Theoretically Speaking, Is The Pandora At Least Capable Of Dreamcast E

[SpacemanSpiff]

Whenever the subject of what systems can be emulated on the Pandora comes up, the Dreamcast always seems to get filed into the same "not gonna happen" category as the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube. Now I don't claim to be the most knowledgeable guy out there when it comes to hardware, but from what I understand the Dreamcast wasn't really that close to the PS2/GC/Xbox in terms of processing power, and its hardware wasn't overly complex either, making it much less difficult to emulate. Moreover, the fact that the Pandora contains a more advanced version of the PowerVR chip that the Dreamcast uses, should make emulating it less of an obstacle. So most of the difficulty would come from emulating the SH-4, but with a fast recompiler and the Pandora overclocked to 900 MHz I don't think this is outside the realm of possibility; the existence of Chankast (runs many games full speed with only a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4) should at least prove that getting some games to run at decent speeds on the Pandora shouldn't be a total pipe dream. I understand that a decent emulator would probably have to be written entirely from scratch and that's probably the main reason that it isn't likely to happen, but do any developers think that the Pandora is technically capable of decent Dreamcast emulation?

 

[icurafu]

I would say yes, as powerful and quite a lot more when you consider the CPU + DSP.

However, being a console, I'm sure someone will explain that it has some special secret talet that makes it unique compared to the Pandora.

EDIT: Oops, sorry. Two replies at once. I was responding to IS it more powerful.

For emulation, let's lean on the side of NO, and be surprised if we get an emulation with a few frames.

 

[Prophet]

These sorts of questions are intended to go to my pinned emulation topic. That's why it was originally created - to avoid repeated "can x system be emulated?" topics.

The real answer is - we don't know 100% for sure. Wait and see what happens. But for now, the safe answer is no.

 

[satanic virus]

Chankast needs a pretty decent PC to run games as they were meant to be played. Although DC came out before XBOX, PS2 & GC, it is still part of the same generation.

At a push you may be able to get DC emulation at comparable speeds as Jaguar emulation on GP2X. However, lets hope for decent N64 emulation first! Despite the impressive Pandora specs, I really think good (if any) DC emulation is impossible.

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

These sorts of questions are intended to go to my pinned emulation topic. That's why it was originally created - to avoid repeated "can x system be emulated?" topics.

The real answer is - we don't know 100% for sure. Wait and see what happens. But for now, the safe answer is no.

Sorry, I saw separate topics devoted to the DS and N64 on the first page and I guess I figured we might as well cover all the bases, heh.

 

[Tinnus]

On topic, no, decent Dreamcast emulation is not possible. A 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 is WAY more powerful than an ARM at 900MHz, even a Cortex-A8.

 

[Soulkiller]

*looks at the rest of the thread* awww crap, I guess I deserve that if I leave a forum thread open and leave my computer for an hour and not hit refresh when I come back.... sorry, my bad

On Topic: I beleive if we can get a developer on it thats worth his full grain of salt we will get a working emulator in some time....as to it being playable, good question, time will tell. Theoritcally, I would the say the Pandora is _capable_ of emulating maybe half speed DC emulation in a resonable amount of time... now add in the crazy amount of time a super developer can devote multiplied by the community effort.... We might someday be in some kind of range of *POTENITAL* playable (but not necisarly full speed) DC emulation. Eventually someone will give it a shot do to the high demand for it though, I'm just wondering if its going to take HLE to make this thing work even in the most basic stages...

 

[gruso]

. . . back on topic - DC on Pandora - possible?
I guess not. JC on Pandora? We'll see.

 

[trooper]

Come on guys/girls, Please stick to the topic.

Thanks.

Trooper

 

[satanic virus]

Come on guys/girls, Please stick to the topic.

Thanks.

Trooper

Sorry for going off on a tangent here ...

 

[Rayek]

I would love to see DC on Pandora, but I really don't know. Honestly, a lot of the games for DC that I find worthy of playing have also been NeoGeo games, and that system's a most definite YES, so that always satisfied me with the GP2X... I think it'll do for me with the Pandora.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

I honestly have no idea.

Maybe once PCs can emulate Dreamcast well then we can try Pandora...

But I wouldn't expect anything to work (well) of course >:/

 

[phi6]

I honestly have no idea.

Maybe once PCs can emulate Dreamcast well then we can try Pandora...

But I wouldn't expect anything to work (well) of course >:/

For games I have tried, nullDC dreamcast emulator works well on my laptop (turion x2 2.4ghz, 2gb ram) and for the most part fullspeed.
I'm talking fully 3d games such as Shenmue1/2, Powerstone series, Sonic Adventure, Jet Set Radio etc..

I doubt it would work well on the Pandora though, I think thats just asking too much.

 

[Kayday]

I didn't want to start a new thread on DC emulation since so I'll just bump this one. I was searching for atomiswave arcade board and I came across the ngemu board and there was a topic on a dreamcast emulator for the PSP. Here are some recent videos of it running on a psp straight from the author Raziel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=368PNiIePug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=368PNiIePug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=368PNiIePug

Now, if we really want a dreamcast emu for the Pandora and or at least someone to try and attempt one, we should get in contact with Raziel. We never know what's possible unless someone is willing to try.

 

[craigix]

Can you post details of how that emulator works? Does he reveal anything about the hardware used on the PSP?

 

[efegea]

Didn't know nullDC was open source. Have they released it? (the source) I'd want to take a look.

 

[TaG]

Didn't know nullDC was open source. Have they released it? (the source) I'd want to take a look.
see here for plan from drkIIRaziel, author.

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

Holy crap. Seems like a wasted effort on the PSP though, since the DC has 4 times as much VRAM.

The main reason that I had a glimmer of hope for DC emulation on the Pandora is that they both use PowerVR hardware, from what I've read about the DC the PowerVR chip is the most expensive part to emulate but I thought maybe the PowerVR chip in the Pandora could emulate it without much difficulty since the architecture/instruction sets are similar (presumably), can any devs comment on that?

 

[efegea]

Holy crap. Seems like a wasted effort on the PSP though, since the DC has 4 times as much VRAM.

The main reason that I had a glimmer of hope for DC emulation on the Pandora is that they both use PowerVR hardware, from what I've read about the DC the PowerVR chip is the most expensive part to emulate but I thought maybe the PowerVR chip in the Pandora could emulate it without much difficulty since the architecture/instruction sets are similar (presumably), can any devs comment on that?

I think, but can be wrong, that the powervr similarities doesn't matter because the pandora uses the OpenGL ES 2.0 layer and the emulators doesn't talk directly to the hardware.

see here for plan from drkIIRaziel, author.



So he is going to release it after a rewrite targetted for embedded devices? I hope it doesn't take too much time to do, I'm a bit impacient

 

[quadomatic]

Holy crap. Seems like a wasted effort on the PSP though, since the DC has 4 times as much VRAM.

The main reason that I had a glimmer of hope for DC emulation on the Pandora is that they both use PowerVR hardware, from what I've read about the DC the PowerVR chip is the most expensive part to emulate but I thought maybe the PowerVR chip in the Pandora could emulate it without much difficulty since the architecture/instruction sets are similar (presumably), can any devs comment on that?

Someone said that despite they both use PowerVR, the differences in hardware are great because of changes over generations of the hardware. I can't find the post where I read that...darn. I don't think I can quite recall it well. The PowerVR chip in the Pandora is more powerful except that the Dreamcast had a 12 million poly fill rate, while Pandora is 10 million. Somebody said that somehow that could be made up with shaders or something, but I don't know if thats true...honsetly none of this has been verified. A lot of people mentioned the documentation on the Dreamcast's PowerVR chip being an issue or something.

I suppose you can go through this thread:

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showt...&hl=powervr