GameCube Emulation Lessons

[TrashyMG]

Maybe you can sell it on ebay and get some cash back ;^).

Well I still have the Motherboard and the CPU, everything else ended up in my friend's computers as hand me down upgrades..

That Pentium II did spend ~10 years as a home web and file server after being retired of gaming.. so figured I got my worth out of it.

 

[Saber]

Wasn't there a vid before going around that showed some GameCube games to be better looking than Wii games?

Maybe that was through Dolphin x64 with Windows? Some GameCube titles hold up well even without the emulator's resolution bump and AA. Super Smash Bros Melee, Zelda Windwaker, Soul Calibur II, Resident Evil 4, and Metroid Prime 1 and 2 still look stunning. Scaled up to 1080p with widescreen hack and you have some impressive eye candy. 

 

[Perusa]

Quick question!

If Dolphin would run on the Pyra. Does that mean that Wii games will be playable automatically?

 

[TrashyMG]

Quick question!

If Dolphin would run on the Pyra. Does that mean that Wii games will be playable automatically?

I wouldn't say that.. there is a bit of a hardware leap between the Gamecube and the Wii.

 

[Perusa]

Oh...okay. I somehow thought of that.

 

[PokeParadox]

IIRC the wide interconnect and fast RAM was what gave the GC its main advantage over the PCs of the day, at least when it came to texture loading. Though of course you needed that more as it didn't have the oddles of graphics RAM that PCs could have.

I had a gaming PC at the time when the GC came out (and I did buy the GC, but certainly not for the graphics!) and I remember it felt very out powered versus what I could play on my rig. Consoles have ALWAYS been behind PC performance at least since the early 90s, and this has never changed since.

Of course it could be out-powered by a PC, but consoles have always been the "cheaper" option for gaming.

But GameCube Graphics hardware was one of the first to implement a programmable pipeline for graphics (i.e. shaders)


Of course the end-image will not look quite as nice for 2 reasons:

1. GameCube could only output in 480p and if you were in Europe you were shafted into only being able to output PAL or PAL60 at 480i Vs 1024x768 which I'm remembering being standard for PC at the time.
2. Not every game bothered to use the shaders. Some examples that did were Metroid Prime 2 (e.g. there are tanks with water that shimmers - shaders). This was mainly lazy multi-platform ports...

With that being said... aside from the output resolution, the GPU for GameCube was quite advanced for the time.