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

[bigtruck]

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

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

Erm... I'm sorry, maybe you're also being sarcastic and I'm just not getting it. But you do realize that was sarcasm, right? None of the Valve games are open-source, and likely won't be for a very long time, if ever. While I assume you actually meant porting hl1 and not emulating it, the Pandora is also not even close to being powerful enough to play hl1 through emulation/virtual machine.

 

[monaug5]

I was being sarcastic also.

Thats a shame though and I was really hoping it could have been done some way.

 

[Tashi]

I was being sarcastic also.

Thats a shame though and I was really hoping it could have been done some way.

If really a playable dreamcast emulators comes(and thats not shure), there is a possibility to play the Half Live Dreamcast port. Is never officially released, but Its available over P2P networks.
gamespot.com board post

 

[Prophet]

Vectrex yellow lighted for SDW. I'd imagine it'd run beautifuly on Pandora, given the relatively hi-res screen (should give a nice smooth vector display). You'd also probably have plenty of speed left to throw in some extra vector emulation effects, like glowing/pulsing lines and vertices etc. Anyway, I wish my Vectrex still worked - I think the power supply died.

Dreamcast yellow lighted for drkIIRaziel. Altho I'm not expecting more than a tech demo in the end, but hey, feel free to prove me dead wrong drkIIRaziel. I wouldn't complain.

Regarding DC Half Life. I have played it, and it's really not very good. The loading times are extremely annoying. If you played the PC version, you will only be disappointed with the DC version. Had the spent more time dev'ing it, perhaps it could've been better. Mainly those damn loads.

 

[gaterooze]

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.



Great! Thank you.

Prophet: my Vectrex suffered the same fate. Ah, good times with it -- we stuck in on the counter of a comic shop we ran for a while and let customers try to beat my high score on Mine Storm. Never did

 

[Sdw]

Vectrex yellow lighted for SDW. I'd imagine it'd run beautifuly on Pandora, given the relatively hi-res screen (should give a nice smooth vector display). You'd also probably have plenty of speed left to throw in some extra vector emulation effects, like glowing/pulsing lines and vertices etc. Anyway, I wish my Vectrex still worked - I think the power supply died.

Yeah, the hires screen should really help with Vectrex emu. A problem with the GP32 version (besides the slow speed) was that details got lost due to the low res.
I am thinking of making both a landscape and a portrait mode, not sure how well controls would work in portrait mode though.

Also the first version will probably be a straight port, meaning it will use the current code that software renders the lines to a framebuffer. But the next step will probably be to use hardware accelerated line drawing, which may give us such nice things as anti-aliasing, and as you suggested, perhaps even some more cool effects like pulsing lines.
Argh, when will those damn Pandoras be ready for purchase?!?!

 

[anexanhume]

Hey Exophase, Notaz has said he intends to include 32x emulation along with his port of picodrive. Perhaps it should get yellow lighted at this point?

As for DC emulation, I'm completely fine if all we get is a tech demo, because as soon as OMAP 4xxx/Cortex A9 hardware shows up, it can be ported and run better (hopefully full speed). Same with N64, the code existing will make it a lot easier as new ARM SoCs come out

 

[icurafu]

That's true.

CortexA9 will not be such a speed improvement per core. You'll just get 2 or 4 cores. So the next challange is improving multitasking, which is harder than it sounds on emulators for systems where the applications were all designed for a certain one core system.

 

[anexanhume]

That's true.

CortexA9 will not be such a speed improvement per core. You'll just get 2 or 4 cores. So the next challange is improving multitasking, which is harder than it sounds on emulators for systems where the applications were all designed for a certain one core system.

A9 also has speculative out-of-order execution. I don't know how relevant that is to emulators, though.

 

[Prophet]

Yellow lighted 32X for Notaz.

I have a feeling a month after Pandora's release, I can just green light the entire list.

 

[ldesnogu]

A9 also has speculative out-of-order execution. I don't know how relevant that is to emulators, though.

It's relevant for dynamic code generation, since you wouldn't have to care (or at least not as much) about pipeline interlocks

 

[monaug5]

Hmmm I can still hold out hope it could play Half-Life though.

To tell you the truth I would not mind paying for it if I had to.

 

[icurafu]

wait, so you really weren't being sarcastic?

 

[anexanhume]

A9 also has speculative out-of-order execution. I don't know how relevant that is to emulators, though.

It's relevant for dynamic code generation, since you wouldn't have to care (or at least not as much) about pipeline interlocks

Ah, so it would help for emulators that do dynamic recompilation? Or do all emus feature some type of dynamic code generation in addition to translation/mapping? Seems like that would be a big boost since that seems to be a technique to squeeze performance out of higher end emus (n64 and DC, in this case). Too bad it's not on the A8 in that case as well.

 

[Chip]

Hmmm I can still hold out hope it could play Half-Life though.

To tell you the truth I would not mind paying for it if I had to.

Sorry, but you cannot. The Pandora will never be able to emulate a fast enough x86 machine to run existing HL binaries at anything like a playable speed, and the likelihood of Valve releasing the source code or porting it themselves is essentially nil.

 

[jaycee900]

Hmmm I can still hold out hope it could play Half-Life though.

To tell you the truth I would not mind paying for it if I had to.

Sorry, but you cannot. The Pandora will never be able to emulate a fast enough x86 machine to run existing HL binaries at anything like a playable speed, and the likelihood of Valve releasing the source code or porting it themselves is essentially nil.

You could always hope the DC emulation is fast enough and play HL on that lol I wouldnt mind playing that Propeller Arena game.

 

[anexanhume]

As an aside question, what is the minimum average FPS for a game to be playable? I'm guessing around 20, but I don't really know. My wild guess is that an optimized DC emu couldn't get over 10 for any game, but I'm anxious to see what kind of progress comes about.

 

[Esn]

As an aside question, what is the minimum average FPS for a game to be playable? I'm guessing around 20, but I don't really know. My wild guess is that an optimized DC emu couldn't get over 10 for any game, but I'm anxious to see what kind of progress comes about.

Well, if you're playing a board/card game, 2fps is probably enough...

It depends on the game really. I'd say that 15fps is OK for most things. Although I've only played emulated 2D games, so I'm not sure about the minimum "OK" framerate for 3D stuff...

 

[Prophet]

20fps is the minimum IMO for action games, simply because it still looks somewhat "smooth" and fits cleanly into a 60Hz refresh rate without experiencing hiccups. 15 is Ok though, but will look slightly "jumpy" on a 60Hz display.

But like Esn said, it depends on the game. Action games really need high fps to look and play well since you have to time your reactions precisely to movement on screen, while your typical strategy game will be just as playable at 10fps as it will be at 60fps.

 

[Exophase]

For most games involving any kind of dexterity, playing at anything under 90% or so of the realtime speed will completely change the way the gameplay feels. Even worse if it's inconsistent and slows down greatly at random times. They'd still be playable, the experience would just be totally different. And the music will usually be ruined. At a certain point button presses become too unresponsive and it's too laborious to even get through the game.

Many RPGs and other turn based games can be played well under fullspeed without the gameplay challenge changing much, it'll just bore you to tears.

Personally I don't like the "playable" adjective much at all.

Unfortunately people very frequently confuse fps in an emulator with fps in a 3D game. They aren't the same thing. Frameskip bridges the two closer together, but that can usually only buy you so much.