Launch-Ready Emulators

[thingie1234]

from some of the commentary on This page it seems that there aren't going to be any big three emulators prepped for launch.

Even the one evil dragon says is in the best shape is shot down by notaz, it's author.

I was hoping for a portable snes at launch, and that seems unlikely.

I mean, atari is nice and all, I guess.

Is there anyone with some intimate knowledge of this stuff that can post "This is what is ready, and working well," in a trustworthy list? Skip the assumptions and conjecture, I'm looking for serious analysis, here.

 

[Wootson]

from some of the commentary on This page it seems that there aren't going to be any big three emulators prepped for launch.

Even the one evil dragon says is in the best shape is shot down by notaz, it's author.

I was hoping for a portable snes at launch, and that seems unlikely.

I mean, atari is nice and all, I guess.

Is there anyone with some intimate knowledge of this stuff that can post "This is what is ready, and working well," in a trustworthy list? Skip the assumptions and conjecture, I'm looking for serious analysis, here.

Ready at launch:

• Angstrom OS with all its bells and whistles
• Various other OS menu systems
• Stella
• Hatari
• UAE4ALL
• DOSBox
• Vice
• Colem
• Exaile
• Free Heroes 2
• Commander Genius
• Angry Drunken Dwarfs
• BattleJewels
• Battle for Wesnoth
• Super Mario War
• C-Dogs
• Pandora Panic!
• Quake 2
• And many, many other stuff that is published right now and will be released shortly after launch...

And you dare to complain? :lol:

This all was stated by EvilDragon himself on the official OpenPandora blog.

I also heard the following stuff is ready shortly after launch:

• Giana's Return
• Beats of Rage
• PicoDrive
• GPFCE
• Street of Rage Remake
• Some text adventure emulator/player

And of course people will start porting over lots of things from the enormous GP32/GP2X/Wiz/Dingoo library.

 

[Asiyura]

UAE4ALL is there, everything else is bonus :lol:

 

[Yoyobuae]

I'm good as long as I get Battle for Wesnoth (Drakes are pure win!!!).

 

[skeezix]

Wesnoth is fracking amazing, too. Like 250MB of awesome (and thats using a compressed pnd!)

I think the BattleJewels build is solid; its in demo mode, but next time I get a moment I'll flip it to full mode. Kronos doesn't have a lot of features, but does play MAgnetic Scrolls games. I've got a few others too; a crappy Snes emu port, Colem, and various other rushed ports.

But trust me one thing -- we've been focusing on the firmware; Pickle has a pile of ports, but once the firmware is called 'done' and uinits are shipping.. its all out port-war And I bet 1 in 10 receivers of the Pandora are going to ber porting more stuff; further, the Debian-ARM repo has full of stuff, a lot of which just works.

And, well, with DOSBox, you've got a lot to fiddle with

Not to mention it being a full Linux machine already, so you can browse etc.

So, I think ytou'll haev plenty to keep busy, and a flood coming

jeff

Quake3; its not a perfect port (one bug stands out), but its _great_ already. I man, thats all I need

 

[Kangal]

Quake3; its not a perfect port (one bug stands out), but its _great_ already. I man, thats all I need

Thanks Fry!
Just wondering what that bug is?
If it gets sorted do you think performance should increase from 12fps on high settings?

I always thought the Pandora could do QIII at least half-speed on high settings, do you think that's a reasonable goal*?

*on the original (medium sized) maps with at least 3 AI bots

 

[Kangal]

It would be cool if flash did work and someone implemented a plug-in for the browser or a Program that lets you download flash games.

Hey Apple, guess who's got more Apps then you!

 

[Tom`]

Just out of curiosity, why would it be difficult to port any GP2X emulators? I mean, maybe the graphics stuff would have to be modified, or any multithreaded code, but I don't know how much time this would take - it seems like a straight port of an emulator that was nearly fullspeed on the GP2X would not need a lot more work for the Pandora.

 

[skeezix]

Tom -- its probably not too much work, no, but it depends. At the extreme, its tied very much to specific hardware on the gp2x, doing memory mapping and register tricks etc.

In that case, its an easy port to make it over, and working, but be less efficient (ie: just change it to SDL or something and bam); to port it as well as it was 'on the metal' gp2x to the Pandora would take some effort. Its not _that_ much, but its some work. But the other extreme is .. SDL on gp2x, port in about 5 minutes to Pandora's SDL.

(Pandora's SDL works fine, but it is not optimized yet; some SDL builds for gp2x used hw acceleration for instance and worked a treat; so someone will have to adopt SDL as their pet, and optimize it; but already it works pretty well.)

Like anything else -- a qiuck port should work okay, but a loved port will do much better

jeff

Q3 bug; right now, some walls show up transparent, last I looked. I've not had time to look into it (I wasn't doing the port), but probably not too bad to fix; ie: if its the flickering lightmap walls, or animated walls, or various other type of feature walls, that will point to the origin of the problem (goofed up shader script load, or .. etc etc.) So should be findable pretty quickly; but it plays very nicely. I didn't notice any framerate problems myself.. either I'm more tolerant of such things, or my settings were not on max. *shrug*

 

[thingie1234]

So that's a no?
That's all a long ways to go to say "We're not answering your question".

 

[Jourdy288]

Emm... We already have N64, PS1, and Dreamcast (which is still a WIP but getting there) for launch... Again, DC isn't ready, but Genesis is.
Try the wiki.

 

[Windy]

Are there any plans for GBA emulation in the near term

 

[paddy]

ha ,that list is rubbish in my opinion and even if it had most emus avail at launch i would still say the same but this is all becase i have a psp with all that stuff and more already ,i am most looking forward to using the OS more than the emulators and amiga will be very nice but really holding out for n64 and dev games.

Actuly for the development taking soooo long as in nearly 2 years and devs having boards for over a year i find it pretty lame that not all emulators have been ported over ages ago ,just goes to show how much real interest the pandora has ,and what is the deal with snes and megadrive emulators ,they were shown ages ago and stated running over fullspeed yet picodrive will not be out any time soon as notas wants the 32x emulation finished ,well actuly thats fine by me and i can fully understand this but what about snes ? it was said to be fullspeed but when i watched the vids it simply wasn't. (ps ,sorry if i have got this wrong with the amount of time devs have had the dev kits)


Question = can't we just run quick ports via the os instead of pnd's ? i would love zsnes if possible but i don't think it is possible ,ohh and sega fusion.

Emm ,where is the atari jaguar emulator atari lynx & pcengine ? also scumm vm ? is this going to be the trend with pandora that we don't get emus untill they are 100% perfect ,not like it used to be ,i was kinda looking forward to bug reports and actuly helping with the emulators as much as possible ,ohh mabe those emulators that have been held off will be for the store at a price.

One last thing ,i am happy to wait for emus but the points i have raised are simply my thoughts on why it is taking so long to do a basic port ,and how i will be quite sickened by the thought OPT and the authors might possibly want to make money from possible emulators.A good for instance would be the original xbox emulator set all ported over by one man and he done an amazing job ,i think nearly all the emulators were ported by the one guy including well just about everything apart from n64 as that was done by someone else, so atari lynx ,c64 ,dosbox, amiga psx snes megadrive/segacd 32x and the list goes on and on ,it can't be that difficult ,i am no dev that is for sure but in fact if the store starts selling the more popular emus it will make me learn and port them my self free of charge.

 

[rum runner]

im good with quake 2 that enought to keep me happy for a long time

 

[Fishbong]

It's the early adopter's blues.

The Pandora's software releases will go up considerably once the first batch is out. How many homebrew titles did the PSP have before being released?

 

[silver]

Emm... We already have N64, PS1, and Dreamcast (which is still a WIP but getting there) for launch... Again, DC isn't ready, but Genesis is.
Try the wiki.

Emm... No. The problem is there are videos of the pandora handling Snes, Genesis and PS1 with ease on youtube. But recent posts & comments indicate that NONE of these are actually in a usable state - which is just disappointing.

Dreamcast is a tech-demo, and may never be playable.
N64 - yes, although needs heavy overclocking at the moment to get near-playable on any game (and yes, I know playable for one person = unplayable for another.)

 

[matzesu]

On my USB Stick, i have roms for:

- Sega Megadrive/Genesis
- Sega Mastersystem / Game Gear
- Nintendo Gb GBC GBA
- Nintendo Nes Snes N64
- Atari Yaguar
- Comodore C64

But im in the first 2000 i think, and there is a bit time until i get my unit..

 

[paddy]

you might have roms but you don't have the emulators and from the looks of it you will only be able to play your c64 roms.

 

[matzesu]

No problem: Until the Emulators are Ready, i can play some Roms on my NDS Flash Cart: GB GBC, NES, SNES, Megadrive, GameGear, Mastersystem,
GBA Games are Native on the DS..

i always look for a cheap ps1 version of final fantasy 7, but it isnt inportant..

i have the wesnoth pnd on my usb stick already..

 

[Bosbeetle]

:lol: @ quark 2 I'd like to play that

ah you eddited it out