State Of Emulation On Caanoo

[procyon]

I apologize to everyone if this comes off as a bit of a rant, but I suppose that's what this is. I have been an extremely faithful supporter of the GP2X platform for many years now, having bought an F100, an F200, the Wiz, and finally the Caanoo. I saw the Caanoo as the ultimate evolution of what I always wanted the GP2X to be, and eagerly anticipated seeing "emulation done right" on it. But unless it's PicoDrive or an emulator written by zx-81, it's been anything but.

I recently had the opportunity to experience PSP emulation. A friend of mine was not technically proficient at hacking the system, but thought I would be a good person to ask for help, having successfully hacked my Wii for emulation. I gave it a go, and yeah, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to do, but once I got through getting the custom firmware on it, I was quite amazed at how flawless many of the emulators worked. I gave the machine back to him and went back to my Caanoo, and just sighed.

The NES is my favorite system to emulate, and I can't stand NESGP2X. It blows my mind that notaz can get PicoDrive to emulate a 16-bit machine at 60 FPS, but no one will take the time to optimize an NES emulator to do the same. OhBoy won't even launch games for me. As I said before, all of zx-81's emus are quite nice, as is MAME, but I'm jealous of level of support that NES and SNES have on the PSP. I'm left wondering where all the good emu authors went? There was amazing progress being done before the Wiz. Then the Wiz came and seemed to splinter the community. Add to that the release of the Pandora, and I feel like many people have abandoned the GP2X platforms entirely.

Is this the case? And if so, what can be done about it? How can we let authors know that we're still out here and that the hard work they do would still have an audience? Thanks for letting me vent.

 

[Popcorn Dave]

EDIT: double post

 

[Popcorn Dave]

Well it's still quite new at the moment, and this stuff takes time, but I agree... it's getting a bit frustrating. I thought Snes9x would be out of beta by now, and I haven't heard any word on PocketSNES or GINGE. At least it's playable with most games though, and the GBA emulator is running nicely. Picodrive is almost flawless as far as I can see, the only game I've had trouble with was Micro Machines 96 (and I suck at that anyway)... I have no idea how Notaz rolled it out so quickly, but I have to tip my hat! You can be fairly sure that Gameboy, NES and SNES will be up to speed eventually, but at the moment it's just a case of waiting.

I don't mind waiting, really, (if I were impatient I could easily have bought a Wiz) but I do want to kick the arse of whatever IDIOTS at GPH decided to make the Caanoo incompatible with the Wiz. I really think they're splitting their own customer base, or more importantly, their developer base... you've only got so many people working on a particular game/emulator, and they were already dividing their (spare) time between Wiz, Dingoo and Pandora; making the Caanoo yet ANOTHER separate entity just makes that problem even worse, when they could have just kept the insides the same and had a killer handheld right out of the gate. It seems pretty disrespectful to the people that worked so hard on the Wiz to make them do it all again for the Caanoo just one year later. I'm not a developer so I don't know, obviously, but I can't help but think if I were coding in my free time I'd get pretty fed up of doing the same emulators and homebrew over and over just because there's another new gadget that isn't compatible. And now the successor to the Dingoo is just around the corner - oh wait, my mistake, TWO successors to the Dingoo - so it's all getting a bit out of hand really. <_<

 

[crow_riot]

i'm probably getting bashed/flamed about this
the problem about SNES is, that bitrider, who is working on it at the moment, didn't release the source code yet. at least i'm not aware of it's location. IMO it would be totally stupid to port the previous 6.5.0 version (which sources are available) if someone already has an improved version of it lying around.

i think it would be best to ask bitrider to make a caanoo port, as he seems to have the best oversight about pocketsnes at the moment.

 

[SolarLune]

I don't really think that it's fair to be annoyed that the emulators aren't the greatest yet as the Caanoo hasn't even been out a full year. Ginge will probably come out sometime soon, and the SNES and NES emulators will also probably be fixed soon as well. However, while I do agree that GPH should have made Wiz games compatible with the Caanoo, I think that by doing this, they are trying out a business strategy. If some games are available for Caanoo and not for the Wiz, that's a reason to buy a Caanoo. However, the Caanoo needs to be supported for more time than a couple of years (probably more along the lines of 2 - 4).

 

[Exophase]

It blows my mind that notaz can get PicoDrive to emulate a 16-bit machine at 60 FPS, but no one will take the time to optimize an NES emulator to do the same.

You'd may as well be saying that it blows your mind that you won't take the time to optimize the NES emulator. That's not meant to be a dig at you but to illustrate a point: it's not just a matter of time involved but skill. Many people can port emulators but fewer can write ARM assembly optimized code like notaz can. He didn't just take an emulator and tweaked it in some superficial way, a huge chunk of the code has been written from scratch by him.

That said, notaz already did do that for NES (gpfce) but I guess for whatever reason it hasn't been ported, or it has and you haven't used it. notaz himself has a lot of other things he's busy with right now and can't get to the NES emulator any time in the near future.

Not sure why you think the Wiz splintered the community. It got ports of most of the best GP2X emulators. I imagine people are less excited about the Caanoo because it's pretty much the same hardware as Wiz. And EvilDragon gave out more Wizes on behalf of GPH, specifically for emulator developers, than GPH has for Caanoo.. they seem more interested in giving them out on Facebook competitions.

Probably the biggest problem is that the people who did the Wiz emulators don't see a Caanoo port as a big enough effort to have to do themselves, yet some people actually doing the ports are ignoring the Wiz emulators for whatever reasons.

 

[procyon]

You'd may as well be saying that it blows your mind that you won't take the time to optimize the NES emulator. That's not meant to be a dig at you but to illustrate a point: it's not just a matter of time involved but skill.

You are correct, and I would amend my statement to say that no one qualified will take the time to optimize a NES emulator, and I say that with all due respect. I am an OO C++ programmer, but no where near talented enough to do the work myself, no matter how much I wish I was. I have been to notaz's site, and the only version of GPFCE that he released is for the original GP2X.

BTW Exo, kudos to you on the work you did with the GBA emu for PSP, it's amazing. I'm hoping that Caanoo owners will get to experience that level of quality in the near future as well.

 

[crazyfooinc]

It's a shame really; the Caanoo's developer base has been split up, and quite a bit of this is due to the fact of the Caanoo's incompatibility with previous hardware and the release date. If GPH isn't going to support their handhelds for longer, and if they are not going to be compatible, then what is the point of putting effort into writing software that won't come to much use?

 

[DaveC]

I do want to kick the arse of whatever IDIOTS at GPH decided to make the Caanoo incompatible with the Wiz. I really think they're splitting their own customer base, or more importantly, their developer base...

I didn't understand that either especially since it is the same damn SoC! The Caanoo might as well use something completely different since ,in their infinite wisdom, switched things around just enough to screw the backwards compatibility. They probably made that decision the same time that they decided on the speaker positions :rolleyes: I am waiting for The next GPH console and will skip this one. It just isn't the Caanoo that has slow development though, Pandora development is pretty damn dead too, it is actually worse than the Caanoo so don't feel bad.

 

[goldenegg]

It just isn't the Caanoo that has slow development though, Pandora development is pretty damn dead too, it is actually worse than the Caanoo so don't feel bad.

Pandora development is slow because so few people have their units. It'll pick up once the first batch has fully shipped. Emulation is still further ahead on the Pandora, as they have emulators for systems we don't (C64, Amiga) and other emulators work better (NES, SNES).

 

[senquack]

Yeah, GPH really dropped the ball on the Caanoo in a huge way. Three of the biggest complaints about it I hear:

1.) The replacement of the DPAD with useless-for-fighting-games analog nub

2.) Lack of backwards compatibility with the Wiz despite having the exact same SoC and screen resolution.

3.) The volume slider stinks and the loss of the two volume buttons really hampers any hoped-for seamless backward compatibility with the Wiz.

Any person with even half a brain would have seen that the solution is simple: Put a DPAD on the Caanoo, even a secondary one, and wire it to the same GPIO ports that the DPAD of the Wiz was wired to. Keep the stupid volume buttons and again, wire to the same GPIO lines. Kills three birds with two stones quite nicely, at a slight cost increase thanks to the DPAD. If the increase is just too much, ditch the stupid nub and work on making the DPAD really shine.

Sadly, GPH are incapable of logic.

 

[goldenegg]

1.) The replacement of the DPAD with useless-for-fighting-games analog nub

I couldn't disagree more. I've had absolutely no issues playing any fighting games with the analog nub. It's more accurate than both my Wiz and A320. There's a pretty strong resemblance to the Neo Geo CD gamepad, which is largely considered to be one of the best gamepads for fighting games.

2.) Lack of backwards compatibility with the Wiz despite having the exact same SoC and screen resolution.

The lack of backwards compatibility is a head scratcher. Maybe they'll deal with that with a firmware update at some point.

3.) The volume slider stinks and the loss of the two volume buttons really hampers any hoped-for seamless backward compatibility with the Wiz.

I much prefer the Caanoo's slider over the buttons on the Wiz, but I could see why others might not agree.

 

[torpor]

I really wish they'd get their act together on the WLAN side of things, though .. I bought the official adapter and it simply doesn't work ..

 

[crow_riot]

I really wish they'd get their act together on the WLAN side of things, though .. I bought the official adapter and it simply doesn't work ..

from what i remember ED posted, that simon from GPH has something fixed in an upcoming firmware.

 

[Cthulhu32]

I am currently working on my own fresh port of FCEUX to the Caanoo (not relying on older GP2X ports.) I've been bogged down by finals week for my grad school, but that officially finished for the semester yesterday. Currently I have a mini-gui to load roms from, and the games load and display. The background tiles work fine but the sprites are corrupting for some reason. I'm writing to a buffer that copies itself directly to the frame buffer (there are graphical glitches when writing pixel-by-pixel to the frame buffer) and speeds are very good. Even though the sprites are all messed up, the Castlevania intro and demo reel play at full FPS.

I also agree with Exophase through my own tests that SDL bogs down the FPS significantly. When you render to an SDL screen, that has to copy itself into the frame buffer which it seems like is taking up a lot of time. It is not a simple memcpy(framebuffer, SDL_buffer, 320*240*3), but instead a full transformation that scales from the screen size/depth to the size of the frame buffer. I really wish the GPH_SDK would reveal more source for how to control some of the underlying systems, there's been a little bit of guesswork for writing my own custom routines. Libcastor was a little bit helpful but all the memory pointers are off because the Caanoo has more memory for the 3d textures. Also the LCD no longer consists of 2 frame buffers with a foreground/background, but instead just a single 320x240x3 framebuffer (non-rotated).

 

[redlemon]

I am currently working on my own fresh port of FCEUX to the Caanoo (not relying on older GP2X ports.) I've been bogged down by finals week for my grad school, but that officially finished for the semester yesterday. Currently I have a mini-gui to load roms from, and the games load and display. The background tiles work fine but the sprites are corrupting for some reason. I'm writing to a buffer that copies itself directly to the frame buffer (there are graphical glitches when writing pixel-by-pixel to the frame buffer) and speeds are very good. Even though the sprites are all messed up, the Castlevania intro and demo reel play at full FPS.

I also agree with Exophase through my own tests that SDL bogs down the FPS significantly. When you render to an SDL screen, that has to copy itself into the frame buffer which it seems like is taking up a lot of time. It is not a simple memcpy(framebuffer, SDL_buffer, 320*240*3), but instead a full transformation that scales from the screen size/depth to the size of the frame buffer. I really wish the GPH_SDK would reveal more source for how to control some of the underlying systems, there's been a little bit of guesswork for writing my own custom routines. Libcastor was a little bit helpful but all the memory pointers are off because the Caanoo has more memory for the 3d textures. Also the LCD no longer consists of 2 frame buffers with a foreground/background, but instead just a single 320x240x3 framebuffer (non-rotated).

That's great to hear, I wish you the best of luck. I can barely manage my own programming modules in java never mind C++.

 

[Popcorn Dave]

FCEUX huh? Well, that's something! Thanks dude, if you can put this together it would be badass!

 

[goldenegg]

Cthulhu32,

You've just made my day! Hopefully you'll be able to work through the SDL issues and get full framerate gameplay from your port. Looking forward to trying it!

 

[admmelonhead]

On openhandhelds I'm pretty content with what I've seen, other than the lack of a really good SNES emulator (I have both, pocketsnes for most, snes9x for what it can't run) and amiga. Other than that, I'm pretty content.

 

[qbertaddict]

On openhandhelds I'm pretty content with what I've seen, other than the lack of a really good SNES emulator (I have both, pocketsnes for most, snes9x for what it can't run) and amiga. Other than that, I'm pretty content.

I can assure you the the newest version of pocketsnes that is coming out will make you really really really happy. You will be more than content