Nintendo 64 on the Pandora

[Brotasmo]

I know this topic has been discussed before, but do you guys think that Nintendo 64 emulation will ever reach the same level of compatibility and speed that we see in PSX emulation currently, for example? I know the N64 is totally a different animal, and I know next to nothing about coding and compiling anything, let alone a complex program like an emulator. Is the hardware that hard to work with? Or maybe there's just a limited number of devs for this? Thanks!

 

[xiongxioi]

With respect, my friend: short answer is " no", long answer is " noooooooooooooooooooo".


Even someone can come up with a genius emulating architecture, pandora 2 is probably out by that time.

 

[PokeParadox]

Actually someone with the time and knowledge could improve it somewhat... but yes it's a lack of devs - The current gfx plugin is a "quick" conversion from OGL to GLES by pickle with a couple of attempts to speed it up by bzfrank. If some had the right combo of time, motivation and knowhow to do a complete rewrite of the GFX plugin a few more games could be playable but there just doesn't seem to be anyone interested or with enough time to spare.


EDIT - I stand corrected, I forgot about the part where adventus worked on it... and now I feel bad


Thanks for correcting me Notaz!

 

[lobski]

I think with the work and dedication massed like PSX, N64 can be very playable. But right now, N64 is like the soggy, dirty, diseased whore nobody wants to be around, but really needs loving, time and effort dedicated to it.

 

[Dionysus]

I think its pretty good at 860mhz. Perfect dark runs nice, as does 1080, dkr, f-zero, ocarina, mario. Gonldeneyes not great and majora runs nice but crashes after i go through the first door when chasing skull kid at the start. The work done in the configuration thread helped a LOT.


Theres little things like the skys in some racing games and perfect dark somethimes going weird and the prob with majora. Few things need ironing out but i find it perfectly playable. Make sure you have the configured pnd. I was getting slowdown in diddy kong racing at 1gh now it very rare at 860mhz.

 

[Askarus]

It's not that a performance issue I think.


It's the compatibility.


Glover, Yoshi's Story, Donkey Kong 64, Mario Tennis.


Those games are not playable.


The games that are playable are playable at a good speed.


Only Game I had that's to slow to play was Banjo Tooie.


(That's for the Giga Pandora. The CC Pandora was to slow for most games. Don't know about the Rebirth as I don't have one.)

 

[Dionysus]

It's not that a performance issue I think.


It's the compatibility.


Glover, Yoshi's Story, Donkey Kong 64, Mario Tennis.


Those games are not playable.


The games that are playable are playable at a good speed.


Only Game I had that's to slow to play was Banjo Tooie.


(That's for the Giga Pandora. The CC Pandora was to slow for most games. Don't know about the Rebirth as I don't have one.)

Did you try the configured pnd on you cc? Thats what made the difference on my rebirth. Before I was clocking at 1050mhz to get f_zero smooth now its fine at 860.

 

[Askarus]

Doh. Forgot about that configured pnd.


Only used it on my Giga Pandora.


I don't use the configurations as there are things I don't like.


I only use the 320x240 resolution and the audio config.


It's the non full screen I hate so much. I'm used so much to the stretched picture.


I also don't use the PND in the repo.


In my experience it's slower than the one I have.


(Attached it if you want to test it)


Edit:


I checked the new config files again and now I've got everything except the non full screen stuff.


Banjo tooie runs playable now.


(I forgot to copy the frameskip stuff)


Don't know why this game tends to crash my Pandora.


Sometime it starts but omstly after selecting a saved game my Pandora freezes.

mupen64.pnd

 

[notaz]

The current gfx plugin is a "quick conversion from OGL to GLES by pickle with a couple of attempts to speed it up by bzfrank.

That's not true, adventus has put significant effort to it before bzfrank:


http://code.google.com/p/gles2n64/source/list

 

[TrashyMG]

It's all on the Game, for example Mario64 is fully playable set to 640x480 at 500mhz... Zelda is another story, I need to overclock to 900Mhz and I've been playing with overclocking the SGX/Memory a bit to make it a tad bit smoother. N64 emulation is tricky and requires a lots of work.. I have a decent gaming desktop and N64 emulation is still not perfect even on PC emulators..

 

[PokeParadox]

Ok - I stand corrected, and as mentionjed in my edit above, I feel a little shitty in forgetting about Adventus's contribution. But I don't think there has been someone tackle it that actually knows both sides of the coin, i.e. How write good GLES code mixed with how to write a graphics plugin for an N64 emulator?