How far away are we from achieving full-speed XBOX 360 and PS3 emulation @full-speed (with sound) on

How far away are we from achieving full-speed XBOX 360 and PS3 emulation @full-speed (with sound) on

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Is that all? I'd pay 100 times over for emus that are of DraStic quality.


By the way, I've actually already purchased DraStic twice and wouldn't hesitate to buy it a third time for my other Alphabet account.
 
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You don't want to make Exophase too rich and go to Bora Bora do you? I would like him to stick around for another awesome emu or two ;)
 
Klumpen said:
If you're into vector art, maybe you could answer me a simple yet important question: Is it possible to make a plugin for one of the GB(A)/SNES emulators that vectorizes a whole game ("Zelda: A Link to the past" or "Super Mario World" for example), stores the data somewhere and plays the game in true HD without having to vectorize every sprite in real time? I'd love that and hopefully one day stuff like this will be made for the existent emulators
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Technically, it "could" be possible, but there's a lot of things that need to be in order first; and even then it might not work on every game.
For example, on the C64, you have 8 hardware sprites, a character set and a character map. These are combined to draw the display.

This means if you pre-rendered a 2x (or higher) version of all the sprites and character set data, you could alter your raster routine to draw from the HD version instead.

However, there are numerous complications that means it might not work with some/many games. For example, sticking to the C64 (I know this best), there's a "bitmap" display mode, which means graphics aren't drawn using character set data. Some games also compress/decompress sprite data on the fly, which also means you can't just capture the sprite memory addresses to know which sprite to draw. Then in addition, the C64 allows 3 sprite colours (two shared across all sprites), so you'd need to consider supporting colour changing on the fly inside your HD graphics.

There's also what tricks games used to add extra effects (Creatures on the C64 swapped sprite colours multiple times a second to get a new "shade" on CRT tvs, thanks to the residual light between renders (not sure if that's best way to describe it, but there we go)).

And finally, on top of all of that, it depends how the emulator actually converts the emulated graphics output to the screen, whether you can interject with the new graphics.
 
SONY said:
WTH did I just watch there!!? And was it Japanese or Chinese? I'm gonna download that movie (English subs) now!
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It was Chinese and Japanese and you should rather rent or buy it.

It's a scene from the movie Ip-Man very loosely based on his life where he earns one bag of rice per person he has won aganst and since he took on ten at the same time it's ten bags then, but he only gets one so that he does come back. I thought that this trilogy would be more popular here, having pretty awesome Wing-Chun choreography at least. One just has to overlook the massive propaganda here and there and the historical inaccuracy but it's from China after all.

Donnie Yen did even get lessons from Ip-Chun (Ip-Man's real son) for those movies and is part of the cast in the second one which is confusing since he is a very old man training a much younger one there that is playing his real father. *error*

pmprog said:
[...]
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I'd take that for C64 too! Sounds complicated though.

Maybe GameBoy would be easier?
 
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Klumpen said:
I'd take that for C64 too! Sounds complicated though.

Maybe GameBoy would be easier?
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Not 100% on gameboy, been far too long since I looked at that. However, the NDS development that I did (via devKitPro), it had several layers in a combination of tilemaps (character map) and sprites, so I imagine it could also be done that way for that (in 2D mode only of course).But yes, it certainly wouldn't be "easy" to add.

Actually, one way to do it - which has already been done with Elite2: Frontier (I think it was glFrontier, but can't remember) - is actually make a customised version of the emulator specific for one game, which does override all the graphics functions inbuilt to the game.

Edit: Yes, it was glFrontier, uses Atari version, decompiled and mixed with Hatari
 
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Sorry, couldn't reply earlier.

First I thought you could dump all sprites then vectorize them, but as pmprog said that probably wouldn't work.

Else, some emulators support texture swapping like N64 video plugins, maybe that could work for the more recent consoles as they are less prone to this kind of optimization.

For example, dumping textures from the N64 can sometimes result in the dump of every single variation of a texture. For example, take Mario Kart. Every single character+kart sprite can be darkened or colored according to the situation (in a shadow or under star power). This easily amounts to thousands of dumped textures in total, where there should only be hundreds.

Your reasonable bet would be to customize a high-level renderer for just-in-time texture swapping, so that it loads every texture and vectorizes them, does the needed color swaps and everything and puts them back in the image when the texture is applied. But of course, this'll probably need a lot of resources, and I'm not taking into account the programming difficulties.

The best solution for now comes from filters like xBRZ, which provide vector-like scaling. And this one should run flawlessly on Pyra  ;)
 
Kev2442 said:
Sorry, couldn't reply earlier.

First I thought you could dump all sprites then vectorize them, but as pmprog said that probably wouldn't work.

Else, some emulators support texture swapping like N64 video plugins, maybe that could work for the more recent consoles as they are less prone to this kind of optimization.

For example, dumping textures from the N64 can sometimes result in the dump of every single variation of a texture. For example, take Mario Kart. Every single character+kart sprite can be darkened or colored according to the situation (in a shadow or under star power). This easily amounts to thousands of dumped textures in total, where there should only be hundreds.

Your reasonable bet would be to customize a high-level renderer for just-in-time texture swapping, so that it loads every texture and vectorizes them, does the needed color swaps and everything and puts them back in the image when the texture is applied. But of course, this'll probably need a lot of resources, and I'm not taking into account the programming difficulties.

The best solution for now comes from filters like xBRZ, which provide vector-like scaling. And this one should run flawlessly on Pyra  ;)
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Hey, xBRZ looks really good, I'm using HQx or 2xsal with light scanlines depending on the games.

Is xBRZ already implemented in some emulators? Thanks for the hint in any case.
 
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xBRZ and its predecessor xBR are implemented in a few emulators stock. But it's also available as addons on other ones. I know that GLideN64, the latest OpenGL plugin by the creator of Glide64, already supports xBRZ texture filtering.

I also like HQx and 2xSai, but now they're just not as good.

I still use filtering at times, but lately, I've been more and more using the good old pixelated image. Not that it's really the original looks (TV artifacts, scanlines and all), not that everyone likes, but I'm starting to like it anyway.

Let's hope most emulators on Pyra will support this awesome filter.
 
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Kev2442 said:
xBRZ and its predecessor xBR are implemented in a few emulators stock. But it's also available as addons on other ones. I know that GLideN64, the latest OpenGL plugin by the creator of Glide64, already supports xBRZ texture filtering.

I also like HQx and 2xSai, but now they're just not as good.

I still use filtering at times, but lately, I've been more and more using the good old pixelated image. Not that it's really the original looks (TV artifacts, scanlines and all), not that everyone likes, but I'm starting to like it anyway.

Let's hope most emulators on Pyra will support this awesome filter.
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The best image I had was ZSNES + Super2xSal + Seiken Densetsu 3 + TV-Out to a big CRT I had back then about 8 years ago.

I finished the game like this with my ex-gf and it was pretty awesome. Too bad that I couldn't take this set-up with me into this small flat here.
 
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I'm also looking into getting back a big CRT from my family if I have enough space. Let's hope it will work flawlessly for some time.

There's a big mess in emulation. It all comes from what you'd like, being either the closest experience to the childhood original, or the best possible graphical enhancement.

I've been trying to get the best visuals from ePSXe for more than ten years. Yeah, I've been playing on emulators before my ninth summer  :D
 
Kev2442 said:
I'm also looking into getting back a big CRT from my family if I have enough space. Let's hope it will work flawlessly for some time.
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Still have my 36" 4:3 CRT with two 800x600 SVGA inputs, one 480p Component and 5 S-Video/Composite inputs I bought in 2000. Love it for old video games systems and Pandora use.
 
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You're gonna make me jealous  :lol:

36" ? That's a beast ! I think ours is somewhere near 28. Hope you don't get a hernia if you happen to move it.

All I can remember is that through VGA I guess we could output 1024x768 from a computer. So there are a lot of possibilities...
 
Kev2442 said:
You're gonna make me jealous  :lol:

36" ? That's a beast ! I think ours is somewhere near 28. Hope you don't get a hernia if you happen to move it.

All I can remember is that through VGA I guess we could output 1024x768 from a computer. So there are a lot of possibilities...
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The other reason why I still have it is that I'm not moving it...Will most likely sell it with the house if I move.

The 800x600 isn't bad, I have my Dreamcast on one of the ports and a AMD K6-III 400Mhz running Windows 98SE with a Voodoo 3 video card to play 3DFX era games on it. Carmageddon I/II, Mechwarrior 3 and such...  
 
I'd be willing to bet we'd see  3ds (Old) emulation before a viable 360 emulator. I could see the ps3 being cracked by somebody, and created.. but My gut says the xbox 360 emulation isn't going to occur in any decent time.. 
 
Why's that?

The PS3 cell is an extremely bespoke CPU architecture with little available outside-of-Sony/IBM knowledge. The Xbox 360 cpu is a somewhat bespoke PowerPC with multiple cores (asymmetric cores I think), but given the success of the Dolphin project and how long PowerPC cpus and architecture have been around and widely used (Apple, IBM, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc), probably more likely to be emulated in the mid-to-far-term, one would guess.
 
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