DaveC Look at this HERE!
Thats not far off full speed ! not very 3D or anythin but still . Also look at my other videos again and see some other not bad ones. Some are playable.
The game is barely 3D and relies entirely on sprite graphics. It is exceedingly simplistic with nearly no animation. And yet with so little going on, it still runs at an appallingly low framerate and is just barely playable. It is honestly impressive the emulator got this fast, but it is still USELESSLY SLOW because of the HARDWARE IT RUNS ON. This is potentially the worst example possible to state a case for the GP2X emulating the PSX.
we were supposed to get a 2x to 3x speed increase with the dynarec. possibly a different implementation of a dynarec may actually get that result.
It won't ever happen, because most of the stress of emulating the system is not handling R3000A/GTE instructions, it's rendering a frame. Rendering the frame on its own with NO CPU and NO GTE to emulate, and NO AUDIO, would still not be able to achieve the full 30 FPS in the majority of cases just because the CPUs in the GP2X are in no way, shape or form suited for 3D rendering. The reason ARM recommends the VFP9 Vector Floating Point Unit and PowerVR MBX-RS coprocessors is because a bare ARM9 core is balls-slow at floating point and 3D operations of any sort.
Yes the PSX runs at about 32 mhz...but the GP32X runs at 240 - 280 Mhz. There is no strict 'rule' on how much faster a CPU should be to emulate another system. And besides that there is still a possibility of using the other CPU in the GP2X.
I believe people know what they are talking about said it is NOT impossible to use the second CPU to get more performance.. only very hard...
so don't say NEVER... I too seriously doubt that the GP2X could ever emulate ALL PSX games at full speed, but I do think if we keep the developers motivated they can come up a PSX emulator that will run a decent amount of very cool PSX games at acceptable speed, and that would be well worth the efford they put in this
You aren't getting it. Not only is the PSX's CPU a 34 MHz (not 36 MHz) 32-bit chip, that is a huge task to emulate on even a *300* MHz ARM9 (generally, the processor doing the emulation should be 10x as fast or so is the common convention, though you cannot just act on clockrate alone, there are more factors.) The issue is, not only is the CPU hard as hell to emulate at full speed on the GP2X's ARM920T, but on top of that there is the Geometric Transform Engine to emulate, which is loads of floating point code, and the GP2X has no FPU, at all. Then you have the worst part-- the 3D RENDERER. The GP2X has NO 3D SUPPORT AT ALL, PERIOD and draws 3D scenes at a snail's pace for even the simplest games. The ARM940T processor is just as poorly suited to 3D rendering as the 920T, even worse because it has a quarter as much cache. Also, its use of the bus is so ass-backwards that most of the time, heavily working the ARM940T lags the 920T to the point where it would've been faster just to work with the first processor only. There are isolated exceptions, but they don't involve intensive 3D work. Passing around this much data per frame will pound the bus between processors and memory into a bloody pulp.
PSX emulation will never be much faster than it is now. It will never achieve full speed in even simple games except perhaps a homebrew demo that just flips a few cubes around. Final Fantasy VII will never run properly. Just accept it, drop it, and move on, for god's sake. The facts are right in front of you. Pick them up, look them over, suck it up and drive on. Emulate something else.
