Nds Emulation

[Frogboy]

I've read that Nintendo DS emulation might be possible. I've never actually played one so I was wondering how well this could be done considering the obvious limitation of only having one screen? Do many games use both screens at the same time? Would it be viable to toggle between screens? Could you possibly fit both or most of both screens on Pandora's screen?

 

[dabridge]

Don't worry about the screen:

As for games, I haven't really played any that require full attention to both screens at the same time...

 

[#1 GameMaster]

Yeah most of the time the main part of the game is on the top screen while the bottom screen is used as a map.

 

[Frogboy]

Don't worry about the screen:

As for games, I haven't really played any that require full attention to both screens at the same time...

Would you even be able to see that on Pandora?

 

[dabridge]

It will probably look like a .gif if it was like that on the pandora.
I'm guessing making it 1.5 times or even 2.0 times bigger shouldn't be a problem...

 

[gruso]

Scaling up the display would probably look crap though. With that amount of room to move, the emulator could show both screens at their native resolution within a full graphical representation of the DS, plus some ambient background scenery.

Not so silly actually, a few emus do this. Like NES on the GP2X, and iPod on the DS. I might mock up a screenie for the lulz later this afternoon, hehe.

 

[atomicthumbs]

hq2x

 

[gruso]

Ah, ok.

 

[JakeK]

The Pandora won't be challenged when playing DS games?

 

[nubie]

He is right, I like SAIx2 personally, or quad (x2) pixel-ing, seeing as how this is so small.

I will post a picture of how I see it going.

http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/Pandor...780512536804882

There is enough room to quad pixel the main screen and still keep the full second screen. I am loving this resolution.


@JakeK, who knows? but at this point we at least have a shot, it is the same architecture and at least double the clock speed (Quadruple?). Not to mention how much more RAM we have.

 

[zannyuk]

I know you guys are enthusiastic but on my 2.8ghz pc with a 7600gt nvidia ds emulation for most of my games is still a bit on the jerky side.

I dont see how the emulation would be smooth on pandora, maybe if a asm code was developed, i dunno.

 

[BaDToaD]

NDS emulation would attract too much of the wrong type of attention. IMHO

 

[JakeK]

I know you guys are enthusiastic but on my 2.8ghz pc with a 7600gt nvidia ds emulation for most of my games is still a bit on the jerky side.

I dont see how the emulation would be smooth on pandora, maybe if a asm code was developed, i dunno.

It depends on the emulator. If someone really got into it and the code was excellent then fullspeed emulation of DS could be possible. Maybe the emulator you are using is crap as I bet I could play DS with my 6600GT, 3.00GHz PC easily. I have tried many other consoles on my PC and they work 100%.

NDS emulation would attract too much of the wrong type of attention. IMHO

I doubt it would make any difference. The PC can emulate all consoles (except next gen) and it doesn't receive a any slander. DS emulation is just another program on the Pandora, plus if done correctly if could attract attention due to its power. It could receive a bad rap from companies and DS fanboys but to consumers it would make no difference.

 

[Zarneth]

NDS emulation would attract too much of the wrong type of attention. IMHO

Very true. Companies aren't really loosing out on emulation of consoles and games they no longer sell, but start hitting the current generation and they may put their foot down.

 

[nubie]

NDS emulation would attract too much of the wrong type of attention. IMHO

Very true. Companies aren't really loosing out on emulation of consoles and games they no longer sell, but start hitting the current generation and they may put their foot down.

Yeah, we don't want to be the pirate console.

As far as ASM goes, we have a 600mhz ARM proc and the DS has a 67mhz ARM and a 33mhz ARM, so if we needed an ASM core it should be much faster than a PC one. Double both and that is only 200mhz ([67 + 33] * 2), so there is a spare 400mhz for the custom hardware and the rendering.

If a fast renderer is available we should be good to go. The PowerVR is a monster by all counts (Think 2 generations beyond Dreamcast PowerVR), so on the video side we should be good as well.

The DS 3d is rated at theoretical 120,000 polys/second, and the PowerVR is 10 Million, so no worries there.

 

[hal9000]

As far as ASM goes, we have a 600mhz ARM proc and the DS has a 67mhz ARM and a 33mhz ARM, so if we needed an ASM core it should be much faster than a PC one. Double both and that is only 200mhz ([67 + 33] * 2), so there is a spare 400mhz for the custom hardware and the rendering.

There were many discussions with emulation experts on this forum about power needed for emulation, and there were a general consensus that this kind of computation do not really make sense.

In particular, it is not because you emulate an ARM platform on an ARM platform that you can run native code directly and emulate a x MHz processor with a x MHz processor.

 

[Exophase]

About the resolution/scaling:

nubie's rendition is what I figured to be the most useful mode. It can also be done side by side scaled to fit. This doesn't really look that bad - GBA emulation on PSP is usually scaled + bilinear filtered, and while it does look blurrier and more washed out it's generally more than good enough to be considered worthwhile. With pixel shaders we can possibly efficiently implement custom filters such as bicubic filtering that look better. Another mode is just showing one of the screens (for games that don't really use the second), and for the few games that actually do depend on vertical orientation (ones that treat it like one big screen) it can be layered, which will look small but still be quite usable. All the extra space can provide touchscreen UI if desired.

About feasibility:

I expect Nintendo DS emulation to require roughly 4-6x what GBA emulation does, although this will vary tremendously per game. Bear in mind that gpSP on GP2X is not really representative of the best GBA emulation you can get on ARM, I'm sure it can be optimized quite a bit over that (even what I have now is significantly faster than what's out). A lot can be done in just making the CPU and GPU emulation faster without resorting to more exotic tricks, although using the MMU to accelerate things could help a lot, even w/o hurting Linux (as some discussions here have shown).

Some considerations: a lot of games probably put the CPU in idle state a lot, especially 2D ones. Consider that a number of games may in theory actually need less CPU on DS than on GBA because DS has more acceleration for audio (much of the CPU time on GBA games tends to towards audio rendering). A lot of games don't really use one of the screens for important things, and could be frameskipped more heavily on one screen without it really hurting the visual experience too much.

I'd love to see the C64x+ DSP used for fast/accurate 2D rendering, the PowerVR used for rendering the 3D layer (albeit with some potential inaccuracies), and the NEON unit used to emulate the DS's geometry capabilities.

Legal aspect:

To date I only know of one free emulator that has ever received a cease and desist from a corporation (UltraHLE). Two PS1 emulators have been fought by Sony, but they were commercial - Sony has ignored every free PS1, PS2, and PSP emulator. Likewise, Nintendo has done absolutely nothing about the myriad other N64 emulators, some capable ones released not terribly long after UltraHLE, nor have they said anything to any authors of GBA, DS, or Gamecube emulators. The authors of FirestormZ (a commercial suite of Nintendo emulators) claim that they got a cease and desist from Nintendo after announcing their to be commercially available GBA emulator, but given that they took preorders anyway and didn't release anything for years (which, when they finally did, performed much worse than they said it would) all signs would say that they were lying about everything, including the C&D.

DS emulation may still increase piracy, but I'm certain that it'd appeal to many people who own DS's and own the games they want to play (whether or not they are capable of ripping copies themselves). If there were an adapter to read DS games (via USB perhaps) then this could be deterred further, but I think such an adapter would be a bigger target than the emulator itself.

 

[JakeK]

IMO piracy won't change at all even with the introduction of the Pandora. Maybe if the Pandora was going to be the biggest competitor for the DS and PSP but not many people know about the Pandora. I posted about it on the Steam User Forums and no one had heard about it (Off Topic gets a lot of traffic) nor wanted it. It might be a concern if the Pandora was marketed as a handheld that is mainly for emulation but it isn't, nothing like it.

 

[fusion_power]

He is right, I like SAIx2 personally, or quad (x2) pixel-ing, seeing as how this is so small.

I will post a picture of how I see it going.

http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/Pandor...780512536804882

There is enough room to quad pixel the main screen and still keep the full second screen. I am loving this resolution.


@JakeK, who knows? but at this point we at least have a shot, it is the same architecture and at least double the clock speed (Quadruple?). Not to mention how much more RAM we have.


Hm, interesting setting. I personaly would like a vertical mode for the Pandora so you have the screen in portrait mode and we can see NDS screens over each other like at the real NDS. (They should be able to scale 2x or 1.5x in this mode maybe)
But sadly, the Design of the Pandora makes a useful portrait mode not very likeley. The lucky people who can get one of the first prototypes of the Pandora could test, if the Handhald is somehow usable in vertical mode. ^^""

 

[Game_over]

Ok it's my turn

I know you guys are enthusiastic but on my 2.8ghz pc with a 7600gt nvidia ds emulation for most of my games is still a bit on the jerky side.

I dont see how the emulation would be smooth on pandora, maybe if a asm code was developed, i dunno.

I agree with the notion that you may just be using a crap emulator. But more accurately, I'm sure it's just due to the emulator not really supporting/bieng able to handle your graphics card. Nvidia cards sometimes tend to be picky as to what it wants to render even though it used kicked ATI's a** in video rendering. You could have the most up to spec pc, that never means that absolutely everything will run properly.

NDS emulation would attract too much of the wrong type of attention. IMHO

Maybe so, but is it legal....yep. Emulation in general ALWAYS attracts the wrong type of attention period. There is no future proofing that. As long as you are not distributing the BIOS file with said emulator your fine. Again, theres homebrew that you can legally play on the DS emulator like StarcraftDS or DoomDS.


As far as how its displayed you can totally put them side by side, and make them fit to screen. Alot of games do use the bottom one as a map, however there is a bunch that use the screen side by side, like Ninja Gaiden DS, and Brain Training (for example). If you want to go all out, you can maybe make the screen size adjustable by dragging the vertical line with the touchscreen, thus giving you a reason not to worry about trying to make only half the touchscreen active.