How Good Are Gp2x Emulators?


sm1988

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Well from my understanding so far emulators from gp32 and so on cuold be ported to pandora with little or no effort. So how good are the emulators from the gp line, I am afraid I missed the boat on the gp homebrew scene but if these emulators can be used I think it would be a good start for the pandora, I would be more than happy with good stable emulation from the 8 and 16 bit eras and then wait for more advanced offerings down the road. so if some old salty gamepark veteran could give a quick run down of emulator performance and a what's what that would be great!
 
all 16bit and below runs a 100% speed no problem and can handle all games I would think, SNES is already ported to Pandora according to... hmm don't remember but someone here :)

So you can count on good stable emulation of 16bit and below from the get go I'd say
 
The only proviso is that for *some* GP2x emulators that actually make use of the second core, obviously they will have to be somewhat redesigned such that whatever was being offloaded to the second core now runs on the main one. Or the DSP. Or whatever bit of the OMAP3530 best suits it.

So Picodrive may be a little more work to port than DrMD was back at the GP2x's inception because it is a significantly more advanced emu, and actually uses GP2x-specific features. I've not a clue exactly how much more work though, not being a coder - you'll have to wait for Notaz to comment.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, as the more powerful machines become easier to emulate, there is a tendency not to develop emulators for the less powerful machines until some way down the line - consider how long it took to get GnuBoy or FCEUltra for GP2x in comparisson to NES emulation on GP32. I would guess that this slightly unfortunate pattern will hold true for Pandora's emus as well; expect perfect SNES, genesis, and playstation (well, ok, maybe not perfect playstation - I'd *guess* that might take a bit longer) first, then once people actually start pining for Phantasy Star 1 and Megaman, SMS and NES emulation.

Though that could, of course, turn out to be completely wrong...
 
Yeah SNES is already ported to Pandora (info from Squidge). So i susspect all 8 bit and 16 will be ready when it comes out along with playstation (PSX). :D
 
Yeah... I remember it took until the f-day preview in the last year of the GP32's lifespan to finally get a good GBC emulator (i.e. one which would not speed up/slow down randomly). While at the same time, there were good Genesis, SNES, Atari ST emulators...

I gather that the NES was the equivalent of that for the GP2X.

So... statistically, we can expect that there will be one system which will just kinda be forgotten by everyone.
 
Esn said:
Yeah... I remember it took until the f-day preview in the last year of the GP32's lifespan to finally get a good GBC emulator (i.e. one which would not speed up/slow down randomly). While at the same time, there were good Genesis, SNES, Atari ST emulators...

I gather that the NES was the equivalent of that for the GP2X.

So... statistically, we can expect that there will be one system which will just kinda be forgotten by everyone.
What will be forgotten by everyone. I would like every system i think possible to be emulated on pandora, Weather it be GB or Wonderswan to DS. <_<
 
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Esn said:
So... statistically, we can expect that there will be one system which will just kinda be forgotten by everyone.
Lets just assign the Virtual Boy to the role of "sacrificial lamb" and get everything else up and running :D
 
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Well the thing is with the psp scene people say that the genesis and snes emus are great most of this coming from fan boys but the truth is there is still alot to be desired as far as graphic and speed issues i was just wondering if the emus on the gp2x are in the same league as zsnes and gens for the pc by no means am i dogging the emus for the psp the authors of these emus provided me with hours of great and free entertainment. I am just hoping and assuming that the pandora along with the programmers will finally bring the flawless performance of a pc to a portable.
 
Chip said:
Esn said:
So... statistically, we can expect that there will be one system which will just kinda be forgotten by everyone.
Lets just assign the Virtual Boy to the role of "sacrificial lamb" and get everything else up and running :D


Yep the system that got everyone into handhelds. Oh no i had a gamegear. :lol:

shame we didn't have 2700 mah back then
 
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Holokauston posted on Apr 23 2008 at 12:15 AM said:
I never even had a gameboy, just my Epoc MC218 from 1998 I think, still have it but lost the touch pen :(

What is an Epoc
 
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sm1988 said:
Well the thing is with the psp scene people say that the genesis and snes emus are great most of this coming from fan boys but the truth is there is still alot to be desired as far as graphic and speed issues i was just wondering if the emus on the gp2x are in the same league as zsnes and gens for the pc
Picodrive (the best GP2X Genesis emu) is probably the best Genesis emulator on any system ever -- it's absolutely perfect. Heck, DrMD (the best until PD came along) is among the greatest as well! Reesy and Notaz are marvels.

The GP2X SNES emus are very good, on par with the PSP, but still a way off PC ones in terms of compatiblity (special chips) and obviously speed. But with the Pandora's hardware this shouldn't be much of a problem. And with the mighty Squidge handling it, I'm sure you will be very happy :)
 
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GunPei2X said:
sm1988 said:
Well the thing is with the psp scene people say that the genesis and snes emus are great most of this coming from fan boys but the truth is there is still alot to be desired as far as graphic and speed issues i was just wondering if the emus on the gp2x are in the same league as zsnes and gens for the pc
Picodrive (the best GP2X Genesis emu) is probably the best Genesis emulator on any system ever -- it's absolutely perfect. Heck, DrMD (the best until PD came along) is among the greatest as well! Reesy and Notaz are marvels.

The GP2X SNES emus are very good, on par with the PSP, but still a way off PC ones in terms of compatiblity (special chips) and obviously speed. But with the Pandora's hardware this shouldn't be much of a problem. And with the mighty Squidge handling it, I'm sure you will be very happy :)


Sweet, if he pulls some magic then I would donate something to the cause and maybe have my grandma knit him a pandora cozy :D
 
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Chip said:
So... statistically, we can expect that there will be one system which will just kinda be forgotten by everyone.
You know, I LIKED my Virtual Boy, there were a few really good games for it. Anyway, I once played an emulator for it on my modded Xbox, it used those red/blue 3d glasses to make the images, and worked pretty well, so hey, you never know ;)
 
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sm1988 said:
Well the thing is with the psp scene people say that the genesis and snes emus are great most of this coming from fan boys but the truth is there is still alot to be desired as far as graphic and speed issues i was just wondering if the emus on the gp2x are in the same league as zsnes and gens for the pc by no means am i dogging the emus for the psp the authors of these emus provided me with hours of great and free entertainment. I am just hoping and assuming that the pandora along with the programmers will finally bring the flawless performance of a pc to a portable.
This is exactly true; in reality while Genesis and SNES emulation run at decent speed, the Genesis emulation has mediocre sound and the SNES emulation requires you turn off lots of graphical effects and overclock a LOT, and even then it does not achieve full speed in many games. Hell, even the PSP's best SNES emulators, while still pretty unoptimized in a lot of ways, do not achieve full speed and in some games barely break 20 FPS.

"full speed" is 60 (or 50 in the case of PAL) FPS and not "with 3 frameskip" or some such BS.

That said, Pandora should be able to handle both Genesis emulation with a highly accurate YM2612 and SNES emulation with the full graphical featureset without a problem. The CPU is miles beyond the GP2X's put together, it'll be free of bus/memory contention problems the 2x has that rear their ugly head during use of the 2nd CPU, and unlike the 2x it has true video acceleration.
 
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GunPei2X said:
Picodrive (the best GP2X Genesis emu) is probably the best Genesis emulator on any system ever -- it's absolutely perfect. Heck, DrMD (the best until PD came along) is among the greatest as well! Reesy and Notaz are marvels.
Picodrive is great. But definitely not the best Genesis emulator on any system ever. The sound emulation is noticeably off. And i mean noticeably for someone who uses 5$ radioshack speakers & a 12$ soundcard on his PC and claims they're as good as any 300$ sound system.

The emulation on the GP2X is great. Although most of my experience is with SNES i've only found a few games have major problems. You aren't going to get 60fps with transparencies. But 23~ steadily with transparencies is quite doable. Unfortunately to get it to run that good though you need to overclock it fairly high. And that doesn't help the GP2X's already crappy battery life.
 
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