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

[MonkeyChops]

i'm not so sure prophet is in the mood to keep this up anymore, or if he's even getting a pandora anymore. Maybe someone else should take over the updates? Chip, you need another job, right?

 

[Esn]

Some Dreamcast news and a video:
www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=47027

 

[Esn]

Dreamcast video of Prince of Persia running on Beagleboard at equivalent of ~14FPS:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o4y9k0s_Xc

Compare with PoP running full speed:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrzJea-YCJw

Thread:
www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=47065&st=90

(I know that the first post of this thread is no longer updated, but I think it's still a good idea to keep emulator news in one place)

 

[Mqark]

I always wonder why people pick these odd games to show off an emulator.
Why not something more famous or exciting like Shenmue or MSR?

Is it just availability of ISO's...

 

[bustaballs]

That's pretty impressive for a machine that's only slightly less powerful than a PS2. The possibilities for this new handheld are amazing.

 

[drkIIRaziel]

I always wonder why people pick these odd games to show off an emulator.
Why not something more famous or exciting like Shenmue or MSR?

Is it just availability of ISO's...

That'd make the game so much less fun

 

[rikisg]

That's pretty impressive for a machine that's only slightly less powerful than a PS2. The possibilities for this new handheld are amazing.

The DC was actually more powerful than a PS2 at least so I have heard. Also Soul Calibur looks prettier on the DC.

 

[Chip]

The DC was actually more powerful than a PS2 at least so I have heard. Also Soul Calibur looks prettier on the DC.
You heard wrong. The PS2 hardware is significantly faster/better than the DC in any area you care to measure. What the DC had going for it was its ease of programming and some really great first-party games from SEGA.

 

[drkIIRaziel]

The DC was actually more powerful than a PS2 at least so I have heard. Also Soul Calibur looks prettier on the DC.
You heard wrong. The PS2 hardware is significantly faster/better than the DC in any area you care to measure.

Except coder efficiency =P.


Dreamcast has always been underused anyway, so its not a fair competition .The sh4 is pretty damn powerful, and pvr while not a polygon-crunching chip can do very nice gfx otherwise (eg, textures, texture compression ... ps2 didn't have any, dual render buffers, modifier volumes, alpha sorting .. etc)

 

[darkblu]

I'm considering porting DeSmuMe and changing the core to assembler. No promises, but work will begin when I get my Pandora (No dev unit).

Where can I find information about what changes have been made to the ARM instruction set between the ARM7TDMI, ARM9E, and Cortex-A8?

re everything up to and including v6 (i.e. excluding cortex) - arm's architecture reference manual (ARM) rev I (ARM DDI 0100I), section A4.2, table A4-2 'ARM instructions and architecture versions'

http:\\www.arm.com/miscPDFs/14128.pdf

 

[truekaiser]

I'd kill for a fully functional Saturn emulator. I'd show no mercy.

I'll help you!

Saturn had an amazing library with some really fantastic exclusives.

the only experience i have had with a saturn is one time when it crashed when a friend brought it over. needless to say i was not impressed compared to the playstation.

 

[darkstorm classic]

I'd kill for a fully functional Saturn emulator. I'd show no mercy.

I'll help you!

Saturn had an amazing library with some really fantastic exclusives.

the only experience i have had with a saturn is one time when it crashed when a friend brought it over. needless to say i was not impressed compared to the playstation.



That's hardly indicative of anything. I've had the same saturn for 11 years and it's still fine, and has never had any kind of crash.

 

[Alpha2]

Both the saturn and DC were technically inferior to their sont counterparts, that does not however mean that neither had worthwhile games. They do have quite a few between them regardless of personal impression.

When it comes down to it these systems are remembered because of those bright points in their existence, Games like Panzer Dragoon, Astal, Guardian heroes, shenmue, and even burning rangers (there are plenty more on both systems of course) are games you keep thinking about when these systems are brought up and how nice it'd be to play them agian even while getting munched on by african zombies in RE5.

 

[jaycee900]

The DC was actually more powerful than a PS2 at least so I have heard. Also Soul Calibur looks prettier on the DC.
You heard wrong. The PS2 hardware is significantly faster/better than the DC in any area you care to measure.

Except coder efficiency =P.


Dreamcast has always been underused anyway, so its not a fair competition .The sh4 is pretty damn powerful, and pvr while not a polygon-crunching chip can do very nice gfx otherwise (eg, textures, texture compression ... ps2 didn't have any, dual render buffers, modifier volumes, alpha sorting .. etc)


I've read a few interviews for developers of both the PS2 and DC a few years ago stating the DC was easier to program for and the reason why Shenmue eventually got ported to the Xbox was because the PS2 wasn't upto the job, not polygon wise but texture compression and other such technical terms that bypass me in me old age, but anyway the DC was THE most powerful console when it came out, the same can be said for the Xbox over the PS2, but people just like to playdown a consoles limits instead of just playing the games!

 

[Loonie]

People have always had some pretty strange ways of measuring a console's power when they pronounce 'X' to have been the most powerful console of some era or other. A console is only as good as the games made for it.

As for the topic, I do hope someone remembers to do the PC-Engine emulator.

 

[typs lik dis]

They're obviously referring to the technical capability of a console. I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to interpret "power" in that context as referring to general influence on the market, how good its games are (actually, that one is _really_ far out), or whatever you're thinking of. How _do_ you define power, if not the way most people seem to?

I don't think PC-Engine will be left behind.

 

[Esn]

Would anyone be willing to take over the updating of this list? h34r:

Here's all the news since it was last updated:

08/11/12 - wesbrown18 announces in this thread that he'll work on porting the atari800 emulator to the Pandora
08/11/18 - SteveM has 29 emulators ready for testing, "27 of these are command line-based emulators of some rather ancient systems from SIMH (stuff like the PDP-11 and old IBM mainframes).", "Next I have the Frotz Infocom/Z-Machine interpreter", "Finally I have a "port" (just a very slightly modified recompile, really) of FUSE, the Free Unix (ZX) Spectrum Emulator." (www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=45327)
08/12/09 - Atari520 emulator by Cpasjuste (www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=45660)
08/12/09 - SMS - green (cpasjuste)" (www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=45659)
08/12/03 - Atari ST - green for both OutcaST (skeezix) and Hatari (cpasjuste)
Turbographx 16 - green for Hugo (cpasjuste)
08/12/22 - not quite "news", but interesting: DOSBox with no optimizations runs WarCraft 2 nearly fullspeed (www.codejedi.com/cgi-bin/blog.cgi/2008/12/index.blog)
09/01/21 - fullspeed NeoGeo emulator by Cpasjuste (www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=46269)
09/03/16 - Dreamcast should be moved from "probably will not work" to "might work decently"; Youtube video of emulator by ZeZu and DrkIIRaziel (www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=47065&st=90)

 

[Alpha2]

They might have said Xbox got Shenmue3 because the PS2 couldn't handle it but that dosent mean they couldnt still have done it if they wanted to. As long as the core gameplay remains the same there's no such thing as a game that can't be done on another system. Sega was concentrating on trying to ride the possible underdog to the top.

But even if they did try to push it on the PS2 they ran the risk of it selling poorly in general and not making back their development costs on a system notorilously hard to develope for (or atleast the excuse that many people continued to use in the 4th and 5th years).

What truely puzzles me is why they havent announced a 'nextgen' or even PC compilation of the whole trilogy? That's the 64,000 dollar question.

 

[timewarp78]

If I own a console, eg PS1 or xbox, am I legally entitled to download its rom to run on a PS1 emulator? I would have thought so...

 

[WizardStan]

If I own a console, eg PS1 or xbox, am I legally entitled to download its rom to run on a PS1 emulator? I would have thought so...
IANAL but I've frequently been told that you can only make copies, not download them. The best argument (the only one I can actually remember) is that you only have rights over the exact copy that you own; if you download a copy that differs in any way from that which you own (whether it be something as simple as just an ID change, or a slightly different version compiled and released a few months later) then you have downloaded something that you don't have any rights to at all.