardware'.

It's not just the Pollux you need. There are also things like RAM speed, hardware scaling, etc. that affect the overall performance of a system.
The WIZ was not that much of an improvement of the GP2X.
The GP2X was nearly able to run SNES in fullspeed without frameskip - the WIZ didn't do MUCH better.

And don't think the Pandora is so much more powerful, it's just the 3D core that make the difference (unuseful for emulators until PSX, unuseful for DOS).

The Pandora has a new generation of an ARM CPU, you can't compare the MHz, it is way faster.
The same DOSBox build can run some 386 games in fullspeed (even some 486, AFAIK), where the WIZ version can't do much more than a 286.

 

[Exophase]

But isn't it terrible that the hardware is very similar and in weeks no one ported any emulator to the Caanoo? There is just the MAME from GPH.

One difference between the two is that with Wiz ED sent out units to several emulator developers many months before the official release (Wiz was delayed a lot for some reason). So they had time to get this stuff ready. With Caanoo GPH has mainly been sending units to contest winners and a few game devs, not really emu devs.. and only a few weeks before release anyway. Pickle has one, so I'm sure he'll at least be porting something. Undoubtedly, the devs at gp32spain will do so as well. But most importantly, if GINGE is made available you'll get compatibility with GP2X emulators (and maybe Wiz ones, although Wiz offers very little over GP2X in terms of emulators)

And Pollux is nearly 3 times more powerful than the SoC inside GP2x, I don't think 'it's just the same hardware'.

I didn't say "just the same hardware", I said "not radically different." Despite having a similar kind of CPU you don't get > 2x the performance because the memory timings are worse.

And don't think the Pandora is so much more powerful, it's just the 3D core that make the difference (unuseful for emulators until PSX, unuseful for DOS).

Nope, Pandora's CPU is drastically more powerful than what's on Wiz/Caanoo. Probably the biggest reason for this is because it has L2 cache to compensate for the inefficiencies of the main memory bus. Having an all around wider superscalar design doesn't hurt.

[quote name='Tetsuro' date='29 August 2010 - 04:08 PM' timestamp='1283094531' post='912650]Can you link me at those 4 emulators? I know nothing of them. [/quote]

Sure, see this thread: http://www.gp32x.de...-and-downloads/

Those guys are very active right now.

[quote name='Tetsuro' date='29 August 2010 - 04:08 PM' timestamp='1283094531' post='912650]Why not? You could always start... maybe we can sing a song in chorus mfor you if you done it.

P.S.: I could send you 10$ if you do it in your spare time (a good DOS emulator obviously, better than that on the Wiz.. optimized). [/quote]

I have much better things to do and not enough interest in something like this... in general I work on my own projects, not on other code bases. And no offense, but thinking that $10 would be incentive for me to do anything is a little crazy ;p

 

[Tetsuro]

But isn't it terrible that the hardware is very similar and in weeks no one ported any emulator to the Caanoo? There is just the MAME from GPH.

One difference between the two is that with Wiz ED sent out units to several emulator developers many months before the official release (Wiz was delayed a lot for some reason). So they had time to get this stuff ready. With Caanoo GPH has mainly been sending units to contest winners and a few game devs, not really emu devs.. and only a few weeks before release anyway. Pickle has one, so I'm sure he'll at least be porting something. Undoubtedly, the devs at gp32spain will do so as well. But most importantly, if GINGE is made available you'll get compatibility with GP2X emulators (and maybe Wiz ones, although Wiz offers very little over GP2X in terms of emulators)

And Pollux is nearly 3 times more powerful than the SoC inside GP2x, I don't think 'it's just the same hardware'.

I didn't say "just the same hardware", I said "not radically different." Despite having a similar kind of CPU you don't get > 2x the performance because the memory timings are worse.

And don't think the Pandora is so much more powerful, it's just the 3D core that make the difference (unuseful for emulators until PSX, unuseful for DOS).

Nope, Pandora's CPU is drastically more powerful than what's on Wiz/Caanoo. Probably the biggest reason for this is because it has L2 cache to compensate for the inefficiencies of the main memory bus. Having an all around wider superscalar design doesn't hurt.

[quote name='Tetsuro' date='29 August 2010 - 04:08 PM' timestamp='1283094531' post='912650]Can you link me at those 4 emulators? I know nothing of them.

Sure, see this thread: http://www.gp32x.de...-and-downloads/

Those guys are very active right now.

[quote name='Tetsuro' date='29 August 2010 - 04:08 PM' timestamp='1283094531' post='912650]Why not? You could always start... maybe we can sing a song in chorus mfor you if you done it.

P.S.: I could send you 10$ if you do it in your spare time (a good DOS emulator obviously, better than that on the Wiz.. optimized). [/quote]

I have much better things to do and not enough interest in something like this... in general I work on my own projects, not on other code bases. And no offense, but thinking that $10 would be incentive for me to do anything is a little crazy ;p
[/quote]

That was not wise for them, not at all.

Probably the emulators ported with ginge aren't well optimized enough since, for what I have understood, they are optimized for the old SoC. Maybe they are optimized if the new SoC is just an increase in MHz over the predecessor.

Didn't know about that, anyway on emulators Pollux seems already good, maybe there are chances to do even better, specially in emulating old DOS platforms.

Those emulators are for Wiz, I was talking about the Caanoo since it's the new kid on the block with just one or two emulators working.

I'm not a company I would have done that like a consumer that want to support the community, that's all (mine 2 cents). It was just to sweaten the job.

 

[Exophase]

Dude:

1) Wiz and Caanoo have the SAME SoC, there's virtually nothing that can be optimized for Caanoo, no having more RAM doesn't really change things.
2) Wiz and GP2X have the same CPU architecture, there's very little you can do in Wiz specific optimizations... the emulators heavily optimized on GP2X represent about the most you'll get out of Wiz too...

I don't know what you guys expect, maybe the problem is that so many emulators were well done on GP2X that there isn't anything that needs to be done to make them better on Wiz or Caanoo. They'd both do just fine running the standard NES, Genesis, Gameboy, PC-Engine, etc etc emulators for GP2X.

 

[BlackPowderDoc]

Now, for the ignorant among us, what has to be done to actually make things made for the Wiz work on the Caanoo? (I ask out of pure ignorance. I just took my SD card out of my Wiz and put it in the Caanoo, but alas, nothing works just yet. It could entirely be operator error.)

 

[Tetsuro]

Dude:

1) Wiz and Caanoo have the SAME SoC, there's virtually nothing that can be optimized for Caanoo, no having more RAM doesn't really change things.
2) Wiz and GP2X have the same CPU architecture, there's very little you can do in Wiz specific optimizations... the emulators heavily optimized on GP2X represent about the most you'll get out of Wiz too...

I don't know what you guys expect, maybe the problem is that so many emulators were well done on GP2X that there isn't anything that needs to be done to make them better on Wiz or Caanoo. They'd both do just fine running the standard NES, Genesis, Gameboy, PC-Engine, etc etc emulators for GP2X.

1. I know that they have the same SoC, as I know that those emulators are more optimizable like 'virtually everything'.

2. Same CPU architecture but have more juice, if one feature got trashed for the lack of processing power it could eventually be implemented with a 2x processing power. It seems that the 920T does not have DSP extensions too.