Nintendo 64 Emulation

[borgqueenx]

Collect 10 dollar of dollar from every person who would like a n64 emulator, and give it to the developer of it.

 

[Enverex]

I think there's no reason to DONT have the n64 emulator in pandora at some point in the future. Think about this, the psp have 266Mhz and 32 ram, pandora is at least 3 times more powerfull than the psp, and i remember playing the first dungeon of Oot (at 5fps) in my psp. The only thing we need to see nice n64 emu is a good developer, such as strmnrm was for psp.
Also there are open source n64 emu's for linux... And if dreamcast can run on pandora, im sure n64 will run smoothly.

the psp has 333mhz maximum.
And yeah we need strmnmrnm or whatever the name was. But the problem with building emulators is, that it EATS time.
And no one responded to our 10 dollar idea yet, so thats why i think no one will make the emulator.

Psp can be overclocked at 333 maximum , but its standar 222, like pandora has 600 but it for sure would be overclocked up to 900.
Btw , whats that of the 10 dollar idea??

I'd be careful saying that, where are you getting "for sure up to 900" from? The devs said that 900 would likely be the max on some that managed to OC that high. Don't assume that every Pandora will get that, sure, they will almost all overclock, but not likely anywhere near that much for every single one.

 

[guizm]

Even if it could not be overclocked, that 600 mhz ( or 720, who knows... ) will be enough, at least to run at 30 fps ( or so i think, im not a developer )
That of the 10 dollars is a good idea, from 4000 pandora user's , im sure the 4000 want the emu, and from that, if only 1000 donate it will come 10.000 dollars, that is many money, at least for me.

 

[borgqueenx]

Even if it could not be overclocked, that 600 mhz ( or 720, who knows... ) will be enough, at least to run at 30 fps ( or so i think, im not a developer )
That of the 10 dollars is a good idea, from 4000 pandora user's , im sure the 4000 want the emu, and from that, if only 1000 donate it will come 10.000 dollars, that is many money, at least for me.

yes but i think only 1/10 of the pandora owners will actually donate the money. ALL pandora users will profit.

The best solution is(i guess) donationware. meaning the software is 100% free to use, but to make it, and for a new version, a sum of money has to be donated.

Is this a good idea developers? respond

 

[MDave]

I'm interested in the situation with the dev funds people have put money towards when they bought their Pandora's. How's that going to work exactly? This probably needs it's own thread though, but Ima too lazy to make

 

[borgqueenx]

I'm interested in the situation with the dev funds people have put money towards when they bought their Pandora's. How's that going to work exactly? This probably needs it's own thread though, but Ima too lazy to make

well the 10 dollar donationware system is a guess something similar.
I didnt purchased dev funds with my order because i was already blown off the extra 100 euro i had to pay. (330 dollar turned out into about 330 euro)


but i'd be happy to pay 10 dollars for a n64 emulator.
Maby exophase can explain why no one has shown interest yet.
he's a developer after all.

 

[greendots]

Hasn't he already explained it multiple times already? Its going to involve many, many hours of programming. So much that $1000 would not be enough to be the sole incentive to do the emulator. The author must really want it. Even $10,000 for the project probably would be less money per hour then one would normally receive. Some one will need to rewrite most of an emulator for ARM assembly and OpenGL|ES which like abundantly stated in this thread and other will take a long time...

Just wait till pandora comes out Im sure we will have an N64 emulator soon enough. And by the way Zezu of the NullDC emulator has a pandora board and working on the port...

 

[efegea]

Just look at the beta testing subforum...there is a work in progress n64 emulator, mupen64plus

 

[Enverex]

Just look at the beta testing subforum...there is a work in progress n64 emulator, mupen64plus

Actually if you read it, it's not work in progress at all. It's just the source for an existing open source emulator and it doesn't work at all yet, it'll require quite a bit of modification before it works at all and then, before it'll be playable it'll need to be optimised extensively. The poster left it there for someone else to work on, he's not working on it himself.

 

[efegea]

Just look at the beta testing subforum...there is a work in progress n64 emulator, mupen64plus

Actually if you read it, it's not work in progress at all. It's just the source for an existing open source emulator and it doesn't work at all yet, it'll require quite a bit of modification before it works at all and then, before it'll be playable it'll need to be optimised extensively. The poster left it there for someone else to work on, he's not working on it himself.

Uhm, I understood that he wrote a new dynamic recompiler...and he said it was working on software rendering, although slow, just need some work to make it to run on hardware opengl es. But yes, it still need a lot of optimization and work, but that's what I meant with work in progress. Perhaps I understood his post wrong?

EDIT: I have read the post again, and still don't see why do you say that he is not working on it and left it there for someone else :huh:

 

[neko]

Just look at the beta testing subforum...there is a work in progress n64 emulator, mupen64plus

Actually if you read it, it's not work in progress at all. It's just the source for an existing open source emulator and it doesn't work at all yet, it'll require quite a bit of modification before it works at all and then, before it'll be playable it'll need to be optimised extensively. The poster left it there for someone else to work on, he's not working on it himself.

Actually, it's an ARM port of an existing emulator. The original mupen64plus did not have a dynarec for ARM.

 

[Enverex]

Just look at the beta testing subforum...there is a work in progress n64 emulator, mupen64plus

Actually if you read it, it's not work in progress at all. It's just the source for an existing open source emulator and it doesn't work at all yet, it'll require quite a bit of modification before it works at all and then, before it'll be playable it'll need to be optimised extensively. The poster left it there for someone else to work on, he's not working on it himself.

Uhm, I understood that he wrote a new dynamic recompiler...and he said it was working on software rendering, although slow, just need some work to make it to run on hardware opengl es. But yes, it still need a lot of optimization and work, but that's what I meant with work in progress. Perhaps I understood his post wrong?

EDIT: I have read the post again, and still don't see why do you say that he is not working on it and left it there for someone else :huh:

It was mainly the way the post itself was worded and also lines such as "Unfortunately OpenGL acceleration does not work. It is possible to use software rendering, but it is very slow and some of the textures display incorrectly. Since several people are working on OpenGL ES libraries, I am posting this as-is for testing purposes." (especially the last part). I'm possibly misreading it, but it's the impression I get.

 

[neko]

Just look at the beta testing subforum...there is a work in progress n64 emulator, mupen64plus

Actually if you read it, it's not work in progress at all. It's just the source for an existing open source emulator and it doesn't work at all yet, it'll require quite a bit of modification before it works at all and then, before it'll be playable it'll need to be optimised extensively. The poster left it there for someone else to work on, he's not working on it himself.

Uhm, I understood that he wrote a new dynamic recompiler...and he said it was working on software rendering, although slow, just need some work to make it to run on hardware opengl es. But yes, it still need a lot of optimization and work, but that's what I meant with work in progress. Perhaps I understood his post wrong?

EDIT: I have read the post again, and still don't see why do you say that he is not working on it and left it there for someone else :huh:

It was mainly the way the post itself was worded and also lines such as "Unfortunately OpenGL acceleration does not work. It is possible to use software rendering, but it is very slow and some of the textures display incorrectly. Since several people are working on OpenGL ES libraries, I am posting this as-is for testing purposes." (especially the last part). I'm possibly misreading it, but it's the impression I get.

I assume this is referring to projects like what Adventus is doing, and this is an emulator to use for testing it.

 

[midna25]

I took a look at that. It seems more of a PoC than anything. I am wondering, however, if Mupen is the best choice for a port.

 

[neko]

I took a look at that. It seems more of a PoC than anything. I am wondering, however, if Mupen is the best choice for a port.

Which emulator would you suggest? AFAIK there is no N64 emulator with native OpenGL ES support.

 

[Blue Ion]

Which emulator would you suggest? AFAIK there is no N64 emulator with native OpenGL ES support.

If you are worried about the OpenGL ES part, just write a Glide Wrapper for OpenGL ES or just us NanoGL.

Honestly the big bottleneck will be the recompiler (or lack of thereof), and by the time recompiler perfomance starts to catch up and yield proper speed, there will be either a very polished NanoGL (due to the dozens of quick ports that will use it) or proper Glide64 port (since that is one of the best video plugins out there).

 

[neko]

Which emulator would you suggest? AFAIK there is no N64 emulator with native OpenGL ES support.

If you are worried about the OpenGL ES part, just write a Glide Wrapper for OpenGL ES or just us NanoGL.

Honestly the big bottleneck will be the recompiler (or lack of thereof), and by the time recompiler perfomance starts to catch up and yield proper speed, there will be either a very polished NanoGL (due to the dozens of quick ports that will use it) or proper Glide64 port (since that is one of the best video plugins out there).

I noticed that Glide64 was disabled in Ari's port of mupen. Was there a reason for this?

 

[ari64]

Which emulator would you suggest? AFAIK there is no N64 emulator with native OpenGL ES support.

If you are worried about the OpenGL ES part, just write a Glide Wrapper for OpenGL ES or just us NanoGL.

Honestly the big bottleneck will be the recompiler (or lack of thereof), and by the time recompiler perfomance starts to catch up and yield proper speed, there will be either a very polished NanoGL (due to the dozens of quick ports that will use it) or proper Glide64 port (since that is one of the best video plugins out there).

I noticed that Glide64 was disabled in Ari's port of mupen. Was there a reason for this?

Yeah, it contains x86 assembly code. Since Blue Ion seems sure that this will be ported, I'll be looking forward to that

The recompiler is not the bottleneck, it's close to full speed already. The FPU code could be improved a bit though.

 

[El Jefe]

i'd donate... mebe even $15

 

[Blue Ion]

Yeah, it contains x86 assembly code. Since Blue Ion seems sure that this will be ported, I'll be looking forward to that

The recompiler is not the bottleneck, it's close to full speed already. The FPU code could be improved a bit though.

Argh, dreaded assembly code, I've taken a look to the source, and it the assembly part doesn't seem all that big. Perhaps, even I could try to replace the asm parts with C counterparts (and maybe later, do arm asm code, or even neon for the sse parts), but considering I'm no coding guru, that may have to wait a little.

As for the recompiler, you already have an arm dynamic recompiler? Like the Dosbox dynarec, I was under the impression that those things are quite hard to write, and even harder to get right but my congratulations for that.