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

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

 

[icurafu]

Awesome.

 

[Pleng]

woooohooooo! Time for a beer me thinks. Even if I have to drink it at 1 sip/sec!

nanan naaa na naa naa Daytooooonnnaaaaaa!

okok I know it may never be playable. But we have to have a dream(cast), for if we don't have a dream(cast), how are we gonna make a dream(cast) come true?!

 

[quadomatic]

Damn I'm glad I made that post asking about Pandora, metaphorically poking him with a stick for an answer.

Woohoo!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[icurafu]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix9huu4k5Qo

 

[quadomatic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix9huu4k5Qo



Holy crap. That was some pretty fast progress.

I mentioned dev units in the post I made saying that it was awesome that he was going to do DC on Pandora. Hopefully he'll look into it.

 

[icurafu]

fast isn't the word I would use. I wonder what the bottleneck it.... could it be the CPU? Or the RAM.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

another video
yet another video

looks like they're putting A LOT of work into this

he said it isn't optimized yet

 

[fusion_power]

DC Emulation sounds very interesting, Sonic Adventure or all the DC "SNK vs. ..." Games onto the Handheld would be great.
But even onto the PC, DC emulation needs a powerful system. And as long as less powerful Consoles like the Saturn can't be emulated onto the Pandora, I doubt it would be more easy to make a playable DC Emu than a playable SATURN Emu for the Pandora.
AFAIK it is not easy even with similar Hardware Components. AFAIK "GPSP" GBA Emu for GP2X can't take advantage of the fact that GBA and GP2X have similar ARM Architecture. So if the DC and the Pandora have PoverVR components it doesn't say that these Chips can be used onto the Pandora in the way, they are used onto the DC.
But of course I wish the Devs all luck onto this project. I also hope they can use the Pandora Power somehow, even with all this NDA and closed Chipset restrictions. ^^"""

 

[quadomatic]

DC Emulation sounds very interesting, Sonic Adventure or all the DC "SNK vs. ..." Games onto the Handheld would be great.
But even onto the PC, DC emulation needs a powerful system. And as long as less powerful Consoles like the Saturn can't be emulated onto the Pandora, I doubt it would be more easy to make a playable DC Emu than a playable SATURN Emu for the Pandora.
AFAIK it is not easy even with similar Hardware Components. AFAIK "GPSP" GBA Emu for GP2X can't take advantage of the fact that GBA and GP2X have similar ARM Architecture. So if the DC and the Pandora have PoverVR components it doesn't say that these Chips can be used onto the Pandora in the way, they are used onto the DC.
But of course I wish the Devs all luck onto this project. I also hope they can use the Pandora Power somehow, even with all this NDA and closed Chipset restrictions. ^^"""

No, DC emulation runs on much slower platforms like Pentium IIIs. SSF needs an SSE2 enabled processor and a Shader Model 2 video card with 256MB of ram.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

From what I've heard, Saturn is very, very, weird. It's not the processing power as much as the complexity of the machine which makes it difficult to emulate.

 

[Kayday]

fast isn't the word I would use. I wonder what the bottleneck it.... could it be the CPU? Or the RAM.

It's the ram I believe because he said that the psp port will only run on psp lite because it has twice the ram of the old psp. Funny thing is he said he can get it full speed while his partner, Zeze of nullDC, said it's impossible. On the psp that is.

And great work on getting Raziel on board. I hear he is also working with Elsemi(CPS3 emu author) on the Naomi and Atomiswave arcade emulator. Maybe he'll bring those babies over to the Pandora also.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

fast isn't the word I would use. I wonder what the bottleneck it.... could it be the CPU? Or the RAM.

It's the ram I believe because he said that the psp port will only run on psp lite because it has twice the ram of the old psp. Funny thing is he said he can get it full speed while his partner, Zeze of nullDC, said it's impossible. On the psp that is.

Huh. Well I don't feel like I can say whether it's possible or not given my very limited programming experience, so I'll just spectate.

 

[quadomatic]

From what I've heard, Saturn is very, very, weird. It's not the processing power as much as the complexity of the machine which makes it difficult to emulate.

Yea, 2 cpus and 6 other processors. And we thought cell was difficult to swallow.

Regardless of all the hurdles, I'm glad that someone has announced that they will be taking up the project and will develop a DC emulator for Pandora.

If Sonic Adventure 2 could be played on Pandora....OMFG THAT WOULD BE SO INSANE...ahem. We'll see what unfolds.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

AFAIK "GPSP" GBA Emu for GP2X can't take advantage of the fact that GBA and GP2X have similar ARM Architecture. So if the DC and the Pandora have PoverVR components it doesn't say that these Chips can be used onto the Pandora in the way, they are used onto the DC.

The GBA has no OS to work with--everything is done directly in hardware, so all the hardware would have to be emulated. The DC on the other hand, has a Windows CE base that abstracts nearly everything from the hardware. Because of the layer of abstraction it takes much less relative power to emulate because much of the code can simply be redirected instead of interpreted and converted to different hardware calls.

 

[Julius]

I might be wrong about this, but AFAIK WindowsCE was only used in a few games, while most ran on the "bare hardware".

But I am definitly looking forward to any progress on this emulator (not that I am overly optimistic).

 

[CyruzDraxs]

I might be wrong about this, but AFAIK WindowsCE was only used in a few games, while most ran on the "bare hardware".

But I am definitly looking forward to any progress on this emulator (not that I am overly optimistic).

I believe that's partially true--parts of Windows CE are in the bios itself, so it still had abstractions, even if they went straight to the bios itself. I believe games had the option of including specific libraries like SDL and OpenGL that could be included on the disk and loaded by the BIOS as extension modules.

 

[Exophase]

I might be wrong about this, but AFAIK WindowsCE was only used in a few games, while most ran on the "bare hardware".

But I am definitly looking forward to any progress on this emulator (not that I am overly optimistic).

I believe that's partially true--parts of Windows CE are in the bios itself, so it still had abstractions, even if they went straight to the bios itself. I believe games had the option of including specific libraries like SDL and OpenGL that could be included on the disk and loaded by the BIOS as extension modules.


Like Julius said, most games didn't use WinCE, and the ones that did included it on the GD-ROM. The game code is statically linked and as far as an emulator is concerned is directly accessing the hardware.

I talked to drkIIRaziel (author of nullDC) about this today. He has some interesting ideas but I think his goals are far too optimistic. Also, videos right now are running such that one SH4 instruction = 6 cycles, you can interpret that however you want.

Does all make me more optimistic about Pandora at 900MHz being able to do it though.

 

[quadomatic]

I might be wrong about this, but AFAIK WindowsCE was only used in a few games, while most ran on the "bare hardware".

But I am definitly looking forward to any progress on this emulator (not that I am overly optimistic).

I believe that's partially true--parts of Windows CE are in the bios itself, so it still had abstractions, even if they went straight to the bios itself. I believe games had the option of including specific libraries like SDL and OpenGL that could be included on the disk and loaded by the BIOS as extension modules.


Like Julius said, most games didn't use WinCE, and the ones that did included it on the GD-ROM. The game code is statically linked and as far as an emulator is concerned is directly accessing the hardware.

I talked to drkIIRaziel (author of nullDC) about this today. He has some interesting ideas but I think his goals are far too optimistic. Also, videos right now are running such that one SH4 instruction = 6 cycles, you can interpret that however you want.

Does all make me more optimistic about Pandora at 900MHz being able to do it though.


I assumed that people were thinking Pandora would be at 900MHz for this in the first place. If anyone can do DC emulation on Pandora though, I would think that it is drkIIRaziel.

Exactly how optimistic is he anyways?

 

[MarkoeZ]

im a relative newb to this forum. But i think if Exophase is optimistic, that means something, right?

Anyway, thumbs up for everyone that's trying new things, i want one even more every day...