Sega dreamcast emulator on pandora is it possible?

[sukhi-2006]

I really want to play dreamcast on portable system, will the dc emulator appear on pandora, i've heard nulldc is getting ported to pandora.

 

[Lord_Doku]

you answered your own question.

but dont expect it to run fullspeed. Its just an possibility.

 

[CCmachined]

maybe some time in future. not all games will be playable, most likely.

nulldc will most likely be very optimised for the PSP, though...

and not soon, either. don't hold your breath. enjoy amiga, MAME, PSX, GBA, SNES etc and HOMEBREW! like the rest of us ^^

p&|a

 

[fischju]

Don't expect to be playing it any time soon, but with the amazing progress of the nullDC port for PSP (a couple FPS in menus to 3fps in-game, in a couple of months) a proof of concept in the near future is very possible. Maybe with the ARM at 900mhz and full neon/sgx/dsp acceleration some games will be playable, but don't expect it this or next year.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

I think within about a year you might start to see a handful of games reaching 30fps, but it'll take some serious dev work to get there.

 

[truekaiser]

we will definitely see a dreamcast emulator before a saturn emulator that i know.

dreamcast specs

#  CPU: Hitachi SH-4, 200MHz clock rate, 360 MIPS (millions of instructions per second), 1.4 GigaFLOPS (floating-point operations per second), 128-bit 3D calculations, 64-bit data bus, 800+ MBytes/second bus bandwidth
# Graphics Core: NEC PowerVRSG, 3 million polygons/second peak rendering rate, Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping, Point, Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic Mip-map filtering, Gouraud shading 32-bit z-buffer, Colored light sourcing, Full scene anti-aliasing
Hardware-based Fog, Bump mapping, 24-bit color, Hardware-based texture compression, Shadow and Light volumes, Super sampling
# Memory: 16 MB main RAM, 8 MB video RAM, 2 MB sound RAM
# Resolution: 640x448.
# Colors: 16.7 million
# Sound: Yamaha Audio Core, 32-bit RISC CPU, DSP for real-time effects, 64 sound channels, ,Full 3D sound support, Hardware-based audio compression
# Dreamcast Control Pad: Digital and analog directional controls, Dual analog triggers, Virtual Memory System data save unit
# Expansion Options: Modem: 33.6kb per second transfer rate (56kb in U.S.) Upgradable
# Operating System: Customized Microsoft Windows CE and Sega operating system
# Media: GD-ROM (GigaByte Disk-ROM) Drive - Maximum speed 12X 1.2 GigaByte capacity

saturn specs

    *  Two Hitachi SH2 32-bit RISC @ 28.6MHz
    * One Hitachi SH1 32-bit RISC
    * VDP 1 32-bit video display processor
    * VDP 2 32-bit video display processor
    * Saturn Control Unit (SCU)
    * Motorola 68EC000 sound processor
    * DSP sound processor
    * 2 Megabytes (16 megabits) RAM
    * 1.54 Megabytes (12 megabits) VRAM (Video RAM)
    * 540 Kilobytes (4 megabits) Audio RAM
    * 540 Kilobytes (4 megabits) CD-ROM Cache
    * VDP 1 32-bit video display processor
    * sprite, polygon, and geometry engine
    * dual 256KB frame buffers for rotation and scaling effects
    * Texture Mapping
    * Goraud Shading
    * 512KB cache for textures
    * VDP 2 32-bit background and scroll plane video display processor
    * 320 Kilobytes/Second Transfer Speed
    * background engine
    * 5 simulataneous scrolling backgrounds
    * 2 simultaneous rotating playfields
    * 200,000 Texture Mapped Polygons/Second
    * 500,000 Flat Shaded Polygons/Second
    * up to 60 frames per second animation
    * 24-bit true color graphics
    * 16. Million Available Colors
    * 320x224, 640x224, and 720x576 Resolution
    * Yamaha 24-bit Digital Signal Processor @ 22.6MHz
    * Motorola 68EC000 sound processor @ 11.3MHz
    * 32 PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) Channels
    * 8 FM (Frequency Modulation) Channels
    * 44.1 khz Sampling Rate
    * CD-ROM (2X)
    * Audio CD Compatible
    * CD+G Compatible
    * CD+EG Compatible
    * CD Single (8 cm CD) Compatible
    * Optional - Video CD, Photo CD, EBook, Digital Karaoke
    * Optional - 512KB Memory Cartridges for game save

just due the sheer number of cpu's in the saturn.

 

[bakawhite]

maybe some time in future. not all games will be playable, most likely.

nulldc will most likely be very optimised for the PSP, though...

and not soon, either. don't hold your breath. enjoy amiga, MAME, PSX, GBA, SNES etc and HOMEBREW! like the rest of us ^^

p&|a

Is a Pandora app really to be considered homebrew? We don't call secret Maryo chronicles a homebrew.

 

[PokeParadox]

err... if it was coded from scratch in someone's room... it's homebrew. regardless if the game idea is not considered original.
But many of us write original games... don't diss the homebrewers, encourage them.
If you want something better than a clone or a port then give devs useful feedback of how to improve their games and such.
It takes a lot of work to write a game from scratch and finish it... (especially when there is a stupid bug preventing release of CromoZome <_< )
</rant>

DC emulation is a possibly... i.e. get the author of nullDC a Pandora and pray to the god of emulation, or something.
I'd like to see an emulator appear, much like, I enjoyed seeing PSX and eventually an N64 emulator appear for GP2X. IT doesn't matter if it's too slow to be usable, I just like seeing stuff running on hardware it's not intended to be running on! :lol:
I'd say, wait and see; but don't expect playable DC emulation.

 

[mali]

http://www.emudev.org/drkIIRaziel/blog/

After the code is cleaned up/rewriten there are plans to port to pandora ( www.openpandora.org, realy cool stuff ) and possibly other consoles (wii seems like a nice target, ps3 if theres a way to get 3D access). ALL THIS MAY(OR MAY NOT) COME AFTER THE CODE IS REWRITEN, SO DONT ASK ABOUT IT NOW(you’l just waste your time, realy). The code will be open sourced as soon as it gets stable.

 

[sukhi-2006]

Good thing the 3d accelerator is powerful and cpu upto 900mhz, but some say the dreamcast emulator will run full speed with sound there's a letter with D i can't remember the word with that it suppose to be superb.
It will be coded totally different to pc emulator, so that might help.

The developer has full faith that dc emulator will be really good, if it was going to be slow he wouldn't even bother with it.

 

[mkinzler]

But SH-4 is much more powerfull then ARM and additionally you have to do do the soundcode. Let's wait and see.

 

[hlidegp2x]

But SH-4 is much more powerfull then ARM and additionally you have to do do the soundcode. Let's wait and see.

SH4 more powerful than a Cortex-A8 ???? are you mad ???

 

[mkinzler]

When you compare it in relation with processor speed. The cortex has a higher clock but is it enough?

 

[maciek_urbanski]

When you compare it in relation with processor speed. The cortex has a higher clock but is it enough?

At first I thought you were mistaken, so I've read that SH-4 does 360MIPS@200MHz (1.8 iop/clock) 1.4GFLOPS (3.89 fop/clock), browsed through ISA reference and I must say - it's a very good & efficient CPU.
It seems that interpreter-based emulation on OMAP is out of the question and recompilation/just in time compilation is a must.

Dreamcast was in fact a beast.

 

[hlidegp2x]

When you compare it in relation with processor speed. The cortex has a higher clock but is it enough?

*sigh* always that frequency comparison...

SH4 has only direct mapping 8kB i-cache and 16kB d-cache and no L2 cache. Cortex A8 has different hardware optimizations like branching prediction, hardware return address stack, etc. which makes ARM code faster than a standard ARM cpu for the same frequency.

That's why I ask you, how can you compare a SH4 with a Cortex A8 by just comparing theoretical digits about their performances which are never reached in real condition ?

 

[sukhi-2006]

I think the pandora has good specs which no hand held system on the market has got.

The dreamcast has only 200mhz processor, the pandora has 900mhz processor and pandora has a better 3d accelerator than dc, the pandora is powerful as from xbox to wii when it comes to specs.

Here is a video of pandora:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBP5CZeC ... re=related

 

[Falcon Delta]

Yeah, but what you don't understand is that emulation uses many more resources than running the actual hardware.

 

[JayFoxRox]

But with enough ram, we could recompile the game multiple times, at different byte alignments. It COULD get extremly fast.

 

[Exophase]

When you compare it in relation with processor speed. The cortex has a higher clock but is it enough?

At first I thought you were mistaken, so I've read that SH-4 does 360MIPS@200MHz (1.8 iop/clock) 1.4GFLOPS (3.89 fop/clock), browsed through ISA reference and I must say - it's a very good & efficient CPU.
It seems that interpreter-based emulation on OMAP is out of the question and recompilation/just in time compilation is a must.

Dreamcast was in fact a beast.

Those are actually DMIPS (relative Dhrystone numbers), not MIPS. You shouldn't trust marketing numbers too easily. Multiple Dreamcast emulator authors claim that real games get as little as 0.5 instructions per clock. And the GFLOP rating is even more misleading because it is based solely on a 1 cycle dot product (that isn't accurate to full 32bit precision, and it has very few other vector instructions) - when it comes to normal floating point operations it's much more ordinary and cannot do more than one at a time under any circumstance. It's better at doing floating point dot products than Cortex-A8, but the flexibility of NEON goes a long way to make up for it. According to drkIIRaziel, Dreamcast games tended to not push more than 1 million polygons a second to begin with, so you don't exactly need all of that geometry transformation power in the CPU.

Compared to Cortex-A8 SH4 is worse in many ways, even at the same clock speed... inferior L1 cache, no L2 cache (and the memory subsystem on Dreamcast is bad), 16bit instruction set cripples orthogonality (fixed registers for memory base/offset) and cuts out many of the features ARM has (conditional execution, folded shifts, etc).. SH4 doesn't really have better density either because Cortex-A8 has Thumb-2. SH4 relies more heavily on indirectly loaded operands stored in data memory (ie, dcache) as opposed to instruction operands, which thrashes the poor direct mapped L1 cache. Also SH4's execution units are less redundant, in that it can only execute most ALU type instructions one at a time. And it doesn't have the 64bit path to the L1 dcache Cortex-A8 does either (for loading two registers per cycle in ldm instructions)... and ARMv6 adds useful of things on top of all this.

SH4 has a few nice instructions (like a conditional that aids for strcmps) but I really don't think it is enough to close this gap.

SH4 is overrated because of marketing. That's all there is to it.

But with enough ram, we could recompile the game multiple times, at different byte alignments. It COULD get extremly fast.

wut

 

[sukhi-2006]

Now pandora has 256mb ram that can do a better job than before using dynaric might help.