Only An Emulator.?

[swamy_wizz]

I just have one question, is this machine only intended to Emulate and PLay retros..
can we expect some good quality 3d games to be released later that runs on decent fps.
what do you guys think?

(neverthless im gonna order mine this week on playasia..)

 

[Exophase]

Wiz wasn't intended for anything. People can write or port whatever they want to it. Having said that, writing an original 3D game for the Wiz is a ton more work than porting an emulator to it, or even writing a new emulator for it (usually). I'm sure some 3D games will be ported, but unfortunately 3D games for Linux didn't catch on much until a few years ago (if even at all). What that means is that most of what's out there demands specs that are difficult for the Wiz to keep up with, because it's worse than a 10 year old desktop.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

I can't really think of any 3D games for linux at the moment, that the wiz would really be capable of running.

 

[Pickle]

I can't really think of any 3D games for linux at the moment, that the wiz would really be capable of running.

quake 1/2

 

[RupeeClock]

How old is Linux anyway? I mean Quake 1/2 has been around for a while now, early Windows.

The Wiz is definitely geared towards gaming in general, I mean since it's open source you could turn it into a number of things, but mostly it's about gaming. I really think GPH knew emulation was a big seller, so they gave the Wiz a power boost to help with that.
I don't see homebrew games really benefitting from the boost nearly as much, but the 3d capabilities are something to look forward to.

 

[christo930]

Wiz wasn't intended for anything. People can write or port whatever they want to it. Having said that, writing an original 3D game for the Wiz is a ton more work than porting an emulator to it, or even writing a new emulator for it (usually). I'm sure some 3D games will be ported, but unfortunately 3D games for Linux didn't catch on much until a few years ago (if even at all). What that means is that most of what's out there demands specs that are difficult for the Wiz to keep up with, because it's worse than a 10 year old desktop.

Is the wiz as powerful as an original iMac g3-233 mhz? All macs with a stock g3 can run virtual game station including the original 233 imac and can run the games quite well. I know the g3 has a really good math chip but I don't know if VGS uses it or not. Any comments?

Chris

 

[skeezix]

omg, how old is Linux? I shoudl know off the top of mky head but I can only approximate..

386BSD (ie: what eventually mutated into FreeBSD, NetBSD and so forth) was 1991 or 1992, and Linux kernel was right around the same time give or take (with Linux turning into usable distributions pretty quickly.) So I'd guess around 1991/1992 for Linux as well.

ie: like 15+ years, though not very common at the onset.

(When 386BSD came out, I remember sucking down distributions with 2400bps modem onto like 50 floppies, for installation onto a hard drive on a PC.. ahh, those were the days )

jeff

 

[Exophase]

Is the wiz as powerful as an original iMac g3-233 mhz? All macs with a stock g3 can run virtual game station including the original 233 imac and can run the games quite well. I know the g3 has a really good math chip but I don't know if VGS uses it or not. Any comments?

Chris

G3 (or PPC 750 more accurately) doesn't have a math chip per se - it does have an integrated FPU but a PS1 emulator can't utilize one of those for very much. Other than that it's a difficult comparison. G3 has a slower system bus, but might not be as crippled by design. It has twice as much L1 cache and L2 cache to boot, although it's off chip it most likely still has makes a significant difference. Per-clock the G3 can push far more integer ops than an ARM9 because it is 4 wide fetch/2 wide dispatch and out of order vs ARM9 which is strictly in-order. If you compare it to a 233MHz GP2X it'll get utterly crushed, and we all know how well a 533MHz Wiz scales compared to a 233MHz GP2X (relatively poorly). PPC is also better suited for emulating PS1 because it's a better superset of MIPS than ARM is. Having more registers helps in this case.

Having said that, I don't think psx4all is nearly as efficient/well tuned as VGS is. No offense meant to zodttd, but Aaron Giles is a dynarec deity, and with the possible exception of Sony's PS1 emulator for PSP I would say that VGS is by far the fastest PS1 emulator ever written (blowing even Bleem out of the water).

 

[zodttd]

None taken Exophase. The hierarchy goes as follows. I look up to Exophase for low level programming / dynarecs. If Exophase looks up to Aaron Giles, so do I!

Aaron Giles wrote some whitepapers on dynarecs before didn't he? I also have seen some emulator source code from him...I think in MAME? Sheeze it's been awhile since I heard that name. Looking him up now!

But answer to your question really comes down to what Exophase politely hinted at... VGS is an amazingly written and in a class way above my work. I would need a lot of help to get something comparable.

 

[sbock]

Yes, Aron Giles is responsible for the universal recompiler engine in MAME and for the MIPS 3/4 and Power PC dynarec x86/x64 cores. There is also a SH2 dynarec in MAME using the UDRC.

 

[Franxis]

I'm back from vacations, i haven't read the thread completely, and i don't know if it has been said by anybody else, but...
Aaron Giles also worked in Connectix on the VGS development...

 

[Exophase]

Yes, that would probably explain why I brought him up when I mentioned VGS :B

 

[forgeflow]

Back when I couldn't get decent video card drivers for my Linux box, there was one 3D linux game that did run properly with the built-in gl driver - Tux Racer. I'm guessing that could probably be ported to the Wiz without too much trouble. But what do I know.