Snes And Gba With Dynarec And Asm

[slaanesh]

The SNES is indeed a powerful beast.
To give you an indication of what is required to emulate it accurately, check out the BSNES emulator.
It's focus is accuracy rather than speed.
On the Macintosh, it requires a G5 or an Intel system running at 2Ghz or so to emulate correctly!

BSNES

and

Richard Bannister's BSNES port

I use this emulator - it's quite good. No solution for the GP2X though

 

[Jurrasic]

Yup. What a lot of people don't realize is that consoles (and old non-wintel PCs like the Amiga) , unlike PCs are not primarily driven by the CPU and it's speed, but by a combination of specialized subprocessors more or less co-ordinated by the CPU, whereas on a PC the CPU does almost all the brute force work instead, though that has changed somewhat with the various 3-D accellerators and games that demand them.

Therefore the CPU is rarely the bottleneck, the 'main' CPUs have been emulated for a long time, it's a matter of writing emulation for the custom chips and all the special routines as Squidge has listed above.

Hay Squidge, would a speed increase be possible if you 'ignored' the pallete shifting and left the snes at 256 colours, as mentioned in this thread http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?act=S...=42&t=30160 this technique was used to enable enough speed for transparencies even in early Pentium PCs back in the day.

I think a lot of people might be willing to give up reduced color richness for speedy transparencies, but I have no idea if it's possible or practical in the slightest.

 

[BradN]

If you disabled palette shifting, you'd likely end up with something that looks totally distorted in places.

 

[EvilDragon]

There's no way to turn off a sprite - if you don't want it to be visible you
have to place the sprite at off-screen position.

Hmmm... wouldn't it be possible to not emulate the sprites which are at an off-screen position?
Or is that already done?

 

[Winterkid]

Perhaps if they're not being emulated, they could be stored in ram somwhere until they're needed?

 

[nik166]

Now, if only we could put all that into code

well it is already, just it's messy slow code, not ASM

but i remember having played mario RPG on an old 233MMX CPU with zsnes in DOS mode, when i experimented pc emus it was clearly the most accurate AND fast emu available for PC, more than snes9x (wich is the base for most other emus, including the GP2x one am i wrong? )
but the last version would never run on my 233MMX again

i found it turned opensource since 2001 (damn time flies! )

 

[ste_167]

well it is already, just it's messy slow code, not ASM

Snes games run great with Squidge's emulator

 

[pepone]

Now, if only we could put all that into code

well it is already, just it's messy slow code, not ASM

but i remember having played mario RPG on an old 233MMX CPU with zsnes in DOS mode, when i experimented pc emus it was clearly the most accurate AND fast emu available for PC, more than snes9x (wich is the base for most other emus, including the GP2x one am i wrong? )
but the last version would never run on my 233MMX again

i found it turned opensource since 2001 (damn time flies! )

Zsnes was written allmost entirely in optimized asm. That's why it was so fast at that time.
On the other hand, many part are still in C (well C++--) in snes9x

 

[geise69]

Now, if only we could put all that into code

well it is already, just it's messy slow code, not ASM

but i remember having played mario RPG on an old 233MMX CPU with zsnes in DOS mode, when i experimented pc emus it was clearly the most accurate AND fast emu available for PC, more than snes9x (wich is the base for most other emus, including the GP2x one am i wrong? )
but the last version would never run on my 233MMX again

i found it turned opensource since 2001 (damn time flies! )

Zsnes was written allmost entirely in optimized asm. That's why it was so fast at that time.
On the other hand, many part are still in C (well C++--) in snes9x

Yeah not to mention the difference between an ARM processor and an Intel. Two totally different architectures.

 

[nik166]

well it is already, just it's messy slow code, not ASM

Snes games run great with Squidge's emulator

yes?

so asm would be useless?