Nulldce On The Beagleboard

[drkIIRaziel]

But right now it`s not worth bitching about which will or will not. If the DC emu gets anywhere near a playable speed in the first 6 months of the Pandora`s existence it's going to be because of over clocking. Some people will choose to do it at their own risk and some wont.

Actually no, if it gets anywhere near playable speeds is gonna be thanks to the amount of work to speed it up.As things are now, it needs ~6x speedup to get playable and no amount of over clocking will help that ..

@Chip: Shipping from US takes a long, long time .. and most likely will get stuck on customs for a few weeks.

 

[Tor]

@Chip: Shipping from US takes a long, long time .. and most likely will get stuck on customs for a few weeks.

You're talking about getting a beagleboard from Digikey, right?

Why would it take a long time, and why would it be stuck in customs? I am located in Europe and I have ordered items from US companies many times. It is often _faster_ than getting anything shipped from a company in my own country, and customs usually does not delay the process by more than a day (2 days is the longest custom delay I have experienced, that was when I had to go to the local duty office and get them to fax info to customs in another city before they would release the cargo).

If there are some special difficulties with ordering from Digikey it would be good to know, because I intend to get a board myself as soon as the Rev. C board becomes available.

 

[jens.l]

@Chip: Shipping from US takes a long, long time .. and most likely will get stuck on customs for a few weeks.

You're talking about getting a beagleboard from Digikey, right?

Why would it take a long time, and why would it be stuck in customs? I am located in Europe and I have ordered items from US companies many times. It is often _faster_ than getting anything shipped from a company in my own country, and customs usually does not delay the process by more than a day (2 days is the longest custom delay I have experienced, that was when I had to go to the local duty office and get them to fax info to customs in another city before they would release the cargo).

If there are some special difficulties with ordering from Digikey it would be good to know, because I intend to get a board myself as soon as the Rev. C board becomes available.


My beagleboard (b4) from digikey was delivered in two days and shipment was for free (order over 100 euro are free) to Germany. I don't know if shipment to greece need more time. The problem with digikey is, if you order
the first time they need some information from you and this a little bit annoying.

hope i could help

jens

 

[Svartalf]

Actually no, if it gets anywhere near playable speeds is gonna be thanks to the amount of work to speed it up.As things are now, it needs ~6x speedup to get playable and no amount of over clocking will help that ..

And there's QUITE a few people hoping you get there with it, myself included.

QUOTE

@Chip: Shipping from US takes a long, long time .. and most likely will get stuck on customs for a few weeks.


Heh... The first dev board I got was initially rejected by US customs (It had a battery and no MSDS for the battery...sigh...) so I can imagine what it might be like for people elsewhere on this sort of thing.

 

[Tor]

@Jens: Thanks for the info, it is reassuring.

 

[darkblu]

Actually no, if it gets anywhere near playable speeds is gonna be thanks to the amount of work to speed it up. As things are now, it needs ~6x speedup to get playable and no amount of over clocking will help that..s.

6x overclocking would, duh.

 

[drkIIRaziel]

Generally i have bad experience from ordering stuff from USA.Customs randomly delays packages and then asks for entrance fee.But since its electronics i'l try to justify it as 'university project related hardware' and hope for the best

6x overclock ? 3 ghz ? yay

 

[Tor]

It sounds like the problem isn't about ordering from the US, it's how customs behave in your country for items arriving from outside (country? EU?).

Yeah, I remember having to bribe customs in one particular European country in order to get my equipment out of customs.. all paperworks and legalese perfectly OK, but no go until they got some money. Happened twice (actually it would always happen unless you were there when the goods were brought in from the cargo flight. Otherwise customs would rip off all invoices and shipping documents, or let the goods 'disappear'.)

 

[Svartalf]

6x overclocking would, duh.

One would think that, but there's a threshold that each multiple won't buy you that multiple's worth of speed. There's memory concerns, etc. and a 2X clock increase doesn't lead to anything more than a 1.75 times increase in many cases. This would be another reason I think all this talk of overclocking is overrated.

 

[Pleng]

drkIIRaziel

Good luck with the work on nullDC. I know there's plenty of people, myself included, rooting for you!

Just one question, what do you think is the best way of dealing with the analogue shoulder buttons when emulating Dreamcast on a Pandora?

 

[ZeZu]

ESN: I dont know craigix, and i've seen posts that the dev. pandoras are indeed gone.

Perhaps if we get enough people who would like to see a public copy of nullDC specifically for pandora, it would get them to send out one or two more.

Better yet, I've started a poll to see what the interest is in the emulator and show the mods how you guys really feel. Anyone who is interested or not, please vote so we know !

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=47065

Also this thread has turned into an overclocking debate, today I will start another that I will use on a regular basis for updates. Please no overclocking wars, overclocking I agree is your own decision. I wouldn't feel half as bad as drk if you fry your pandora really, its yours do what you want with it. But my intention is to get it as fast as possible, and hopefully fullspeed without the need for any overclocking!

-> Thanks for the support !

 

[MWeston]

There are a few Pandora kits out there in the hands of people doing pretty much nothing with them. Maybe someone will give up theirs to go to a good cause like this. I don't have extras at the moment unfortunately.

I'm very interested in seeing where this could go. It sounds like a real technical challenge!

 

[Alpha2]

Actually no, if it gets anywhere near playable speeds is gonna be thanks to the amount of work to speed it up.As things are now, it needs ~6x speedup to get playable and no amount of over clocking will help that ..

Apollogies, I didnt mean to cast any doubt on your skills as a coder, I'm sure You;ll do a bang up job squeezing performance out of it, I just think there are going to be people who want every game to be silky smooth without frameskip before they call it playable.

Personally as long as it's not a chugfest I think I could call it playable for myself. But of course, again none of that matters right now, it;s all about what can be done with the current hardware and how long it can take after that to see som results that might give us hope that something big is imminant.

 

[Eolair]

As long as the voltage is within TI spec I don't think overclocking will damage anything. Check page 124 of the official datasheet for more info:
CODE
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/omap3530.pdf

Standard operating mode OPP3 which is required for 600MHZ should not reduce life expectancy. To have a chance at 900MHZ you will need OPP5 which will reduce life expectancy if you use it for more than a total of 23k hours. IMO, that's still a lot of time to be playing DC games

 

[(naw)mcx]

As long as the voltage is within TI spec I don't think overclocking will damage anything. Check page 124 of the official datasheet for more info:
CODE
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/omap3530.pdf

Standard operating mode OPP3 which is required for 600MHZ should not reduce life expetancy. To have a chance at 900MHZ you will need OPP5 which will reduce life expetancy if you use it for more than a total of 23k hours. IMO, that's still a lot of time to be playing DC games

The way I think of it. By overclocking you INCREASE the useful lifespan of the chip, as it can do more, and keep up with newer chips.

 

[emcp]

But right now it`s not worth bitching about which will or will not. If the DC emu gets anywhere near a playable speed in the first 6 months of the Pandora`s existence it''''s going to be because of over clocking. Some people will choose to do it at their own risk and some wont. I had Homebrew running on my PSP, I had the option to over clock or just not use an app, I chose not to. I sure as heck over clocked my GP32, it still works, the firmware is ancient, but I;m sure that`s a minor issue and it''''ll continue working for a long time, I just chose not to risk my PSP.

I hope you realize that all PSPs are rated to run at 333MHz and doing so is not "overclocking" them at all, nor are they at any kind of risk. Sony just prevented games from using it because they wanted them to conserve battery power as much as possible.

Unfortunately rumors kept getting propagated that it''s harmful to do this -_-


wrong, sony allowed access to the full 333mhz, but it meant no wifi

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/407

 

[Exophase]

wrong, sony allowed access to the full 333mhz, but it meant no wifi

Man, I really hate being told I'm wrong when I'm not. Go read the TITLE of the article you posted and it'll be obvious to you that Sony initially restricted it (which is what I said). The wifi thing is undoubtedly due to battery consumption as always. 333MHz is still not overclocking. So please tell me how I'm "wrong" about anything.

 

[Eso Rimmer]

Hahaha, would you believe this pointless "To overclock or not overclock." debate was started by this innocent post? :lol:

I always overclocked everything since my celeron 333@415MHz @84°C and even got overclocked AMD Barton CPU shot down due to fan fail and never ever had any damaged chip. I've not even heard about anyone around me or on the forums I read who would fried CPU or GPU.

Anyway this argue is completely pointless because no one can say about anything it will work for X hours/days/years break-free. There is always some chance of fail no matter which conditions it works in. Everyone always overclock on his/her own risk so there is no point in persuading other to overclock or not.

As for myself, I always am and always will overclock if I see there is noticable gain.

The best thing would be to delete all posts about overclocking in this thread as it's offtopic.


EDIT:
What's wrong with the board? It adds characters to the post each time it's edited and it gets messed up. :huh:

 

[God Ginrai]

Hahaha, would you believe this pointless "To overclock or not overclock." debate was started by this innocent post? :lol:


This overclocking debate was not started by that post. Gogeta didn't even mention overclock. He simply misstated that the SH4 was an ARM processor.

It was your post which I have quoted below that started this debate:

Judging from these two videos beagleboard seems to run the nullDC nearly 2x faster at 500MHz and PVR@50MHz.
This together with overclocked Pandora and some good optimisations could lead to the state where the possible and the impossible meet and thus DC emulation on Pandora gets possimpible.

-God Ginrai

 

[cb88]

@God Ginrai but what if ti was Gogeta's post that propmted his post... XD

but enough of the OT please we'll eventually find out if it overclocks soon enough