Nintendo Ds Technical Hurdles?

[redstar1949]

I rmeember a while back someone mentioned why it would be difficult to do NDS emulation on the Pandora... could anyone run this down for me? It seems the Pandora should be more than enough to emulate the NDS?

 

[quadomatic]

Nintendo DS is relatively new. Emulation has only recently been successful on PC, so it'll be a bit before we see it working properly on a mobile device.

I'm also not sure that we know Pandora is powerful enough for DS. Can anyone comment on that?

 

[God Ginrai]

Nintendo DS is relatively new. Emulation has only recently been successful on PC, so it'll be a bit before we see it working properly on a mobile device.

I'm also not sure that we know Pandora is powerful enough for DS. Can anyone comment on that?

There are topics about this if you'd just use the search function. I think it was stated that Exophase might consider a DS emu for the Pandora.

-God Ginrai

 

[Orkie]

Nintendo DS is relatively new. Emulation has only recently been successful on PC, so it'll be a bit before we see it working properly on a mobile device.

I'm also not sure that we know Pandora is powerful enough for DS. Can anyone comment on that?

There are topics about this if you'd just use the search function. I think it was stated that Exophase might consider a DS emu for the Pandora.

-God Ginrai

Yeah quadomatic, how dare you not use the search function before replying to this thread started by somebody else!

 

[God Ginrai]

Nintendo DS is relatively new. Emulation has only recently been successful on PC, so it'll be a bit before we see it working properly on a mobile device.

I'm also not sure that we know Pandora is powerful enough for DS. Can anyone comment on that?

There are topics about this if you'd just use the search function. I think it was stated that Exophase might consider a DS emu for the Pandora.

-God Ginrai

Yeah quadomatic, how dare you not use the search function before replying to this thread started by somebody else!


So it's okay to be ignorant as long as you're not the OP? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

-God Ginrai

 

[Orkie]

So it's okay to attack one ignorant person but not another? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

 

[AireTamStorm]

From what I recall, the NDS uses an ARM-based CPU as well, which if we somehow virtualized (instead of emulated) NDS Emulation should, in theory be a breeze for the Pandora hardware, even emulating all the other parts.

I'm thinking, ARM, ARM. Just pass the ARM instructions to the CPU in a controlled environment and you should be all set. (Do all the memory address spoofing, etc...)

Ugh, the more I talk the more difficult I see it being. Nevermind.
Such an emulator would, probably, be a first of its kind.

 

[sehs33]

I doubt it virtualization is that easy, or we would have seen a GBA emulator once the GP32/GP2X were released.

 

[redstar1949]

Well I DID use the search function as a matter of fact... and I didn't find what I was looking for. I wanted to actually develop a much more in-depth understanding of how people are looking at this and why they think it is not possible... etc.

It actually seemed to me personally that the Pandora was plenty beefed up to handle a task like this... even if it didn't do virtualization. The DS isn't a very beefed up handheld...

 

[imec]

no$GBA is probably the fastest and most compatible but I don't believe that it's open source. Even so, 3D games generally don't run at playable speed (at least the ones that I have tried). Nintendo DS emulation is still relatively new, and I doubt that the Pandora will be able to handle some of the more demanding 3D games anyways.

 

[Exophase]

Virtualization is not really good for ARM unless maybe "TrustZone" is used, but it'd still highly interfere with Linux and there would be problems with uncached vs. cached like in trying to do it for GBA (see GPAdvance for GP32 and the problems they ran into). I also personally have no idea how TrustZone works since it's not publicly documented.

All in all the CPU emulation could be much more demanding than the average GBA game because GBA games spend a lot of time in Thumb code running off of the cart bus which is much slower. Although there are definitely some GBA games that push the CPU to the limit, if you want a good comparison you should look at ones that do this and still use the 2D hardware (so don't render the graphics themselves). Still, I believe a good recompiler can handle it, especially if HLE is optionally used for ARM7 libraries provided by Nintendo (I don't know how far this can go because there are probably a number of variations on this, but even a few major functions being recognized could possibly help)

There's a ton of graphical power in the DS, I'd say at least 4x what GBA has, and it has audio capabilities that are far beyond GBA's as well. It'd be great if the Pandora's DSP were used for some of this. Fortunately you can always "cheat" on these things and skip frames (and downsample audio); a lot of DS games have nothing very important going on in one of the screens so you wouldn't really mind frame skip that much there.

But this is all just theorizing, we'd have to wait for the Pandora to see how powerful the hardware really is and someone would have to give it a shot. No matter how much of a "breeze" anyone thinks DS emulation would be even with "virtualization" it'd still be a ton of work to write one for it. The open source ones out now are not that suitable and No$GBA is not only closed source but wouldn't be fast enough for Pandora on its very best day.

 

[bboyneko]

plus honestly, i own a DS and only like about 5 games total for it. The library of DS games has not been nearly as enjoyable to me as the GBA games.

 

[God Ginrai]

So it's okay to attack one ignorant person but not another? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

He wasn't being ignorant, he was just being lazy, see?:

Well I DID use the search function as a matter of fact... and I didn't find what I was looking for. I wanted to actually develop a much more in-depth understanding of how people are looking at this and why they think it is not possible... etc.

It actually seemed to me personally that the Pandora was plenty beefed up to handle a task like this... even if it didn't do virtualization. The DS isn't a very beefed up handheld...

And I didn't feel like criticizing someone for being lazy

-God Ginrai

 

[quadomatic]

plus honestly, i own a DS and only like about 5 games total for it. The library of DS games has not been nearly as enjoyable to me as the GBA games.

I'm not sure about the library of GBA games vs DS (never rly got into GBA...didn't get one till the very end of its lifespan). DS had some great games, but after a few months before Phantom Hourglass came out, the DS library was getting boring to me, so I sold my DS and accessories (lots of stuff) after getting my GP2X, which funded a very nice computer upgrade.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

plus honestly, i own a DS and only like about 5 games total for it. The library of DS games has not been nearly as enjoyable to me as the GBA games.

I'm not sure about the library of GBA games vs DS (never rly got into GBA...didn't get one till the very end of its lifespan). DS had some great games, but after a few months before Phantom Hourglass came out, the DS library was getting boring to me, so I sold my DS and accessories (lots of stuff) after getting my GP2X, which funded a very nice computer upgrade.

...and now it has FFIII and FFIV, plus FFVI and Chrono Trigger 3D remakes coming soon. At this point, you couldn't pry my DS from my cold, dead fingers.

 

[God Ginrai]

plus honestly, i own a DS and only like about 5 games total for it. The library of DS games has not been nearly as enjoyable to me as the GBA games.

I'm not sure about the library of GBA games vs DS (never rly got into GBA...didn't get one till the very end of its lifespan). DS had some great games, but after a few months before Phantom Hourglass came out, the DS library was getting boring to me, so I sold my DS and accessories (lots of stuff) after getting my GP2X, which funded a very nice computer upgrade.

...and now it has FFIII and FFIV, plus FFVI and Chrono Trigger 3D remakes coming soon. At this point, you couldn't pry my DS from my cold, dead fingers.


Unless you got a Pandora with full DS emulation? ;P

-God Ginrai

 

[WizardStan]

plus honestly, i own a DS and only like about 5 games total for it. The library of DS games has not been nearly as enjoyable to me as the GBA games.

I'm not sure about the library of GBA games vs DS (never rly got into GBA...didn't get one till the very end of its lifespan). DS had some great games, but after a few months before Phantom Hourglass came out, the DS library was getting boring to me, so I sold my DS and accessories (lots of stuff) after getting my GP2X, which funded a very nice computer upgrade.

...and now it has FFIII and FFIV, plus FFVI and Chrono Trigger 3D remakes coming soon. At this point, you couldn't pry my DS from my cold, dead fingers.

Chrono Trigger remake is rumored to be keeping the same 2D art style from the original. And I'm going to need a source for this FFVI remake you mentioned, because my google-fu is failing me. A lot of "wouldn't it be nice..." posts, but nothing official I can find.

 

[palmertech]

Just to make it clear, the chrono trigger ds remake is NOT 3d. I dont see all that much of an advantage between snes on pandora and ds Chrono Trigger. I will still be buying it, though, to support the franchise....

 

[quadomatic]

Just to make it clear, the chrono trigger ds remake is NOT 3d. I dont see all that much of an advantage between snes on pandora and ds Chrono Trigger. I will still be buying it, though, to support the franchise....

I bought Chrono Cross right about when it was released and beat it a few weeks afterwards. It was a very awesome game. I think it may very well be the best RPG I played on PSX (and I played a loooooot of rpgs on PSX). Parts were very confusing though. I'm guessing a lot of that may have been explained via alternate endings...and would've made more sense had I actually played through Chrono Trigger. I'm ashamed to say that I've barely gotten past the 1st major battle in the castle. I try to go back and play it, but I always have to start from the beginning, and so I lose initiative.

 

[Vince2501]

I wouldn't hold my breath personally for such an emulator, I do think it's possible though. But as far as how playable it would be remains up in the air.

I think the hardest thing to figure out is how to utilize both screens. I don't know if it's possible to adjust the size of the DS screens to fit in the Pandora, and how viable that would be. The screen certainly looks big enough, but with my No$GBA and it's little screen, I have difficulty playing Contra 4 and avoiding enemy fire. I can't imagine playing that on an even smaller screen.