Pandora's Emulators - What Will Work And What Won't

[quadomatic]

what about http://yabause.org/ it runs on the dreamcast and is written in C (probably not very optimised)... and it seems that only a few graphical functions need to be ported at least acorrding to the wikki

also there is a video of it runnning on a wii on youtube... which has comparable hardware to the pandora

wii ~ 730mhz powerpc 88mb ram 64vram ati graphics

pandora 600mhz arm 128mb shared ram on soc + DSP and graphics acceleration powervr SGX

although the wii emulator looked slow to me....



Yes but are hoping our Pandoras will clock to 900Mhz. Not a feature I'll be using often but I'd happily half my battery life for an extra few fps while playing NiGHTS. Yaaaaaaaaay!


Yabause doesn't work well on Wii anyways. Yabause and SSF weren't good Saturn emulators until fairly recently, with dual core cpus and such. You aren't going to see a Saturn emulator and Pandora. Honestly, I would think DC is more likely, and that's not happening either.

BTW: Is the version of Final Burn Alpha being ported the one that supports CPS3?

 

[cb88]

@quadomatic what are you taling about? dreamcast is a different generation of hardware! has a 200mhz proc... I don't see how it would be more likely than the saturn even if it is hard to emulate

 

[Prometheus]

The "generation" more-or-less means squat, here, really - the Saturn is incredibly complex, as I understand it.

 

[Spectralist]

Yes though the last couple of years have made some incredible strides with saturn emulation. If the Pandora still has a thriving community in a few years i would not be surprised at all if a saturn emulator with at least a few semi-playable titles made it's way onto Pandora.

 

[kulak4]

Allright, I don't know too much about Dosbox emu and I think that it's going to be a silly question, but:
If there is a chance to see games like "Jagged Alliance" (the 2nd one is much better ), "Stonekeep" or "Deus" emulated on Pandora?

 

[Chip]

Allright, I don't know too much about Dosbox emu and I think that it's going to be a silly question, but:
If there is a chance to see games like "Jagged Alliance" (the 2nd one is much better ), "Stonekeep" or "Deus" emulated on Pandora?

Maybe. You'll have to wait and see.

 

[Prophet]

Yeah, that's part of the charm of a new device like this. We have a general idea of what we think may be possible or not, but we won't know for sure for a good while.

Devs almost always find ways to surprise everyone, especially a few years down the road. I have a feeling we'll see some really cool things on Pandora before we're through. I have never seen any similar device off to such a great start before it's even ready for purchase. We will have tons of solid full speed emulators on day one, and that's only touching the surface of what this device will be able to do.

I just wonder when it will actually be done. I'm not in a huge rush, but sometime before Winter would be nice.

 

[quadomatic]

@quadomatic what are you taling about? dreamcast is a different generation of hardware! has a 200mhz proc... I don't see how it would be more likely than the saturn even if it is hard to emulate

Did you ever look at the Sega Saturn specs? One of the big contributors to the Saturn's early demise is its great difficulty to develop for. The hardware is very, very complex. It has 2 cpus and 6 other processors. I'm guessing Sega learned its mistake (well, at least it learned from 1 mistake from Saturn) and didn't make Dreamcast so complex.

Yabause didn't have fullspeed at the same time that Chankast worked fairly well. Using SSF, I tried playing with an A64 3300+, 768MB of Ram and a Radeon X850 Pro. Nights did not run fullspeed, but it was playable for the most part. Guardian Heroes worked fullspeed (I think). But still, this system is waayyyyyyyyyyy more powerful than the Pandora.

Belive me, I would love to believe that Sega Saturn emulation is likely on Pandora (who wouldn't). But at least for right now, its seems highly unlikely that we'll get decent Saturn emulation on Pandora

 

[icurafu]

Agreed, there needs to be some miricle emulation on the Saturn side before we can even consider doing a good port to the Pandora. Best we can do at the moment is to give Yabuse a hand as even they admit that the graphics code is extremely inefficient.

 

[quadomatic]

Agreed, there needs to be some miricle emulation on the Saturn side before we can even consider doing a good port to the Pandora. Best we can do at the moment is to give Yabuse a hand as even they admit that the graphics code is extremely inefficient.

Too bad they can't borrow from SSF.

PSP has some videos for a saturn emulator on youtube. It's mostly 2d games...I'm not sure if its fake. It looks real to me, but I can't find the download for the emulator anywhere. Go ahead and check it out if ur interested.

At least Nintendo DS seems semi-possible. That would be pretty cool.

 

[dbzeag]

Would it make sense to include status of each emulator? For instance the Jaguar and Genesis and SNES emulators are beyond Proof of Concept, running on actual hardware, and getting tweeked for efficiency. Those, I would assume, will be completed sooner than others.

 

[Tashi]

At the first page the Emulators are wrote in green and yellow colors. Greens means work is in progress and yellow for someone will do it the job.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

drkIIRaziel is planning to port NullDC it seems

 

[Vimacs]

At the first page the Emulators are wrote in green and yellow colors. Greens means work is in progress and yellow for someone who MAY do the job.

 

[Sdw]

Once I get a Pandora, I will make a port of Vecx (Vectrex emulator). The GP32 Port I did was not fullspeed, but the Pandora should handle it easily I think.

 

[monaug5]

I am wondering though if Pandora is capable of Half-Life 1 as I am making a mod of half life for the PC as would love to see it on the pandora.

If it could work would I need to change anything?

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

I am wondering though if Pandora is capable of Half-Life 1 as I am making a mod of half life for the PC as would love to see it on the pandora.

If it could work would I need to change anything?

Yeah, Pandora is very capable of Half-Life 1.

 

[quadomatic]

I am wondering though if Pandora is capable of Half-Life 1 as I am making a mod of half life for the PC as would love to see it on the pandora.

If it could work would I need to change anything?

Yeah, Pandora is very capable of Half-Life 1.


Heh heh heh. The only major PC games I can think of right now that had their source codes released would be...all id engines up to Quake 3, Descent 1 and 2...and that's all I can think of.

Maybe a year after the release of RAGE or Doom 4 id will release the source code for the Doom 3 engine...and then we'll have Doom 3 on Pandora!...yea, another beautiful pipe dream.

 

[monaug5]

Hmm so I can continue knowing that pandora can emulate half life 1.

Now to get interest in this developed......

Hmm so I can continue knowing that pandora can emulate half life 1.

Now to get interest in this developed......

 

[Chip]

Hmm so I can continue knowing that pandora can emulate half life 1.

Now to get interest in this developed......

I think there may be a language-related misunderstanding here (possibly it's mine). Half Life is a closed source game. It cannot be ported to the Pandora.