How Likely Is Amiga And Psx Emulation?

[klikklak]

Now that we have some info on the capabilities (and bottlenecks) of the wiz, how likely do you people think will fullspeed Amiga 500 and PSX emulation be? Both have large libraries of games that couldn't be played on the gp2x, so even without the keyboard and analog nubs they would be nice to have. I mean, those two (and n64 I suppose) are the main advantages the panda has over the wiz currently. Earlier I figured PSX would work easily, but I haven't got confirmation for this so I figured I'd ask.

EDIT: I never got uae to work on gp2x, but since people have had success with it, I'm presuming full speed amiga 500 emulation is guaranteed. Can't wait for a touchscreen device and goldbox games.

 

[gibberish]

im assuming amiga will work marginally better than it did on the gp2x but judging from the disgruntled remarks with regards all the recent benchmark tests i wouldnt expect that we'll be seeing playable psx at all. maybe one or two games.

 

[EvilDragon]

im assuming amiga will work marginally better than it did on the gp2x but judging from the disgruntled remarks with regards all the recent benchmark tests i wouldnt expect that we'll be seeing playable psx at all. maybe one or two games.

Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that. Yep, benchmarks aren't that much faster with the WIZ, however, it has additional hardware OpenGL, so there's no need for emulating 3D in software mode anymore as it has been the case with the gp2x.

 

[Exophase]

However, the emulator will have to use OpenGL ES 1.1. I know Tinnus has been targeting 2.0 which is quite different. Doing it in 2.0 will get you more complete/accurate emulation than 1.1, so I don't think it will be very easy for him to switch to it.

In other words, someone's going to have to do one for 1.1.

For all we know the other portions of the emulation could perform a lot better than it does on GP2X, they might be more CPU heavy than memory heavy. We'll have to wait and see.

 

[cowai]

I thought we had OpenGL 2.0?

 

[sam fisher]

For Pandora. As far as I know the Wiz hardware is 1.1 (I think, maybe it is actually 1.0?).

 

[Exophase]

Definitely no OpenGL ES 2.0 on Wiz. For that matter, I'm not really sure what people will do to access the GTE (that's the vector processing front-end of the Wiz), but it's kind of moot since geometry acceleration doesn't do that much to help PS1 emulation.

 

[streak]

Ok, so lets make it clear, to everyone who dont wanna go into details:

PSX on Wiz? , YES but apparently NO FULLSPEED, right?

To be honest, i thought that GPH give a f* , again and again. Isnt it pointless to jump on wiz to have the same emulators / games on Wiz like on GP2X? The situation is similar to from mid nineties when nintendo releases GameBoy Color, that have double-speed of original GameBoy, but still there was no change in games [ no 3d / no higher res / no better sound ]. Second time the same thing, but in different shape.
Thats confusing...

BTW. It seems that DEV's reach a limit-* of the handheld before Wiz hit the market. That became big problem for GPH soon.
I bet that no dev even try to use hardware acceleration in Wiz. Officially, no big games-companies stands after Wiz, and like it was with GP2X, we dont get anything new in real 3D [ only Q1/Q2 ports ], because, like i said before GPH doent try to make good handheld, just wanna sell something, whatever it will be, it needs to be cheap in production. That explains no wifi support and akward screen 240x340 resolution when you take a look under the hood of wiz. Even if we will get Wifi dongle, it will not be used , because of devs. Not every dev will buy it, like it was back in the days with Gp2X and cradle, and not evbery emu will use it...

History likes to repeat itself.


*- I know this is partially, but also confusing.

 

[Pickle]

Psx may run a little better than the current version if the MMU hack is applied and an overclock is applied, but it probably wont be the greatest improvment. Do we really expect the pullox to be fullspeed for the psx? It never ran great on the gp2x.

I think it more that GPH has a relationship with MES and they are with what works and what they know.
Does MES even have a better performing soc? It seems to be the case to with the sw, same linux/driver vender etc. The plan probally was: Let's do what we did with the gp2x but make it smaller and use this newer hw.

I bet that no dev even try to use hardware acceleration in Wiz.

I have? In fact if the opengl to opengles wrapper worked better it could open the door to more open source apps that use opengl. But the performance at the moment is very bad.

Streak dont be too critical of GPH until they release the final product. If they really believed the way you think they do I dont think they would have delayed. If they dont fix the diag tear other using the rotation method then we have something to gripe about. But in my opinion they still have time to fix it.

 

[Exophase]

I'd say it's not 100% out of the question that we could see substantialyl better PS1 emulation on Wiz than what we've seen on GP2X. PSP does a good enough job - although it's helped out by its VFPU, if the turnaround from the vector floating point unit on the 3D accelerator of the Wiz is low enough then it might be better than doing some things on the ARM. It might also be possible that the DSP instructions added to ARMv5e could help some amount with GTE emulation too.

OpenGL ES 1.1 isn't very good for PS1 emulation, but there might be some potential in accessing the 3D hardware of the Wiz directly instead. Pollux supports 4bit textures of the same format of PS1 and it might support render to texture naturally since the framebuffer can be placed anywhere. All of the 3D features of the Wiz are documented for those who have the document (whether or not the Pollux documentation becomes fully open I don't know, but this might be a moot point).

Also, not to devalue zodttd's work, but I don't think psx4all for ARM has hit a performance peak. The recompiler can probably be more aggressive in register allocation, constant propagation, static linking, etc. And mmap can possibly be used to improve memory access times. With the GPU moved off of the CPU core a lot of cache contention would be removed with it, and PS1 games are made with a pretty small cache footprint in mind because of having 4KB icache and 1KB scratchpad. The emulated scratchpad can even be locked in dcache.

It'd be a lot of work and I don't know if anyone is interested, but I wouldn't write it off entirely.

 

[streak]

Do we really expect the pullox to be fullspeed for the psx?

If we look at WIZ as the successor of GP2X handheld, who never gets any good commercial games, and the main thing that forces people-** to buy it, was mainly emulators-*, in that case WIZ should continue the same trend and focus on emulators and HB, because as we already know, GPH will release only few commercial games [ 1 or maybe 2 monthly ] and finally i can say "yes, we all should expect from completely new handheld a lot more than from 4 years old GP2X, otherwise they should sell it for 50 pounds per unit, not 120 pounds"




**- I mean average joe's, not devs that bought system for linux and easy deving
*- emulators on gp2x are easily the best around. GP2X beats even PSP in this matter. And

Streak dont be too critical of GPH until they release the final product. If they really believed the way you think they do I dont think they would have delayed. If they dont fix the diag tear other using the rotation method then we have something to gripe about. But in my opinion they still have time to fix it.

Of course, they have time to fix "something", but this is not the main problem. Since F100 with fw3.0.0 GPH suffers on stragne disease called "lack of concept". Why do you think they change that bloody "tearing" or adding wifi? because community wants to have it. Any critical bugs are comming from outside, independent gp2x devs, not from GPH itself, because they've lack of concept for anything. Do you think craigix could be so successful in selling gp2x worldwide, if they could get better marketing and busines plan for selling and logistic worldwide? Im impressed only in one aspect -> im impressed that GPH still exist, after all. They\re lucky that they have such a good community, respectfull and patient, and ready to give money to company that failed to give anything more to community than handheld itself.

 

[Pickle]

I think we should take the pollux as it is what it is. We have been fortunate to hit some of the limits of the hw early before it actually releases.
Personally I take the pollux as it is, it is what GPH chose and thats life. If I want more performance Im going to spend the extra cost to get it, which is the pandora. Fo those that havnt picked one or the other or both, at least it can be shown what your actually getting and what you can do with it.

Some useful things to consider. Things that ran on the GP2X ok, run perfect on the wiz. In my case vice C64 and quake 1/2. I expect SNES to be perfect, but we have to wait and see what Squidge comes up with.
I would get the wiz if you want low price, compact, some improment in performace, better battery support, bright screen, and do most of the same things on gp2x a little better.

As a side note:
The only thing Ive not liked about GPH is interfacing directly with the community. I believe they watch and talk to a few select people. One cool example or over at phoronix, theres a AMD rep that is very active and will talk to users on thier likes/dislikes/problems anything. I wish GPH could be that way. Maybe thats why pandora is so special, we have instant access to all of the people involved.

 

[vampire8bit]

II expect SNES to be perfect, but we have to wait and see what Squidge comes up with.

If Wiz emulates SNES games at full speed without any frameskip enabled and with transpancies then that could make it a big seller because that's what so many GP2X users wanted. Squidge will be porting Squidgesnes. I think PocketSNES is more updated emu. A port of that as well?

 

[geise69]

II expect SNES to be perfect, but we have to wait and see what Squidge comes up with.

If Wiz emulates SNES games at full speed without any frameskip enabled and with transpancies then that could make it a big seller because that's what so many GP2X users wanted. Squidge will be porting Squidgesnes. I think PocketSNES is more updated emu. A port of that as well?

Squidgesnes would be great since I have always liked that emu. PocketSNES is a bit more accurate when it comes to sound and other "Special Chip" games. I am sure HoH would probably help with that emu on the Wiz. Who knows, maybe Reesy will do it! As others have said, SNES 100% fullspeed with transparencies would be the main reason a lot of people would pick up a Wiz. I am sure there are probably some SNES special chip games that will probably never be fullspeed even on the Wiz though. Time will tell I guess.

 

[coldfish]

I'm a bit disappointed by Wiz's performance in these early indicators.

I'll probably get one when my GP2X dies, I was going to buy one right away to replace my 2X. Now looks a bit less of a must-have.

 

[vampire8bit]

Things that ran on the GP2X ok, run perfect on the wiz. In my case vice C64 and quake 1/2.

Does that mean Quake 1 and 2 are running at 60fps?

 

[jacksterson]

Things that ran on the GP2X ok, run perfect on the wiz. In my case vice C64 and quake 1/2.

Does that mean Quake 1 and 2 are running at 60fps?


Nope.

 

[hlidegp2x]

However, the emulator will have to use OpenGL ES 1.1. I know Tinnus has been targeting 2.0 which is quite different. Doing it in 2.0 will get you more complete/accurate emulation than 1.1, so I don't think it will be very easy for him to switch to it.

In other words, someone's going to have to do one for 1.1.

For all we know the other portions of the emulation could perform a lot better than it does on GP2X, they might be more CPU heavy than memory heavy. We'll have to wait and see.

I believe Tinnus told me he wanted to rewrite his GPU emulation into OpenGL 1.1 so it can be used on several platforms like iPhone and Pandora. If it is the case, Wiz may benefit from this port.

 

[CCmachined]

When comparing to the PSP, consider that the PSP has a MIPS (arch) CPU. The PSX had a MIPS too. Whilst this doesn't mean the games could simply be run on the processor natively, it'd be much more optomisable (due to similiarities..)

I'm imagining psx4gp2x with the FPS multiplied 3 to 4 times? Wipeout might even be playable

 

[Exophase]

I'm imagining psx4gp2x with the FPS multiplied 3 to 4 times? Wipeout might even be playable

psx4gp2x with 3-4x the FPS on a port to Wiz? Not unless it's substantially rewritten.