Some News Of Things To Come...

[Javacat]

I just spent the last 2 hours reading this entire thread and all I want to know is:
Where can I get the PPC port of PSX4ALL? I want to try it on my new Dell Axim X51v

 

[evol]

Javacat wtf is up with that avatar of yours it constantly changes at a speed of 60fps fs0 ????

 

[reiboul]

you guys are quite funny, struggling about PSX emulation

i'm completely on Zodttd's side : he already laid the basics for PSX emulation on GP2X, and if he is convinced that playable PSX emulation is possible, so am I.

33Mhz or 3Mhz, what's the difference?? isn't Genesis' 68000 12Mhz, yet MUCH better emulated than Snes's poor 3Mhz processor?

Even if fullspeed latest 3D psx games were impossible, what's the problem??? As long as FF7/8/9, Oddworld, and many of the top-quality 2D PSX Games are playable, many would be f**** happy!!!

 

[Redeeman]

B. I (and i will admit this) am one of those people who bought a GP2X mainly because i heard it emulated the PSX. I was told this flat out. Wanna know where? Wikipedia! The article told me blatently that the 2X could handle PSX emulation. I see that someone has since edited the article, which i hope will result in less people buying one solely because of this "dream".

ehm.. okay.

C. Zottd, Unai, i respect your dedication to this project, really i do! But seriously, Could you at least admit that only a VERY tiny amount of games, and mainly rather boring ones, are ever going to run? The games that i bought my PSX for (FF, Spyro, LOTD, etc) they aren't ever going to run. And when i have around 500 mind-blowing RPG's for the SNES or genesis, i am very unlikely to clear off half my SD card just to play a rather boring PSX game that stutters.

you know, not to be rude, but that statement lost 10 times more credability than you had, because of the statement about buying because wikipedia said it handles psx. now zottd is the expert about psx emulation here, his voice carries hundred fold the weight of yours.

D. To everyone who has come in here and exibited what could be easily called "Fanboyism," Please, PLEASE, Shut up unless you actually have a single clue what you are talking about. Especially the guy who suggested that we just emulate FF7 itself, rather than the hardware. :rolleyes: The chances of it ever being fullspeed are Nil,. and if you actually bothered to listen to what Epicenter was trying to explain with his long drawn out tech-analysis's, you would probobly understand that. Trying to get fullspeed PSX on the GP2x is the litteral equivalent of trying to get fullspeed Xbox360 emulation on a top-of-the-line gaming rig. The Hardware just cannot handle such loads. And the 2X's hardware is flawed on top of that.

now one could say "Shut up unless you actually have a single clue what you are talking about." to you aswell, you are the one who bought the gp2x for doing what you believe is impossible.

 

[zodttd]

For those I owe a PM to (Fury and Epicenter in particular), I'm trying to hold off PMs for a bit and will get to them later in the day.

Javacat: I never made the PocketPC version available publically. ...It would need more work to be polished like FPSEce. It ran really well though in comparison. I basically just took the Gizmondo (a 320x240 screen by rotating the portrait framebuffer) psx4all source which uses SDL with GAPI (gx.dll) access to the framebuffer, and modified it to work on standard PocketPC's. The Gizmondo is pretty much a landscape screen PocketPC running WinCE 4.2 with most the applications compiled using the THUMB instruction set. The tricky part is getting PocketPC buttons configured and finding the a gx.dll thats been modified to rotate the screen.

 

[STTrife]

Again I am amazed by the arrogance of the people who say thing like 'the chances of running this and that game are zero... and this or that game will NEVER run' etc. etc.
Who are you to say such things. Zodttd, unai and other are the ones who spent months actually MAKING an emulator. So even if you know some things about the hardware of the PSX and the GP2X, do you really think you are qualified to make such hard statements and just say the opposite of what Zodttd is saying.
Don't you think zodttd might just know a TINY bit more what he's talking about? I mean did YOU ever write a PSX emulator for the GP2X? Do YOU know how to emulate those PSX instructions?
Just listen to Zodttd, if he sais something about what is possible and what not do you really think you know better with some general 'ideas' you have about emulation?

 

[Javacat]

Javacat: I never made the PocketPC version available publically. ...It would need more work to be polished like FPSEce. It ran really well though in comparison. I basically just took the Gizmondo (a 320x240 screen by rotating the portrait framebuffer) psx4all source which uses SDL with GAPI (gx.dll) access to the framebuffer, and modified it to work on standard PocketPC's. The Gizmondo is pretty much a landscape screen PocketPC running WinCE 4.2 with most the applications compiled using the THUMB instruction set. The tricky part is getting PocketPC buttons configured and finding the a gx.dll thats been modified to rotate the screen.

Thanks for that information zodttd. By the sounds of the hacking you had to do to get it working, I suspect it wont run on my PDA as it has a VGA screen (640x480).

If you ever get time, have a lot of spare cash and feel up for a challange, you might want to checkout the Axim X51v. Its got a built in 3D graphics card (Intel 2700G5 really useful for pda's :unsure, which could be used to render some 3D graphics in the PSX emulator. Somebody recently used the graphics card to accelerate a GBA emulator, making it run full speed.
If you ever need a PPC beta tester for your new PSX emulator feel free to ask me .

 

[Jarska333]

"The article told me blatently that the 2X could handle PSX emulation."

Yes, and it can.

 

[suppafly]

you guys are quite funny, struggling about PSX emulation

i'm completely on Zodttd's side : he already laid the basics for PSX emulation on GP2X, and if he is convinced that playable PSX emulation is possible, so am I.

33Mhz or 3Mhz, what's the difference?? isn't Genesis' 68000 12Mhz, yet MUCH better emulated than Snes's poor 3Mhz processor?

Even if fullspeed latest 3D psx games were impossible, what's the problem??? As long as FF7/8/9, Oddworld, and many of the top-quality 2D PSX Games are playable, many would be f**** happy!!!

The genesis is clocked at 7.6 mhz, not 12.

And the SNES can be clocked up to 3.6 mhz, but its a WHOLE different story because it has many custom graphic functions and the SPC7000 for sound....thats what makes it more demanding to emulate, no the main CPU´s speed! :rolleyes:

 

[subin]

i understand that psx games usually ran at about 30fps and less, but wasn't the illusion of smoothness created by the sort of "blurring" effect in-between frames of CRT TVs? and wouldn't that be hard to recreate on the GP2x?

or am i being stupid

 

[Shikaku]

i understand that psx games usually ran at about 30fps and less, but wasn't the illusion of smoothness created by the sort of "blurring" effect in-between frames of CRT TVs? and wouldn't that be hard to recreate on the GP2x?

or am i being stupid

Or it basically means this: it doesn't matter.

 

[reiboul]

The genesis is clocked at 7.6 mhz, not 12.

And the SNES can be clocked up to 3.6 mhz, but its a WHOLE different story because it has many custom graphic functions and the SPC7000 for sound....thats what makes it more demanding to emulate, no the main CPU´s speed! :rolleyes:

erf :s so what about Neogeo? 16Mhz 68000 and 4Mhz Z80

 

[pepone]

The genesis is clocked at 7.6 mhz, not 12.

And the SNES can be clocked up to 3.6 mhz, but its a WHOLE different story because it has many custom graphic functions and the SPC7000 for sound....thats what makes it more demanding to emulate, no the main CPU´s speed! :rolleyes:

erf :s so what about Neogeo? 16Mhz 68000 and 4Mhz Z80

12Mhz 68000.
And the video system of the neogeo is finally pretty simple.

 

[reiboul]

12Mhz 68000.
And the video system of the neogeo is finally pretty simple.

Damn... Thought Genesis was 12 and NeoGeo 16... Anyway, that's what I wanted to say : a powerfull arcade system like Neogeo may be a lot easier to emulate than an old 3Mhz SNES! So DaveC shouldn't concentrate that much on the '33Mhz' MIPS because NeoGeo runs actually better than SNES, even if NeoGeo processor is 'potentially' 4 times faster, with much heavier roms, 4Mhz Z80 etc etc...

BTW Pepone, what about Notaz' dualcore implementation in your wonderfull emulator? Genesis and NeoGeo have some hardware in common, could you (or anyone else lol) make use of that?

 

[pepone]

12Mhz 68000.
And the video system of the neogeo is finally pretty simple.

Damn... Thought Genesis was 12 and NeoGeo 16... Anyway, that's what I wanted to say : a powerfull arcade system like Neogeo may be a lot easier to emulate than an old 3Mhz SNES! So DaveC shouldn't concentrate that much on the '33Mhz' MIPS because NeoGeo runs actually better than SNES, even if NeoGeo processor is 'potentially' 4 times faster, with much heavier roms, 4Mhz Z80 etc etc...

You're indeed right. my first emulator was a gamboy one. And I found the neogeo a lot more simple

BTW Pepone, what about Notaz' dualcore implementation in your wonderfull emulator? Genesis and NeoGeo have some hardware in common, could you (or anyone else lol) make use of that?

I'm considering it. But the sound chip used is the Neogeo is a little more complicated than the genesis.

 

[STTrife]

Any news yet from unai or others on the plans and/or progress for psx4gp2x?

 

[evol]

i just had a keraasyy idea

it seems like developers use the second core for soundemulation and such so i asked myself why. and had an orgy of reading trough documentation of embedded hardware on various platforms and came up with a question rather than a answer so here it goes

in my view the 940t seems like its more suited for DSP like tasks (audiosignalprocessing,audiocompression,digital imageprocessing,videocompression)

and then i searched for practical uses for DSP type cpus and one is "Binary scaling"
and it seems awfully close to what the GTE does in hardware (i asked a long time ago if a enteger engine could be used to process fp code)

and thats basicly what Binary scaling is so in short

could the 940t be used to perform DSP type of work efficiently and is Binary scaling usefull in apps on the gp2x ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_scaling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processing

 

[warzywo]

could the 940t be used to perform DSP type of work efficiently and is Binary scaling usefull in apps on the gp2x ?

As you know, the main asset of a FPU is it's speed over the CPU at processing FP and returning the result (that's oversimplified, but the point remains valid I think). I'd suppose even a CPU capable of effective binary scaling wouldn't give a significant speed boost, since the 920 will be sitting around idling while waiting for the FP op to complete on the 940. In order to throw in a FP op on the 940 you'd probably have to preempt whatever would be running there at the moment (video processing, perhaps?) and from what I know the 940 isn't really fond of such actions...

 

[BradN]

I think a more effective way to look at the 940 (than as a DSP) is as another processor, with extra limitations. It's got less cache, and no MMU, so it's well suited to tasks that still fit well within its cache, but can be well separated from whatever the main CPU is doing. Sound emulation, especially on an architecture as the SNES (where the sound CPU is almost in its own little world even on the real SNES) is a reasonable task. Once you get into very memory heavy activities, you'll get more performance impact on the 920 if the 920 is also causing a lot of memory activity.

3d rendering or parts of it might be reasonable, especially number crunching parts that don't need to manipulate texture data. I'm not extremely familiar with 3d rendering algorithms, but there may be some z-ordering tasks or similar suitable for the 940 - like generating a display list for the 920, which then grinds through the textures and outputs them to the framebuffer. If interrupts are used effectively, the 940 could potentially handle sound in addition to this, but I'd worry about ogg decoding (for example) just because of the reduced cache.