Our New Machine, Pandora

[hlidegp2x]

Squidge :

for your info, blackfin in JXD seems to be an oldish one : a 600 MHZ was already proposed 5 years ago but it was expensive : $23.50/1K

I'm pretty sure this is not the same price this chinese manufacturer is paying now. And I wonder if JXD is using all the hardware potential of blackfin.

 

[Exophase]

I had an 80GB harddrive formatted as FAT32 by Windows 98. And it worked fine. Are we sure this 32GB limitation exists in anything?

Explanation.


Great, something that worked in 98 and didn't in XP. Now there's something you don't see everyday.

 

[vampire8bit]

Ubuntu and Debian and Slackware ? I don't know or care about that. I just want to know if it will run SNES fullspeed with sound, if so then that is all that matters

yes and also full speed and near perfect PCEngine/CD (surely one of the greatest systems ever made) with full support for bin/cue format, Amiga, Atari 7800, C64, sega CD and all the other classic consoles and computers up to SNES, then this system will be well worth it and I will certainly buy it.

Dosbox, psx and sharp x68000 emulation would also be nice.

 

[Squidge]

How did you check which emu run on the jxd? (I'm curious to see the neogeo one h34r: )

I downloaded the latest firmware and viewed it in a hex editor. All the command line arguments are there for snes9x (even the "snes9x" banner string). Same for VBA. Neogeo emu is gngeo from the looks of things.

 

[Squidge]

Explanation.


Great, something that worked in 98 and didn't in XP. Now there's something you don't see everyday.


Reason is explained in a microsoft technical paper. Basically they say the following:

"As has been stated numerous times, the world is full of FAT code that is wrong. For this reason, it is highly recommended that if you are formatting a FAT volume which has maximum compatibility with all existing FAT code, the volume should be 32GB or less, have a cluster size of 32KB or less, and the number of clusters should not be near any cut-off points such as 4,085 or 65,525". They go on to moan about implementations that treat FAT32 as having 32-bit clusters, when they are actually 28-bit. Programs formatting FAT32 partitions with less than 65,525 clusters, etc, etc.

So yes, whilst you can have 80GB FAT32 partitions, don't count on them being portable to non-Windows OS's.

 

[realyst]

FAT32 is a horrible idea beyond 32GB. It's a mess. On magnetic media it fragments far to easily. On flash media, you still have the problem that it runs like a tortoise in a molasses sea with data integrity issues.

NTFS is compatible with Windows(which, for better or worse, most people have) and now, more recently, Linux.

It's also a journaling filesystem with a theoretical size limit in the petabytes. It's one of the few things Microsoft has that's worth a damn(probably due to the fact that they didn't create it).

 

[Series-8]

Funny I always found Windows 98's FAT32 implimentation to be flakey.
Linux could format fine (and NT read it fine) but Win98 balked at that and would not boot... (a partition larger than 32GB)

 

[Vince2501]

Same question but with added bonus features:

Would Saturn or Dreamcast emulation be possible? Both have a surprisingly large amount of niche titles that are perfect for handheld play.

 

[Adventus]

QUOTE
Would t or Dreamcast emulation be possible? Both have a surprisingly large amount of niche titles that are perfect for handheld play.
Very unlikely. Current PC saturn emulators require a 3.0ghz cpu, 256mb RAM and a DX9 graphics card. Im guessing DC emulation is even more intensive.

64 emulation on the other hand seems pretty likely, some emulators require <600mhz and a geforce 3/4.

 

[kfuse]

QUOTE
Would t or Dreamcast emulation be possible? Both have a surprisingly large amount of niche titles that are perfect for handheld play.
Very unlikely. Current PC saturn emulators require a 3.0ghz cpu, 256mb RAM and a DX9 graphics card. Im guessing DC emulation is even more intensive.

64 emulation on the other hand seems pretty likely, some emulators require <600mhz and a geforce 3/4.

I disagree 3.0ghz...thats highly unlikely. I've seen pc handle saturn at 1.8ghz and up with 1gb of ram but still ram is a gimme you want lots of RAM for a lot of reasons. Still I've seen emulated on lower grade systems.

 

[Adventus]

QUOTE
I disagree 3.0ghz...thats highly unlikely. I've seen pc handle saturn at 1.8ghz and up with 1gb of ram but still ram is a gimme you want lots of RAM for a lot of reasons. Still I've seen emulated on lower grade systems.
Thats what its says on the wikipedia entry for SSF (highest compatibility emu i could find), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSF_(emulator). I was referring to the Intel specs, a 1.8Ghz AMD is probably fairly equivalent. Unless that document is really dated i doubt they've managed to get it much faster.

The Saturn is very hard to emulate due to its multi processor design (eight to be exact).

 

[kfuse]

QUOTE
I disagree 3.0ghz...thats highly unlikely. I've seen pc handle saturn at 1.8ghz and up with 1gb of ram but still ram is a gimme you want lots of RAM for a lot of reasons. Still I've seen emulated on lower grade systems.
Thats what its says on the wikipedia entry for SSF (highest compatibility emu i could find), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSF_(emulator). I was referring to the Intel specs, a 1.8Ghz AMD is probably fairly equivalent. Unless that document is really dated i doubt they've managed to get it much faster.

The Saturn is very hard to emulate due to its multi processor design (eight to be exact).



yea true...to be honest we've went over this issue so many times its unrealistic.

granted some emu's are picking up speed now...I guess yabuse is making some strides???

 

[Vince2501]

I understand, just thought I would throw it out there and see what I get. always possible that future emus will be more effective with less resources.

 

[sam fisher]

64 emulation on the other hand seems pretty likely, some emulators require <600mhz and a geforce 3/4.

Actually a geforce 2 suffices, or atleast it used to for me. Course I have a geforce 7 in this PC

 

[Yrx]

Dreamcast is probably more likely than Saturn, even though it's still quite a stretch. The emulators are further along, and it seems to be much less of a Frankenstein than Saturn was.

 

[Adventus]

QUOTE
Dreamcast is probably more likely than Saturn, even though it's still quite a stretch. The emulators are further along, and it seems to be much less of a Frankenstein than Saturn was.
Yea and thats saying something. From what i read the best emulator, NullDC, is not opensource and the only one (that i know of) that is open, DCemu, runs fairly poorly.

Considering the hardware of the proposed system i would be extremely impressed (huge understatement) if "fast enough" DC emulation is possible. It may be about on par with a DC (in terms of GPU probably *slightly* better in terms of CPU).... but, from the usual rule of thumb, that doesnt mean it could emulate it.

Personally, I would be very happy with decent PSX and 64 emulation, hell all games went downhill from there anyway. XD.

 

[kfuse]

QUOTE
Dreamcast is probably more likely than Saturn, even though it's still quite a stretch. The emulators are further along, and it seems to be much less of a Frankenstein than Saturn was.
Yea and thats saying something. From what i read the best emulator, NullDC, is not opensource and the only one (that i know of) that is open, DCemu, runs fairly poorly.

Considering the hardware of the proposed system i would be extremely impressed (huge understatement) if "fast enough" DC emulation is possible. It may be about on par with a DC (in terms of GPU probably *slightly* better in terms of CPU).... but, from the usual rule of thumb, that doesnt mean it could emulate it.

Personally, I would be very happy with decent PSX and 64 emulation, hell all games went downhill from there anyway. XD.

I wouldn't say all games went downhill, but most lost their "appeal factor" me personally I'm sick of horrid things such as ps3 and 360,...man I wish sega would make consoles again X_X

 

[atomicthumbs]

QUOTE
Dreamcast is probably more likely than Saturn, even though it's still quite a stretch. The emulators are further along, and it seems to be much less of a Frankenstein than Saturn was.
Yea and thats saying something. From what i read the best emulator, NullDC, is not opensource and the only one (that i know of) that is open, DCemu, runs fairly poorly.

Considering the hardware of the proposed system i would be extremely impressed (huge understatement) if "fast enough" DC emulation is possible. It may be about on par with a DC (in terms of GPU probably *slightly* better in terms of CPU).... but, from the usual rule of thumb, that doesnt mean it could emulate it.

Personally, I would be very happy with decent PSX and 64 emulation, hell all games went downhill from there anyway. XD.

I think that a 600+ MHZ Arm Cortex A8 beats a 200MHZ SH-4 by a large margin. That's just my guess, though.

 

[Adventus]

QUOTE
I think that a 600+ MHZ Arm Cortex A8 beats a 200MHZ SH-4 by a large margin. That's just my guess, though.
The 200mhz SH-4 is a RISC (reduced instruction set) processor and was pretty crazy when it was released (1998). Its very optimised for doing a set of specialised instructions. For instance it can multiply two 4x4 matrices in a single cycle, very useful for 3d transformations. Its also superscaler (like the ARM) so it can process >2 instructions per cycle.... not to mention its also got a pretty hefty FPU.

The ARM might be better, but the difference between them (in a gaming sense) isn't as much as you think.

Edit: Made more read-able.

 

[gaterooze]

Personally, I would be very happy with decent PSX and 64 emulation, hell all games went downhill from there anyway. XD.

Hm, funny, I have a very different opinion. For me, the PSX/N64 era was the worst for games. It was better every generation before then, and has been better every generation since. But that's just me