Snes Emulation

[jlenoconel]

I am sure this question has been asked before, but how much further will SNES emulation go on the Caanoo? Will we get close to full speed on most games. Its pretty good as it is, but certain games suffer from framerate and sound issues. I do not plan to buy another console in the near future as I currently own all the consoles from this latest generation, so I do want to get the most out of what I have. Thanks for any info.

 

[redlemon]

Not much I would say. Pocketsnes is fine for me really. the few games with sound issues generally work with snes4C.

 

[markpeterjameslegg]

I too would like to be able to play Starfox, Stunt Race FX and especially Yoshi's Island at a smooth framerate, also, Chrono Trigger still freezes when playing, seems that the further you get the worse it gets and this is the game I want to play the most.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

I'd like to get past the title screen in Mario Paint... We need USB mouse input and touch screen support.

 

[Berserk]

The Caanoo will probably never be able to fully support 4th generation consoles and GBA. The weak CPU is an issue with SNES\GBA\32x and then compatibility takes a hit with some of the speed ups.

If you didn't already have one, I'd suggest waiting until something more powerful comes out.

 

[jlenoconel]

What the fuck is going on with my login?

How does the power of the Caanoo compare to that of the PSP? I don't remember the emulators on PSP being poor. Surely the Caanoo can run SNES and GBA close to the PSP.

 

[hi-ban]

if the dingoo can smoothly emulate gba, the caanoo must be able to do it twice as fast.

 

[idarwin]

Oh please, please please don't let this thing die. The most important thing on a platform are developers. The hardware should be able to run any SNES game with no problems it just requires work (hard I know).

 

[Optimus]

Wiz/Caanoo did fine with GBA emulation. That was impressive, having a better GBA emulation than SNES. The GBA emulator was even quite playable in the much older GP2X. One could play Yoshi's Island in the GBA emulator well iirc, but maybe not in the SNES (I haven't tried yet).

Still though, I see major improvements in the SNES emulator and even if you don't get full speed for some of the games, you still get some 30-40fps which is more than enough to be playable and fun. Funny, even in the GP2X SNES the speed is not much slower (the strange thing we have discussed, Wiz/Caanoo emuls not making much faster than GP2X), example F-Zero 33fps at 270Mhz, 44-50fps at Wiz/Caanoo at 800/750Mhz, which is an improvement but not related to the mhz. But I understand the reasons maybe. Anyway,. in both devices it's playable, so who cares it's not perfect 100% emulation (although that would be still cool if possible)? Exception is the FX chip games and few others which I would still like to play one day.

Oh GBA emulator was soooo cool that they had a fast forward key. In some screens where you have to go fast and they didn't have complex graphics (for example introduction of Metroid Fusion that you can't skip) you could press the fast forward key in your Wiz/Caanoo and go 1.5x or 2x or maybe 2.5x faster. Cool! That's how good the GPSP emulator is.

 

[markpeterjameslegg]

Maybe it's constant porting from one GP2X console to another, instead of porting a decent full speed, fully compatible pc emulator like ZSnes, when you continuously copy a cassette tape the quality gets worse. I think basically the emulators get quick fixes so that they will run better or more compatible, but they will always be originally ported for the GP32 or GP2X.

 

[idarwin]

Optimus, which are the reasons they don't optimize the snes emulator or which are the problems you mention? Is it just that the console can't handle it... or because it's just to much work to bother doing it?

 

[jlenoconel]

So, is the Caanoo weaker than the PSP for emulation or not? I'm talking about the harder to emulate systems like SNES and GBA of course. I'm still unclear on this.

 

[redlemon]

So, is the Caanoo weaker than the PSP for emulation or not? I'm talking about the harder to emulate systems like SNES and GBA of course. I'm still unclear on this.

Gpsp runs better on psp but i would assume this is because that was the platform in mind that it was made for.

 

[idarwin]

I think as the dude said... it's unclear... some say It's the perfect emulation console, and some other posts say it lacks of performance with key games. What about mame? How is that going?

 

[kayuz]

the actual Mame for caanoo http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/caanoo.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,679 support the romset 0.37b5

 

[fishybawb]

Maybe it's constant porting from one GP2X console to another, instead of porting a decent full speed, fully compatible pc emulator like ZSnes, when you continuously copy a cassette tape the quality gets worse. I think basically the emulators get quick fixes so that they will run better or more compatible, but they will always be originally ported for the GP32 or GP2X.

This doesn't make a lot of sense. ZSNES was pretty outdated last time I checked - SNES9x (the usual source for ports) is more compatible. And it might be full speed on your multi-core PC, but the Caanoo is much less powerful. Anyway, ZSNES contains significant amounts of x86 assembly language, so a port would require a silly amount of work.

 

[markpeterjameslegg]

[/quote]
This doesn't make a lot of sense. ZSNES was pretty outdated last time I checked - SNES9x (the usual source for ports) is more compatible. And it might be full speed on your multi-core PC, but the Caanoo is much less powerful. Anyway, ZSNES contains significant amounts of x86 assembly language, so a port would require a silly amount of work.
[/quote]

Think about it a bit more then. With the constant porting of a piece of software from one console to another data becomes messy, especially when more than one person works on it. Just look at the crappy console ports that plague the PC, they are buggy & perform worse than the console versions usually, even though your PC is 4 times more powerful than the console, this is due to the game being programmed for a different format and the code being messy. PCSX4ALL can run a lot of games now at almost full speed on Caanoo, even my PC can slow on occasion when emulating PSX, yet it's easily 10-20 times more powerful than Caanoo, if the Caanoo can run PSX at almost full speed, then there's no reason it shouldn't be able to run Starfox, Stunt Race FX or Yoshi's Island full speed on Dr PocketSnes.

 

[Berserk]

Indeed, speed is dependent on how optimized the code is. Cross platform ports just aren't going to have the same potential that platform specific ports do (like the ZSNES example).

With that in mind, I wouldn't expect much more out of the SNES\GBA\32x ports. They're running about as well as one can expect considering the cpu and port limitations. Expecting full speed and compatibility just isn't being very realistic.

People just need to accept the fact that the current hardware just isn't where it needs to be to play these ports full speed (on reasonably priced linux handhelds).

Perhaps in another 2 years a future device may mature to that point.

 

[markpeterjameslegg]

Indeed, speed is dependent on how optimized the code is. Cross platform ports just aren't going to have the same potential that platform specific ports do (like the ZSNES example).

With that in mind, I wouldn't expect much more out of the SNES\GBA\32x ports. They're running about as well as one can expect considering the cpu and port limitations. Expecting full speed and compatibility just isn't being very realistic.

People just need to accept the fact that the current hardware just isn't where it needs to be to play these ports full speed (on reasonably priced linux handhelds).

Perhaps in another 2 years a future device may mature to that point.

Yeah, but the Gameboy Advance emulator has much better performance on WIZ, and DrPocketSnes runs almost the same (but not as good compatibility). The Caanoo has twice the RAM, yet it isn't used as far as I can see.

 

[CKeichel]

Yeah, but the Gameboy Advance emulator has much better performance on WIZ, and DrPocketSnes runs almost the same (but not as good compatibility). The Caanoo has twice the RAM, yet it isn't used as far as I can see.

Obviously RAM isn't a limiting factor for GBA and SNes emulation. By the way, does GPsp run better on the Wiz, it seems to be a straight port of the Wiz version, hardware wise both machines are almost identical.