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

[Exophase]

and Exophase has indicated Temper will most probably be ported to the Pando.

Also gpSP.

 

[atomicthumbs]

Game Boy Color is 8-bit.

 

[Javacat]

I see no Dreamcast! Although I guess it will go under "Emulators that probably will NOT work well on Pandora"....

 

[Prophet]

Added some systems and reformatted for better readability.

 

[ldesnogu]

I think MAME is kind of particular in that list. It belongs to several entries because it emulates a wide range of arcade HW.

Perhaps having a dedicated Arcade entry would be useful and then refine it into several generations of arcade HW.

Given I can put my hands on a dev unit, I will probably spend some time porting SDLMAME. Of course, I would work with Franxis to see if porting the changes he did to MAME .37 make SDLMAME usable

 

[astro]

I think MAME is kind of particular in that list. It belongs to several entries because it emulates a wide range of arcade HW.

Perhaps having a dedicated Arcade entry would be useful and then refine it into several generations of arcade HW.

Given I can put my hands on a dev unit, I will probably spend some time porting SDLMAME. Of course, I would work with Franxis to see if porting the changes he did to MAME .37 make SDLMAME usable

Do you think games like Wrestlefest will run on Pandora?.

 

[vampire8bit]

I think MAME is kind of particular in that list. It belongs to several entries because it emulates a wide range of arcade HW.

Perhaps having a dedicated Arcade entry would be useful and then refine it into several generations of arcade HW.

Given I can put my hands on a dev unit, I will probably spend some time porting SDLMAME. Of course, I would work with Franxis to see if porting the changes he did to MAME .37 make SDLMAME usable

No offence, but leave MAME to Franxis, the work he has done for MAME on GP2X is incredible

 

[ldesnogu]

No offence, but leave MAME to Franxis, the work he has done for MAME on GP2X is incredible

Where did you read I was in any way wanting to take over what Franxis has been doing so well for years?
I explicitly said I want to work with him, and I have been in touch with him a few months ago (alas, my free time was not enough back then to do anything productive ).

 

[zacaj]

Will the pandora be fast enough to run Visual Boy advance?

 

[Squidge]

Will the pandora be fast enough to run Visual Boy advance?

Yes, but not at full/playable speed.

For GBA, I would assume Exophase would port his excellent emu instead.

 

[sm1988]

Will the pandora be fast enough to run Visual Boy advance?

Exophase said he going to work on gpsp if that gets ported there would be no practical need for vba.

 

[Svartalf]

"COULD work well" = full speed emulation with full sound and very little if any frame skipping.
"MIGHT work decently" = reasonably playable but possibly without sound and/or with some frame skipping.
"NOT work well" = too slow or incomplete to be considered truly playable.

Thank you Prophet for providing everyone a concise list of what's realistic with regards to the emu capabilities at delivery time for the Pandora. And, it is a realistic one. Some of the "unlikely to work well" list items are theoretically doable, but we need to learn to walk before we can fly- and some of those are akin to trying to fly when we're just beginning to baby crawl on this platform.

 

[zacaj]

Will gpSP's compatability be inproved to vba's level then?

 

[Exophase]

Will gpSP's compatability be inproved to vba's level then?

gpSP is at its core almost as compatible as VBA. There might be some issues that are unique to certain ports. Whether or not this is fixed depends on how serious people are about reporting bugs.

 

[Prophet]

I tested over 200 games in gpsp 0.9 on PSP, and from what I recall almost every single game seemed to work perfectly or close to it.

Some of the problem games (huge frame rate drops) seemed to be by Camelot - some weird routines they must be using.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

Will the pandora be fast enough to run Visual Boy advance?

Yes, but not at full/playable speed.

For GBA, I would assume Exophase would port his excellent emu instead.

I was able to play the Gyakuten Saiban games and Super Mario World on a 600mhz+96mb RAM computer using VisualBoyAdvance and Slackware, at full speed. (haven't tested anything else) But gpSP would probably be better ^^

 

[Squidge]

I was able to play the Gyakuten Saiban games and Super Mario World on a 600mhz+96mb RAM computer using VisualBoyAdvance and Slackware, at full speed.

Was that computer powered by an ARM core?

Considering the 96MB of RAM, I'm guessing X86, in which case, you comparison is nonsense.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

I was able to play the Gyakuten Saiban games and Super Mario World on a 600mhz+96mb RAM computer using VisualBoyAdvance and Slackware, at full speed.

Was that computer powered by an ARM core?

Considering the 96MB of RAM, I'm guessing X86, in which case, you comparison is nonsense.

Oh. Sorry about that, wasn't thinking. :blink:

Out of curiosity how do you compare the processor speeds?

 

[Chip]

Out of curiosity how do you compare the processor speeds?

You don't. At least, not with much accuracy. There is no perfect benchmark for rating processors of different architectures. There are too many variables involved to clearly state that one chip is "better" than another unless it is so significantly faster that no benchmark is needed in the first place. At best, you can say that one chip runs a particular cross-platform program faster than another chip, but a different program might yield different results.

 

[Svartalf]

Was that computer powered by an ARM core?

Considering the 96MB of RAM, I'm guessing X86, in which case, you comparison is nonsense.

I would say it's not QUITE nonsense.

A 600MHz PIII isn't going to outperform the Cortex-A8 we're going to have by all that much (If at all- depends on the code, actually...)- his comparison, while not as good as it could be, indicates that it's worth considering doing a version of VisualBoy Advance on the Pandora.

[ edit ]

I'd have to do a bit of empirical data gathering, I think, before I'd say that it was nonsense or not...

[ further edit ]

There IS a VisualBoy Advance port for Maemo- but it runs slow. While the person doing the port for Maemo is claiming optimizations for Maemo, I suspect the code's not as tuned as they'd like
to think it was, coupled with the fact that the N800's got a slower CPU, clock speed comparisons not withstanding, for the claimed 10fps on the package info. I'm of the opinion of, "Let's wait and
see" leaning towards, the "Uh, it's there but it's not what you really want" side of things.

[ /edit]

It doesn't mean it'll happen or that we won't end up with a version, but it's not a "no-go" on the emu.