Is there any way to emulate the *specific* hardware of the Pandora?

[jdog320]

Hi, I'm just gonna ask everyone if there is a way of emulating the specific hardware for the pandora (e.g. OMAP3530 SoC, PowerVR SGX,Buttons and stuff) on emulators such as qemu or a specific emulator from scratch?

 

[ekianjo]

What are you trying to achieve exactly?

 

[DaMummy]

most of the software is freely available on any random linux distro

 

[levi]

This is a question about the hardware, technically.  As far as I know nobody's developing an emulator that includes all the glitches in the different SoCs and SGX versions, so the best you can so is emulate a stock ARMv7 part in qEmu and forget about the NEON instructions and DSP.  I'm not sure if there's anything you can do to target OpenGLES on a system that only supports OpenGL (you could target OpenGL and use the GLshim to convert it to GLES on the target hardware, but there's a performance penalty you can't model in doing it that way).

Luckily, the buttons are easier to emulate - albeit with your fingers rather than with code.  The d-pad is the arrow keys on any other system, and the X/Y/A/B buttons are PgDn/PgUp/Home/End on a PC.  The triggers are left(I think) shift and control for the L and R buttons respectively.  I'm not sure how the nubs map on to a generic system off the top of my head though.

DaMummy makes a valid point though.  If all you want to do is play some of the excellent games we have on Pandora, it's usually little bother to find the source and compile that on your own system.  That's less true of some of the emulators, but most of them are also on Android, and there are ways of getting Android stuff working on different systems AFAIK.

 

[klapse]

Hi, I'm just gonna ask everyone if there is a way of emulating the specific hardware for the pandora (e.g. OMAP3530 SoC, PowerVR SGX,Buttons and stuff) on emulators such as qemu or a specific emulator from scratch?

No

 

[jdog320]

What are you trying to achieve exactly?

I'm trying to achieve full emulation of the hardware including sdcard emulation, SoC, GPU, Screen, And Software, But also trying to somehow making it faster than the real thing.

 

[jdog320]

This is a question about the hardware, technically.  As far as I know nobody's developing an emulator that includes all the glitches in the different SoCs and SGX versions, so the best you can so is emulate a stock ARMv7 part in qEmu and forget about the NEON instructions and DSP.  I'm not sure if there's anything you can do to target OpenGLES on a system that only supports OpenGL (you could target OpenGL and use the GLshim to convert it to GLES on the target hardware, but there's a performance penalty you can't model in doing it that way).

Luckily, the buttons are easier to emulate - albeit with your fingers rather than with code.  The d-pad is the arrow keys on any other system, and the X/Y/A/B buttons are PgDn/PgUp/Home/End on a PC.  The triggers are left(I think) shift and control for the L and R buttons respectively.  I'm not sure how the nubs map on to a generic system off the top of my head though.

DaMummy makes a valid point though.  If all you want to do is play some of the excellent games we have on Pandora, it's usually little bother to find the source and compile that on your own system.  That's less true of some of the emulators, but most of them are also on Android, and there are ways of getting Android stuff working on different systems AFAIK.

If I can make an ARMv7 Emulator, I may allow to map the controller keys to an external controller.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

What are you trying to achieve exactly?

I'm trying to achieve full emulation of the hardware including sdcard emulation, SoC, GPU, Screen, And Software, But also trying to somehow making it faster than the real thing.

Not sure why you would want to do this.  If you have the emulator-writing skills, I would love to see you work on Sega Saturn emulator for the pandora.  99.9999% of the pandora software are ported (with some optimizations) from Linux/Windows.

 

[Letalis Sonus]

I'm not sure if there's anything you can do to target OpenGLES on a system that only supports OpenGL

Mesa does offer GLES 1/2 support on x86, though.

 

[jdog320]

What are you trying to achieve exactly?

I'm trying to achieve full emulation of the hardware including sdcard emulation, SoC, GPU, Screen, And Software, But also trying to somehow making it faster than the real thing.

Not sure why you would want to do this.  If you have the emulator-writing skills, I would love to see you work on Sega Saturn emulator for the pandora.  99.9999% of the pandora software are ported (with some optimizations) from Linux/Windows.

If I can write a Saturn emu for the Pandora, where will I map the remaining 2 buttons?

 

[TrashyMG]

Plenty of buttons on the Keyboard.