N64 Anyone?

[God Ginrai]

Or the bounty could be based on specific specs, like: at least 35 fps on most games, Source must be released, etc.

-God Ginrai

 

[Tinnus]

Try and look for a download for it, there is none. That Yoshiro guy released a very early unplayable version of the emulator under a different name. There is no psx4all on PSP.

There is a version of psx4psp, but it never went public for personal reasons from one of the developers. But I can say that is was there for months before PSX-P, and more before Sony's, and it always worked better than PSX-P (whose developer was pretty clueless about what he was doing, I must say). It didn't work as fast as Sony's pretty much because we never got around to implementing a proper dynarec or emulating the GTE on the VFPU of the PSP. Hardware video emulation was partially working though and it was a good learning experience that helped a lot on doing the GL ES 2.0 GPU for the Pandora

Reminding you people with a PSP that Sony's video emulation looks pretty much done in software; or else why wouldn't they have texture filtering or resolution increasing options (ie: scaling wouldn't look blurry but instead render the graphics at a bigger resolution)? Those psx4pandora folks must be very good then because their emulator has those

 

[MDave]

Try and look for a download for it, there is none. That Yoshiro guy released a very early unplayable version of the emulator under a different name. There is no psx4all on PSP.

There is a version of psx4psp, but it never went public for personal reasons from one of the developers. But I can say that is was there for months before PSX-P, and more before Sony's, and it always worked better than PSX-P (whose developer was pretty clueless about what he was doing, I must say). It didn't work as fast as Sony's pretty much because we never got around to implementing a proper dynarec or emulating the GTE on the VFPU of the PSP. Hardware video emulation was partially working though and it was a good learning experience that helped a lot on doing the GL ES 2.0 GPU for the Pandora

Reminding you people with a PSP that Sony's video emulation looks pretty much done in software; or else why wouldn't they have texture filtering or resolution increasing options (ie: scaling wouldn't look blurry but instead render the graphics at a bigger resolution)? Those psx4pandora folks must be very good then because their emulator has those

Good to hear

 

[Happy]

As it so happens, I luckily have quite a lot of information on the N64 and its internals. Some of it gathered from N64 scene documents, some from open source emulators and a lot from personal research and reverse engineering, coordinating all the bits of information with a background in computer engineering, in search of a plausible realization of the hardware. This is also where I think a lot of the other N64 emulators fall short, guessing at a solution that works for most games and often ignoring the cases where things don't work. My personal preference would be to accurately emulate all hardware functions, but I would need to evaluate the horsepower of the Pandora to see if the workload would be possible. I am hoping with full utilization of the ARM/NEON and DSP cores that the resources will be there. Which is another reason I think starting from scratch to target the Pandora would result in a better emulator.

I also am not looking for incentive/bounty as I think the project would be reward enough for myself. I am willing to share any hardware information, but am undecided if being open source would be of immediate merit (not looking to start a debate, just stating my position).

 

[Volvagia]

I want N64 emulation far more than I want PSX emulaton on the Pandora. It is very fesable to have the N64 work very well on it seeing how far it has gotten on the PSP and even the Xbox. I wish I could help port it rather than just ask for it, but my programming skils are quite weak.

 

[PoisonedV]

I'd rather have a well working PSX emulator than a shoddy pdx emulator and a shoddy n64

 

[MDave]

As it so happens, I luckily have quite a lot of information on the N64 and its internals. Some of it gathered from N64 scene documents, some from open source emulators and a lot from personal research and reverse engineering, coordinating all the bits of information with a background in computer engineering, in search of a plausible realization of the hardware. This is also where I think a lot of the other N64 emulators fall short, guessing at a solution that works for most games and often ignoring the cases where things don't work. My personal preference would be to accurately emulate all hardware functions, but I would need to evaluate the horsepower of the Pandora to see if the workload would be possible. I am hoping with full utilization of the ARM/NEON and DSP cores that the resources will be there. Which is another reason I think starting from scratch to target the Pandora would result in a better emulator.

I also am not looking for incentive/bounty as I think the project would be reward enough for myself. I am willing to share any hardware information, but am undecided if being open source would be of immediate merit (not looking to start a debate, just stating my position).

I think it would be a very good idea to put up all the information on the N64 hardware somewhere perhaps with the same message your saying. Then any capable people that want to contribute to it will be able to thanks to the research gathered. Closed scene projects are counter-productive in my eyes.

Google Docs and Google Code are good places to share information and work on projects with people.

 

[RajTakhar]

Can we please stick to this thread being about the N64 - it kinda went off-topic in the sense people started to talk about the PSX emulator - we already know the Pandora will have a decent Playstation emulator, it's just that you will need a big-ass SDHC card to play more than a handful of titles.

Although I will probably have the PSX emulator - I'd rather have a decent N64 emulator with loads of titles to play on a 16GB SDHC. For me, I had a PSX and N64, the PSX was okay but very repertitive in titles, I found the N64 to be more played more as the games themselves were typical Nintendo quality - albeit they cost an absolute fortune at the time.

It is a good idea to keep the N64 docs somewhere and perhaps have a link in this thread, additionally we could perhaps try and explore the theme of a competition a little further, if other people had any ideas.

I liked God Ginrai's idea of stating minimum FPS, and ensuring source code supplied by all who decided to enter into the competition, perhaps a bit of a psycho RAD approach for the Pandora, but hopefully it may result in a half-decent N64 emulator being produced ina RAD time-frame

 

[scottm]

This sounds promising - 2 devs willing to at least look at a N64 emulator

The N64 is probably still my favourite console, and a N64 emulator along with scumm are the 2 programs I want most on my pandora

It would be awesome to have a fully working emulator this year

wasn't zodttd looking at n64 emulation?

 

[javaJake]

http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=34897Sounds like he got one up and running with not much effort to me!
Err, running, but not really playable:

QUOTE
This is quite important: The emulator is far from perfect - many (most) roms don't currently boot, and there are all sorts of crashes, graphical glitches and performance issues. There's no sound or savegame support either This should really be treated as a teaser of what's possible in the future. Hopefully if I have enough time and motivation I'll be able to make a lot of headway with these problems.

 

[gruso]

Can we please stick to this thread being about the N64 - it kinda went off-topic in the sense people started to talk about the PSX emulator - we already know the Pandora will have a decent Playstation emulator, it's just that you will need a big-ass SDHC card to play more than a handful of titles.
Tinnus can post about the PSX emulator wherever he likes, imo.

 

[Exophase]

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=45583&hl=


Claiming 4x is much more generous than 3.4x which is what's there.

QUOTE
QUOTE
To cut a long story short, I managed to port the emulator over fairly quickly, but after starting a new job development ground to a halt. A few months later I saw the buzz surrounding PSMonkey's N64 emu, and thought I'd have to finally bite the bullet and let people see what I had been working on.


http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=34897

Sounds like he got one up and running with not much effort to me!

That was his first version, which ran like crap. You must have missed the several months of blog updates he made detailing the work he put into the later versions. Even then, he still put much more work into his initial port than anyone non-Sony put into a PS1 emulator for PSP.

 

[God Ginrai]

I'd rather have a well working PSX emulator than a shoddy pdx emulator and a shoddy n64

It's not a trade off. You'll get your well-working PSX emulator. We're simply expressing our want for an N64 emulator.

I liked God Ginrai's idea of stating minimum FPS, and ensuring source code supplied by all who decided to enter into the competition, perhaps a bit of a psycho RAD approach for the Pandora, but hopefully it may result in a half-decent N64 emulator being produced ina RAD time-frame

Yea, the reason I suggested the source was because I could easily see someone meeting the FPS minimum and not releasing their code. That would then make it so that anyone who wanted to make a faster emu would have no source to work from. So I believe that if you require that they release the source as well, then it will be more likely that we could get a faster N64 emu.

-God Ginrai

 

[fusion_power]

well, just because you're making one from scratch, doesn't mean it's a bad idea to look at other n64 emulators.

Especialy the incredible "ULTRA HLE" Emulator. Old but very MHz effective at it's time. I remember that this thingy run even onto my 266Mhz (!!!) Pentium 2. Ok it had a little bit help from my Voodoo 2 graphic Accelerator and it's Glide skills, but 266Mhz are still 266Mhz. I think a little bit High-Level Emulation with OpenGL ES support and good OMAP optimizing, could make a speedy little N64 Emulator for the Pandora.

Main problem of course still is, that someone first has to start to code this Emulator for Pandora...

 

[gruso]

I'm still of the view that there's a surprise in store, but that's largely based on a couple of weak clues... and maybe a dash of wishful thinking.

 

[God Ginrai]

I'm still of the view that there's a surprise in store, but that's largely based on a couple of weak clues... and maybe a dash of wishful thinking.

Could you enlighten me as to what clues you've been seeing? The only possibility I see is Zod, because he was at one point considering porting Daedalus, but he's too busy to do it at the moment.

-God Ginrai

 

[gruso]

Zod mysteriously pulling out was one of my weak clues. (I know, doesn't sound like much of a clue, does it?) The other clue appeared in November and was discussed excitedly on these boards afterwards. But I don't want to stir up a heap of false hope/hype, which tends to happen easily with this topic.

 

[scottm]

project64 (v1.6) runs at over 30fps on my XPlited eeePc 701 (upgraded to 2gb). I'm assuming that the pandora is as powerful as that and won't be having the extra weight of having XP running underneath it.

Maybe the 256mb of ram is the most limiting factor ?

 

[midna25]

DealdulusX64 for psp is making leaps and bounds progress wise, and speed is jumping up from what it used to be. If the same principle could be applied here, it is reasonable to expect a working n64 emulator.

 

[lulzfish]

Project64 is definitely a good emulator, but it seems to use a lot of DirectX stuff by default [you'd need to write OpenGL and SDL plugins, I guess] and it's "freeware". No source code. So, no Project64.