Target level of Emulation/Ported games for Pandora 2..?

[Foxgod]

<p>

They will attempt to get Dreamcast running on the 1ghz unit, for the P2 DC is a given.


For the P2 goals are most likely Windows XP, and many of the games that require Windows XP, Saturn, the entire Dos library, and maybe Gamecube .

Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about

How come, a modfied XP can run on a P3 with 128 MB ram, surely a quad ARMa15 should be a lot more powerful then that.


GC requires a single core minimum on a desktop with 1.5 ghz speed, getting it on a small screen should require less.


Dos is already running well on a 600mhz unit, does a lot better on 1ghz unit, and should be a breeze for a pandora that is 3x as powerful


Saturn runs well too on a regular desktop, it should by 2013 be more optimised then it is now, theres a new emu release every year that got quite a performance boost.


Now, let me hear your arguments.

You're talking about thing that not exist yes. You can be sure of nothing about it.And frankly i doubts that would be that powerful.


The power needed to emulate dos is just 1/10th of what is needed for windows xp. So it's hardly proving anything...


At the moment the state of the art is mupen that emulate a 100Mhz mips processor on a 800Mhz arm and while it is almost playable, it is not a full speed.


It's quite difficult for a 1500Mhz processor to emulate a 200Mhz processor. And the extra core don't help at all to improve the situation.

The N64 has a difficult to emulate architecture, much like the saturn, the saturn for example is around the same strength as the psx, and yet psx emulation runs almost flawless.


The gamecube and Dreamcast are much more streamlined in terms of computing.


And just because there is not Cortexa15 out yet, it doesnt mean it wont be a lot more powerful, just look at the ongoing trend of new processors being released.


And for the rest Craig already stated a dozen of times hes going for the best that will be out by the end of 2013, an Cortex a15 is the most obvious soc for the P2 then.


Its generally speaking possible to emulate a system on another system that is about 5 or 6 x as powerfull, this only doesnt count for systems with freaky architecture's such as the saturn, n64, ps2 and the ps3.


On top of that, given a device has plenty of ram, an extra core does help a lot, for example, ps2 emulation doesnt even come off the ground on a single core system, while it does a pretty good job on systems with 4 cores.

 

[Exophase]

Yeah N64 has a really difficult to emulate architecture, that's why there were emulators running full speed on computers when the thing was not even three years old. You just say whatever is convenient for your argument..

 

[Foxgod]

Yeah N64 has a really difficult to emulate architecture, that's why there were emulators running full speed on computers when the thing was not even three years old. You just say whatever is convenient for your argument..

Then why does it run ok on the psp, but not on the pandora, even tho the pandora is faster then the psp?


Probably got nothing to do with mips being easier to emulate by the psp its MIPS then the ARM in the pandora?


From what i read, n64 emulation uses a different approach then emulating older systems, and because of that the emulator needs specific instruction per game, which explains why some games run OK, and others dont.


ARM and MIPS are both RISC, but different enough to cause problems with emulation.


Considering the popularity of ARM, i would call ARM more streamlined then MIPS.

 

[Exophase]

What do you mean, how does it run well on the PSP but on the Pandora. I'm pretty sure that in almost all cases it runs better on the Pandora. Have you actually compared the two?


I've said it several times in the past but the main advantage PSP has in emulating N64 is that there's a lot less overhead in rendering the screen. Being MIPS is only a minor advantage at best. Look at the CPU time needed just to emulate the N64's processor on both. On Pandora it's a much smaller percentage of the overall execution time.


Yeah, most N64 emulators use HLE for emulating game ucode instead of emulating RSP/RDP directly (this is no different for the emulators on PSP or Pandora). This doesn't make things harder, it makes things easier - if you look at the feature set of the two components that aren't being emulated then look at the feature set of the ucodes that are you'll understand why (well, probably not, others might though). That some games don't run with this approach is irrelevant.


All in all, you make lots of assumptions about things you don't really know anything about.

 

[Foxgod]

What do you mean, how does it run well on the PSP but on the Pandora. I'm pretty sure that in almost all cases it runs better on the Pandora. Have you actually compared the two?


I've said it several times in the past but the main advantage PSP has in emulating N64 is that there's a lot less overhead in rendering the screen. Being MIPS is only a minor advantage at best. Look at the CPU time needed just to emulate the N64's processor on both. On Pandora it's a much smaller percentage of the overall execution time.


Yeah, most N64 emulators use HLE for emulating game ucode instead of emulating RSP/RDP directly (this is no different for the emulators on PSP or Pandora). This doesn't make things harder, it makes things easier - if you look at the feature set of the two components that aren't being emulated then look at the feature set of the ucodes that are you'll understand why (well, probably not, others might though). That some games don't run with this approach is irrelevant.


All in all, you make lots of assumptions about things you don't really know anything about.

I have no pandora yet, but ive noticed people claim that n64 emulation isnt so hot on the pandora, and that even psp does decently considering its cpu speed compared to the pandora its clockspeed.


But to get back on topic, i dont see how a quadcore arm wont be able to emulate dreamcast if it runs like this on a beagle board:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ztpc-7SstLI?feature=oembed

The droid 2 got an omap 1ghz processor....


Surely an ArmV8 quad which is what Craig hopes to have in the Pandora2 (Craig has been talking abotu 2014 lately) should be able to launch a bunch of games, even while not knowing the specs yet, its fair to expect a significent increase in performance.


Even if Craig goes for a CortexA15 instead which is ArmV7, it should way better then the droid (Cortexa15 will have dualcore 2 ghz processors out in Q3-2013), but if Craig wants 64bits processing (if he really wants 8gb 64bits is required), 2014 would be better for the panda2.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Well as regards dreamcast if drkrrraziel does produce a decent relatively playable dreamcast emu on the 1ghz units then should the same emu not benefit greatly from the p2's power.? I think craig said backwards compatability between p1 and p2 would happen also. ps2/gamecube/saturn are purely speculative form what i hear.

 

[Exophase]

Craig has never claimed to be targeting an ARMv8 processor (I hope), Cortex-A15 is not 64-bit and it is not ARMv8 can we at least get some facts straight here?


Showing Windows XP booting doesn't say anything, I'm pretty sure an old 486 could do it with enough memory. The important part of your claim is not "it can run Windows XP" but that it can run DX8 and DX9 Windows games at acceptable speeds... Windows XP boot time isn't even a good measurement for how well something will emulate Windows games because a lot of the boot process is storage bound instead of CPU bound. But even then this thing takes forever to boot so uh yeah...

 

[Foxgod]

Craig has never claimed to be targeting an ARMv8 processor (I hope), Cortex-A15 is not 64-bit and it is not ARMv8 can we at least get some facts straight here?


Showing Windows XP booting doesn't say anything, I'm pretty sure an old 486 could do it with enough memory. The important part of your claim is not "it can run Windows XP" but that it can run DX8 and DX9 Windows games at acceptable speeds... Windows XP boot time isn't even a good measurement for how well something will emulate Windows games because a lot of the boot process is storage bound instead of CPU bound. But even then this thing takes forever to boot so uh yeah...

Craig wants 8gb of ram, his only option then is ArmV8, ArmV7 doesnt support more then 4gb.


Unless they release an Armv7 with an adress exention up to 48bits?, or was it 44? whichever is required for 8 gb ram.


If theres no extension, his only option will be ARMV8.


Hopefully he will go for Tegra.... The DX and Glide support will certainly help emulating games on WinXP running trough Qemu.


If stuck with Opengles only, then running XP gaming will indeed be a bitch.


Who cares if Tegra is a few % slower then the competition, its about how to the software runs.

 

[Exophase]

Craig wants 8gb of ram, his only option then is ArmV8, ArmV7 doesnt support more then 4gb.
Unless they release an Armv7 with an adress exention up to 48bits?, or was it 44? whichever is required for 8 gb ram.


If theres no extension, his only option will be ARMV8.

You should at least start reading all of the posts in the threads you read because this has been explained several times already. Cortex-A15 has a physical address extension that supports 40-bits (you need 33 physical address bits to support 8GB.. how you could guess 44 or 48 I really have no idea..) OMAP5 is known to support up to 8GB and Exynos 5 may as well.


The problem is that physical address extensions are a kludge and not the same as having true support for the memory, in reality it'll be hard for users to utilize 8GB.. but Craig saw that the SoC he wants supports it and since he wants to use the "best" hardware possible, well.. Fortunately for him people eat this shit up, probably lots will think that 8GB will make their emus faster.

Hopefully he will go for Tegra.... The DX and Glide support will certainly help emulating games on WinXP running trough Qemu.
If stuck with Opengles only, then running XP gaming will indeed be a bitch.


Who cares if Tegra is a few % slower then the competition, its about how to the software runs.

lololol, Glide support. WTF are you smoking? It doesn't matter if the thing has DX whatever support (which all mobile SoCs will!), if it runs Android and Linux it won't run DirectX, period.

 

[Foxgod]

Craig wants 8gb of ram, his only option then is ArmV8, ArmV7 doesnt support more then 4gb.
Unless they release an Armv7 with an adress exention up to 48bits?, or was it 44? whichever is required for 8 gb ram.


If theres no extension, his only option will be ARMV8.

You should at least start reading all of the posts in the threads you read because this has been explained several times already. Cortex-A15 has a physical address extension that supports 40-bits (you need 33 physical address bits to support 8GB.. how you could guess 44 or 48 I really have no idea..) OMAP5 is known to support up to 8GB and Exynos 5 may as well.


The problem is that physical address extensions are a kludge and not the same as having true support for the memory, in reality it'll be hard for users to utilize 8GB.. but Craig saw that the SoC he wants supports it and since he wants to use the "best" hardware possible, well.. Fortunately for him people eat this shit up, probably lots will think that 8GB will make their emus faster.

Hopefully he will go for Tegra.... The DX and Glide support will certainly help emulating games on WinXP running trough Qemu.
If stuck with Opengles only, then running XP gaming will indeed be a bitch.


Who cares if Tegra is a few % slower then the competition, its about how to the software runs.

lololol, Glide support. WTF are you smoking? It doesn't matter if the thing has DX whatever support (which all mobile SoCs will!), if it runs Android and Linux it won't run DirectX, period.

Well its obvious that 8gb wont make it faster, but it probably wont hurt with pc emulation.


And instead of glide i meant opengl (graphics library instead of glide) glide is from a while back....


Isnt theres supposed to be a tegra 3 out in 2013 that is based on Omap5, that does 64 bit, and supports openGL and dx11.


Not needing an extra layer that translate OpenGL to Gles should surely speed things a bit.


I suppose the OpenGL support will be for Android devices, and the DX11 support for windows 8 mobile devices.

 

[Exophase]

Well its obvious that 8gb wont make it faster, but it probably wont hurt with pc emulation.

Probably also won't help, since the machines it'll emulating will be far too slow to demand so much memory and besides you'd probably have to run multiple instances of the emulator each running different programs to even utilize it!

And instead of glide i meant opengl (graphics library instead of glide) glide is from a while back....

All of the hardware has OpenGL support. nVidia isn't special.

Isnt theres supposed to be a tegra 3 out in 2013 that is based on Omap5, that does 64 bit, and supports openGL and dx11.

WTF.. didn't we already go over not calling future nVidia SoCs "new Tegra 3s"? And of course it won't be based on OMAP5, how does that make any sense? The stuff about nVidia releasing mobile SoCs in 2013 that have 64-bit processors is purely made up for Wikipedia and very unlikely.

I suppose the OpenGL support will be for Android devices, and the DX11 support for windows 8 mobile devices.

I doubt Android will run pure (non-ES) OpenGL.

 

[Foxgod]

Well its obvious that 8gb wont make it faster, but it probably wont hurt with pc emulation.

Probably also won't help, since the machines it'll emulating will be far too slow to demand so much memory and besides you'd probably have to run multiple instances of the emulator each running different programs to even utilize it!

And instead of glide i meant opengl (graphics library instead of glide) glide is from a while back....

All of the hardware has OpenGL support. nVidia isn't special.

Isnt theres supposed to be a tegra 3 out in 2013 that is based on Omap5, that does 64 bit, and supports openGL and dx11.

WTF.. didn't we already go over not calling future nVidia SoCs "new Tegra 3s"? And of course it won't be based on OMAP5, how does that make any sense? The stuff about nVidia releasing mobile SoCs in 2013 that have 64-bit processors is purely made up for Wikipedia and very unlikely.

I suppose the OpenGL support will be for Android devices, and the DX11 support for windows 8 mobile devices.

I doubt Android will run pure (non-ES) OpenGL.

Ok, well at least the Wayne looks powerful considering the spec sheet:


http://www.tomshardw...news-38232.html


I suppose the choice will be an A15 with an extension.

 

[Foxgod]

Well as regards dreamcast if drkrrraziel does produce a decent relatively playable dreamcast emu on the 1ghz units then should the same emu not benefit greatly from the p2's power.? I think craig said backwards compatability between p1 and p2 would happen also. ps2/gamecube/saturn are purely speculative form what i hear.

Its indeed speculation, but if you ask me its at least gonna be worth trying.


Saturn should power wise be possible on the P1 tho, Yabause just doesnt update very often, but its bound to come an exellent emulator eventually, considering the progress it already made.


Too bad SSF is Windows only.

 

[mcobit]

Well, saturn emulation will not be possible on the p1, as current gen pcs struggle with it. The saturn is a beast to emulate.

 

[Foxgod]

Well, saturn emulation will not be possible on the p1, as current gen pcs struggle with it. The saturn is a beast to emulate.

Indeed it is, i dont see it happen either, power wise yes, but the architecture is just too alien, SSF emulated almost the entire system, so the games run great, but its windows only sadly.


So Yabause i the only viable emulator for the panda, sadly it doesnt update very often, so patience is virtue.

 

[ekianjo]

What is there so difficult to understand about scaling hardware specs we got compared to hardware specs we will get?


Look at what we got running currently, scale it to what will be available by end of 2013, and you can make pretty good assumptions on what will be possible.


Somehow some of you seem to think that going from the current specs, to a quad Arm will make hardly any difference.


By the time the A15 socs are out, the current specs will be around 5 years old....

You don't seem to understand there will not be a "JUMP" of performance between the P1 and the P2. At least not the kind of jump you are expecting.


You don't even have a Pandora 1, you said, so I don't even know what kind of reference you are using to compare, seriously. Looking at videos is not enough. Running programs on a daily basis is a much better indication of knowing what is going on.


Having 4 cores or 8 cores does NOT multiply the performance by 4 or 8. That's what you seem to believe and you are in for a big surprise.


And all your talk about emulators is just talk as most of the ones you are talking about do not even exist yet.


It's not just about being negative towards what you say, you just dont realize all you talk about is fantasy.


You are the one not being constructive because you never show us hard data of what you are talking about. Stop dreaming, seriously.

 

[SNESFAN]

Hey, let the man dream, need something to do while he waits for his pandora


But seriously though, id expect the a15 to make 60fps on all the current emulators android & angstrom based. No overclocking needed. Its almost there now across the board, so i think this is a given.


If i had to guess i would say it will open the door for stuff like yabase and nulldce to run at playable speeds (here's the if) ...if... it gets ported. (Yabase has a public demo on android that looks almost playable on dual core a9's @ 1.2ghz) i can see nds as playable (already a port for both OS's currently) for some games but i dont think full speed on all of them for sure, i am hoping it will be similar in speed to the current N64 on pandora speed.


Im not holding my breath for the likes of ps2, gamecube, psp, or other 6th & 7th gen consoles... i dont think we will see that level of power for another 5 years or so. Armv8 64bit and beyond.


EDIT: as far as x86 emulation, I would like to see stuff like diablo 2 run at a healthy fps, that would be so cool. I bet we could get windows xp installed but like others on here, I don't think we will see directx stuff running very well (3d games etc) I would think anything that can be ran on a windows 95 box should run great. In my mind I'm taking what the pandora can do now and multiplying it by 1.5x


I'm not trying to kill your dreams or even sway your way of thinking, but I think my own personal expectations are slightly more realistic.

 

[albo]

Guys, Pandora 2 won't be useless simply because it won't emulate Xbox 360 or PS3 Even people that never played old games with graphics that are "bad" for today's standards can enjoy NES and SNES era games


@Android - Diablo 2. Portable. Do. Want.

 

[ZXDunny]

If i had to guess i would say it will open the door for stuff like yabase and nulldce to run at playable speeds (here's the if) ...if... it gets ported. (Yabase has a public demo on android that looks almost playable on dual core a9's @ 1.2ghz) i can see nds as playable (already a port for both OS's currently) for some games but i dont think full speed on all of them for sure, i am hoping it will be similar in speed to the current N64 on pandora speed.

Yabause has been ported, unless I'm very much mistaken, and it runs like a dog. This is (again, from memory) using a pretty highly optimised dynarec core from Ari64 - I'd not like to stick my neck out with foxgod's though and say it will get much better. I don't think Yabause will ever be playable on the P1.


D.

 

[SNESFAN]

If i had to guess i would say it will open the door for stuff like yabase and nulldce to run at playable speeds (here's the if) ...if... it gets ported. (Yabase has a public demo on android that looks almost playable on dual core a9's @ 1.2ghz) i can see nds as playable (already a port for both OS's currently) for some games but i dont think full speed on all of them for sure, i am hoping it will be similar in speed to the current N64 on pandora speed.

Yabause has been ported, unless I'm very much mistaken, and it runs like a dog. This is (again, from memory) using a pretty highly optimised dynarec core from Ari64 - I'd not like to stick my neck out with foxgod's though and say it will get much better. I don't think Yabause will ever be playable on the P1.


D.

Oh i was making a speed comparison, i would like to see those run on the pandora 2 as well as mupen runs on the paandora 1


I bet we do have some of the best programmers in the emulation scene doing these ports, i wasnt suggesting current code needs tweaked or anything like that. I was definately using the old "throw hardware at the problem"


=)


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