for those writing emulators

[JAS]

Hello,

A friend and myself were talking about emulators for the gp32 when he mentioned that the dreamcast has a whole host of completed emulators for it. Now the dreamcast has a n Arm processor running at 60mhz and 2MB ram meaning that the porting to an arm processor is already done - it's just a matter of changing control configurations and the gp32's system and such in order to port it. This might be a WAY easier way of porting emulators to the gp32 with all the features an emulator should have ready for action.

I myself am not a programmer - yet - but I have a fair concept of what it is to program and thought I should mention this in order to perhaps speed up the porting of emulators for the gp32. I'm submitting a link to a big list of emulators that are available for download for the dreamcast - maybe they have readmes with the authors emails in them, and they might just hand over their code!

here's the link: http://www.zophar.net/consoles/dreamcast.html

I hope this helps to bring Snes to full speed and the megadrive to the GP32 also! Good Luck!

 

[Rattboi]

Yo,

I'm a programmer, and there is a major flaw with your idea. The dreamcast ARM processor is only for sound processing. The main processor is an SH4 (Hitachi or something, if I remember correctly). So that idea wouldn't work. Nice try though, buddy.

 

[angrypants]

don't a few palm's or pocket pc's run off of arm processors? I could be wrong but I'm sure there has got to be a few decent emulators out there that run on some what similar hardware. If so they might be a good starting point or just an esier port than other emulators out there.

 

[JAS]

damnit - and here I thought I was so slick - nevermind then...

 

[timthepig]

I used to be in to dreamcast emulation !!

www.dcemulation.com

Is the pinnacle of all dreamcast emulators

(Doom, Quake, Rise of the triad, Ultima 4, Spectrum, c64, Atari 800, Snes, Megadrive etc)

 

[tfc]

I co-founded www.dcemulation.com with 007Cheater!

mwahahaha

TFC

 

[JAS]

Actually, the dreamcast runs at 200mhz (my mistake), but the arm processor IS the main processor. The sound is processed through a 32bit Yamaha SISP chip.

So, in the end this could actually help to write emulators for the gp32.

My friend's quote, "Also, a very functional snes emulator called ZSnes (this baby runs everything! and it's opensource) could probably be ported to the GP32."

On with the porting!

 

[EvilDragon]

ZSNES is 100% pure assembler... that's why it's soooo fast but never ported to any other system...

 

[directhex]

Actually, the dreamcast runs at 200mhz (my mistake), but the arm processor IS the main processor. The sound is processed through a 32bit Yamaha SISP chip.

So, in the end this could actually help to write emulators for the gp32.

My friend's quote, "Also, a very functional snes emulator called ZSnes (this baby runs everything! and it's opensource) could probably be ported to the GP32."

On with the porting!

the Dreamcast still runs a Hitachi SuperH-4 (http://www.superh.com/main.phtml?history=1005,1008)

And has about 12mb or ram in total.

In the end, unless two products run EXACTLY the same chip, any assembler code is rendered useless. C code is pretty tollerant of what chip it's compiled on.

It's MUCH easier to port from something closer to the GP32 architecture (like, say a PDA).

--jo "directhex" shields

 

[Esn]

Ah...

So would it be hard to port PocketDOS to GP32?

http://www.pocketdos.com/

 

[directhex]

depending on how this has be written, it could be very simple. it might be worth mailing the guy who wrote it to ask them what THEY think... mention the GP32 is an ARM920 @ 40->133MHz, 8Mb SDRAM, 320x240

--jo "directhex" shields

 

[stickofjoy]

What about recompiling an emulator written for the iPac PocketPC, which runs the same ARM9 chip?

matt

 

[directhex]

it wouldn't be QUITE that simple, but would require a couple of hours' work to replace all the iPaq specific commands with GP32 commands (e.g. bring in SmartMedia code instead of whatever the hell the iPaq uses). Of course, it also depends on how the emulator is written. If it makes any use of the Windows CD API, it would be far harder than a pure low-level C product to port.

--jo "directhex" shields