Our New Machine, Pandora

[TyBO!]

I mean for c'mon there is only 1 emu I can think of on pc that even remotely emulated saturn and that was SSF

Let's not forget Yabause! It's made some great strides over the past several months.

 

[zodttd]

Now all we need is StrmnNrmn to get a Craiginator and the sky will fall. Imagine his great work on his N64 emulator on this instead of the PSP. ;P

 

[efegea]

una-i got sonic adventure on Xbox-chankast running at about 20fps of the 30fps that the game does run at..

Xbox is the same generation of Dreamcast, so that rule doesn't work

Anyway, I'm sure we will not see Dreamcast on the craiginator, it's imposible. Perhaps at the same speed of 3d psx games on GP2X, but unplayable anyway

 

[atomicthumbs]

una-i got sonic adventure on Xbox-chankast running at about 20fps of the 30fps that the game does run at..

Xbox is the same generation of Dreamcast, so that rule doesn't work

Anyway, I'm sure we will not see Dreamcast on the craiginator, it's imposible. Perhaps at the same speed of 3d psx games on GP2X, but unplayable anyway

Dreamcast is kind of in between the Saturn and the Xbox.

And we wouldn't be able to do it at any framerate above 1 or 2 FPS; the Xbox is a 733MHZ PIII with a modified version of Windows 2000 and a special video card.

 

[Nova]

I hope this is helpful answering the question by nova.

Very, thank you.

 

[kfuse]

I mean for c'mon there is only 1 emu I can think of on pc that even remotely emulated saturn and that was SSF

Let's not forget Yabause! It's made some great strides over the past several months.



Yes, but still SSF still to this day handles more commercial games...e.g. Nights, KOF96, and panzer dragoon...

granted I'd think by next year yabuse will really pick and start playing more games...

and far as dreamcast...hmmm why do we keep insisting that emulating dreamcast on this handheld is fathomable when you can't even do saturn... :unsure:

 

[Goity]

I mean for c'mon there is only 1 emu I can think of on pc that even remotely emulated saturn and that was SSF

Let's not forget Yabause! It's made some great strides over the past several months.



Yes, but still SSF still to this day handles more commercial games...e.g. Nights, KOF96, and panzer dragoon...

granted I'd think by next year yabuse will really pick and start playing more games...

and far as dreamcast...hmmm why do we keep insisting that emulating dreamcast on this handheld is fathomable when you can't even do saturn... :unsure:

Far simpler architecture. The Dreamcast is better emulated on PC and faster, so...

 

[craigix]

Hello everyone, I've not been around much the last week or so as I have glandular fever again. Bastard glandge.

 

[Alex.]

Go Craig! Here's to a quick recovery!

 

[zaffercharles]

Get well soon.

 

[mavsman4457]

Get well, and the required parts for the completion of the prototype, soon!

 

[realyst]

Hello everyone, I've not been around much the last week or so as I have glandular fever again. Bastard glandge.

When my dog had inflamed glandges, she'd drag her butt on the floor. Worth a try maybe?

I kid, I kid.

 

[sam fisher]

Hello everyone, I've not been around much the last week or so as I have glandular fever again. Bastard glandge.

Did the marathon turn off your immune system :S

 

[God Ginrai]

una-i got sonic adventure on Xbox-chankast running at about 20fps of the 30fps that the game does run at..

Xbox is the same generation of Dreamcast, so that rule doesn't work

Anyway, I'm sure we will not see Dreamcast on the craiginator, it's imposible. Perhaps at the same speed of 3d psx games on GP2X, but unplayable anyway

I said a general rule of thumb. That means that it may not always be applicable, but it is in most cases. I was not guaranteeing a fool-proof, always correct regulation, but rather a simple generalization that would help to determine what could be emulated by what.

EDIT: Get well soon, Craig.

-God Ginrai

 

[X-Code]

Doesn't sound like much fun Craig... I'll drink my beers for your prompt recovery

----

Going back to Project Bumblebee... Well, If I can wait, so can everyone else! :lol:

 

[quartercast]

-God Ginrai

Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. What was your nickname again?

 

[KeyboardCommando]

EDIT: As clarification, 'impossible' in this context indicates 'useless-for-gameplay' performance below 5 FPS. In the case of the Dreamcast, 1 FPS would be ambitious. Effective emulation would be 30 FPS+, while 'full speed' would be the native framerate of the console in question. Here, 60 or 50 FPS depending on region, 0 Frameskip.

and far as dreamcast...hmmm why do we keep insisting that emulating dreamcast on this handheld is fathomable when you can't even do saturn... :unsure:

The Dreamcast would be physically impossible for a few reasons.
#1, The SH4 CPU in the Dreamcast is more powerful than any mobile processor out there (feasible for use in a handheld.) Its floating point performance on its own is remarkable-- it's a real piece of work.
#2, Even if the CPU in the handheld could match the power of the SH-4s (allow several times the performance which would be required to deal with the sheer overhead of emulation, by its very nature).. the architecture would be different, necessitating the emulator to 'translate', in a manner of speaking, the SH-4's instructions to actions within the emulated 'virtual machine' on the handheld.
#3, No mobile GPU exists that matches the capabilities and raw horsepower of the Dreamcast's PowerVR GPU. There are PowerVR parts for mobile platforms, but they do not offer the same functionality or capability. They would likely use a similar API, granted, but the performance is simply not available. Most mobile GPUs have a whitesheet spec of 1.0 Million polygons drawn per second, but will not meet this mark in real-world conditions, and certainly not with texture mapped, shaded and lit polys. Wireframes or flat-shaded polys, and we'll talk.
#4, It's simply unrealistic. A Dreamcast game, directly copied from a disc, occupies up to 1GB of space. Compressed heavily it can occupy dramatically less, but the vast majority of commercial titles will occupy such ludicrious amounts of space on an SD card or similar, there wouldn't be room for much else.
#5, Some errata ... for RAM reasons, the amount of bandwidth occupied by constantly streaming data from the SD card would be outrageous, constantly saturating the link and likely not being met by the SD spec itself. Something more robust would be needed. If SDIO was not implemented the emulation would crawl along with a frame being completed about every minute due to the CPU needed to shuttle data between the SD card and RAM constantly. And finally, DC emulation on the PC front is so primitive and moving along so slowly, the current level of optimization emulators have reached yields a sluggish and lacking-in-compatibility gameplay experience on even the most modern of PCs.

By comparison the Saturn is a rosier picture. 2 26.8 MHz SH-2s, integer only processors, 2 VDPs, an SCU that is essentially a fixed-point math coprocessor (most likely for use in 3D transform math), a custom sound processor and a Yamaha synth, plus a couple of coprocessors (SH-1 and 68000) for audio and CD-ROM blocks.. it's a lot to emulate and it's quite complex how it all interacts. While it's very possible to emulate such a machine on a handheld with say, a Freescale i.MX31, it would be a remarkable programming task to do so. Not for the raw horsepower required, but because of the juggling act it is for the Saturn to even function in a simulated software environment-- it's remarkable the machine even works at all the way it's put together. Suddenly jostling your Saturn console could cause it to shift back to its native world, a universe of madness. A secondary processing core or DSP would boost chances of making this monstrosity function in emulator form, but would also double the complexity of the task altogether.

So, we're looking at Impossible vs. Improbable. Take your pick!

 

[kfuse]

EDIT: As clarification, 'impossible' in this context indicates 'useless-for-gameplay' performance below 5 FPS. In the case of the Dreamcast, 1 FPS would be ambitious. Effective emulation would be 30 FPS+, while 'full speed' would be the native framerate of the console in question. Here, 60 or 50 FPS depending on region, 0 Frameskip.

and far as dreamcast...hmmm why do we keep insisting that emulating dreamcast on this handheld is fathomable when you can't even do saturn... :unsure:

The Dreamcast would be physically impossible for a few reasons.
#1, The SH4 CPU in the Dreamcast is more powerful than any mobile processor out there (feasible for use in a handheld.) Its floating point performance on its own is remarkable-- it's a real piece of work.
#2, Even if the CPU in the handheld could match the power of the SH-4s (allow several times the performance which would be required to deal with the sheer overhead of emulation, by its very nature).. the architecture would be different, necessitating the emulator to 'translate', in a manner of speaking, the SH-4's instructions to actions within the emulated 'virtual machine' on the handheld.
#3, No mobile GPU exists that matches the capabilities and raw horsepower of the Dreamcast's PowerVR GPU. There are PowerVR parts for mobile platforms, but they do not offer the same functionality or capability. They would likely use a similar API, granted, but the performance is simply not available. Most mobile GPUs have a whitesheet spec of 1.0 Million polygons drawn per second, but will not meet this mark in real-world conditions, and certainly not with texture mapped, shaded and lit polys. Wireframes or flat-shaded polys, and we'll talk.
#4, It's simply unrealistic. A Dreamcast game, directly copied from a disc, occupies up to 1GB of space. Compressed heavily it can occupy dramatically less, but the vast majority of commercial titles will occupy such ludicrious amounts of space on an SD card or similar, there wouldn't be room for much else.
#5, Some errata ... for RAM reasons, the amount of bandwidth occupied by constantly streaming data from the SD card would be outrageous, constantly saturating the link and likely not being met by the SD spec itself. Something more robust would be needed. If SDIO was not implemented the emulation would crawl along with a frame being completed about every minute due to the CPU needed to shuttle data between the SD card and RAM constantly. And finally, DC emulation on the PC front is so primitive and moving along so slowly, the current level of optimization emulators have reached yields a sluggish and lacking-in-compatibility gameplay experience on even the most modern of PCs.

By comparison the Saturn is a rosier picture. 2 26.8 MHz SH-2s, integer only processors, 2 VDPs, an SCU that is essentially a fixed-point math coprocessor (most likely for use in 3D transform math), a custom sound processor and a Yamaha synth, plus a couple of coprocessors (SH-1 and 68000) for audio and CD-ROM blocks.. it's a lot to emulate and it's quite complex how it all interacts. While it's very possible to emulate such a machine on a handheld with say, a Freescale i.MX31, it would be a remarkable programming task to do so. Not for the raw horsepower required, but because of the juggling act it is for the Saturn to even function in a simulated software environment-- it's remarkable the machine even works at all the way it's put together. Suddenly jostling your Saturn console could cause it to shift back to its native world, a universe of madness. A secondary processing core or DSP would boost chances of making this monstrosity function in emulator form, but would also double the complexity of the task altogether.

So, we're looking at Impossible vs. Improbable. Take your pick!



I do agree but still when working on the saturn...most of the programmers stated they only utilized one of the main CPU's...and barely used the other one as it too way too much energy to get both of them to work correctly

 

[Exophase]

Epicenter is back again to post a lot of stuff and be wrong, yay :B

The Dreamcast would be physically impossible for a few reasons.
#1, The SH4 CPU in the Dreamcast is more powerful than any mobile processor out there (feasible for use in a handheld.) Its floating point performance on its own is remarkable-- it's a real piece of work.

Now that's just dead wrong. Do some research on ARM Cortex-A8. Not only is it clocked a good 3x faster at LEAST, but it's more superscalar (can actually execute two ALU ops at once) and it has 4-way SIMD (as opposed to the SH4's two way, which is where it gets its "remarkable" floating point performance). What was impressive 8 years ago isn't today, even in cutting edge handheld CPUs.

#2, Even if the CPU in the handheld could match the power of the SH-4s (allow several times the performance which would be required to deal with the sheer overhead of emulation, by its very nature).. the architecture would be different, necessitating the emulator to 'translate', in a manner of speaking, the SH-4's instructions to actions within the emulated 'virtual machine' on the handheld.

All decent emulators of powerful RISC platforms use dynarec, nothing new, although I doubt even a highly clocked Cortex-A8 could pull it all off. Maybe at 1GHz..

#3, No mobile GPU exists that matches the capabilities and raw horsepower of the Dreamcast's PowerVR GPU. There are PowerVR parts for mobile platforms, but they do not offer the same functionality or capability. They would likely use a similar API, granted, but the performance is simply not available.

And you know this how... especially in terms of "capabilities", a mobile GPU with modern shaders will wipe the floor with the Dreamcast's abilities.

Most mobile GPUs have a whitesheet spec of 1.0 Million polygons drawn per second, but will not meet this mark in real-world conditions, and certainly not with texture mapped, shaded and lit polys.

PowerVR SGX has much higher "whitesheet specs"

Wireframes or flat-shaded polys, and we'll talk.

Not everyone is Sony you know. Just go look at some SGX demos. They clearly meet or surpass Dreamcast level.

#4, It's simply unrealistic. A Dreamcast game, directly copied from a disc, occupies up to 1GB of space. Compressed heavily it can occupy dramatically less, but the vast majority of commercial titles will occupy such ludicrious amounts of space on an SD card or similar, there wouldn't be room for much else.

It's slightly less practical than PS1 games, which everyone is current crazy over. SD card costs will continue to drop all the time. This argument sucks too.

#5, Some errata ... for RAM reasons, the amount of bandwidth occupied by constantly streaming data from the SD card would be outrageous, constantly saturating the link and likely not being met by the SD spec itself. Something more robust would be needed.

Now that's bogus, go look at what the GD-ROM specs provides and compare it to the SD card spec.

If SDIO was not implemented the emulation would crawl along with a frame being completed about every minute due to the CPU needed to shuttle data between the SD card and RAM constantly.

RAM cache, DMA from SD card... I remember getting into an argument with someone once about how CD-less handheld platforms would struggle to emulate SegaCD, then Picodrive comes along with it on a GP2X.

And finally, DC emulation on the PC front is so primitive and moving along so slowly, the current level of optimization emulators have reached yields a sluggish and lacking-in-compatibility gameplay experience on even the most modern of PCs.

Primitive? Moving along slowly? Either you have standards that put DaveC to shame or you haven't been paying attention to DC emulation on PC at ALL.

By comparison the Saturn is a rosier picture. 2 26.8 MHz SH-2s, integer only processors, 2 VDPs, an SCU that is essentially a fixed-point math coprocessor (most likely for use in 3D transform math), a custom sound processor and a Yamaha synth, plus a couple of coprocessors (SH-1 and 68000) for audio and CD-ROM blocks.. it's a lot to emulate and it's quite complex how it all interacts. While it's very possible to emulate such a machine on a handheld with say, a Freescale i.MX31, it would be a remarkable programming task to do so. Not for the raw horsepower required, but because of the juggling act it is for the Saturn to even function in a simulated software environment-- it's remarkable the machine even works at all the way it's put together. Suddenly jostling your Saturn console could cause it to shift back to its native world, a universe of madness. A secondary processing core or DSP would boost chances of making this monstrosity function in emulator form, but would also double the complexity of the task altogether.

Yes, repeat what everyone has said a million times in a million places and is common knowledge now (but be more detailed to impress people).

So, we're looking at Impossible vs. Improbable. Take your pick!

I pick: get your facts straight, this handheld is probably using ARM Cortex-A8

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi,

Is KeyboardCommando = KeyboardCowboy = Epicenter ? <_<

Bye

Magic Sam