Question About Emu's And Ram

[Cbass182]

I was wondering, does the rom and emulator HAVE to loaded into RAM? I keep seeing that people are talking about games being to large to run with only 64MB of memory. Isn't there a way to run emu's and roms directly from the SD card? Does this mean that PSX is impossible because of size of games also, and not just because of the GP2X's processing capabilities?

I know RAM was an issue with the xbox and Surreal64 a N64 emulator, some games wouldn't run just simply because they were too big.

Why can't the roms be run directly from media?

 

[reallynotnick]

Well flash carts (like nes, snes, genisis, MVS) all have a very fast acess rate, really you can consider the whole cart a chunk of ram. There is no need to up load the data into any sort of ram because the cart is fast enough.

The GBA only has like 8kb of ram. I don't know how fast SD cards are compaired to Carts but I would expect if we could get a fast enough SD we could play any game.

For CD games all you really need is the same amount of ram as the console had, because it can stream info off the disc and so can you off the SD card. Thats why Neo Geo CD works so well.

 

[lucoxade]

Also the data in the ROM file isn't always directly accesable from the emu. In a lot of cases the emu will extract all the gfx and sound from the ROM and organise it in RAM so that it can accessed quicker by the processes for each emulated function of the original chipset.

 

[Cbass182]

cool, that's what I wanted to know, makes sense now. Thanks...