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

[waffles]

well, considering the original creators of the game have long ago stopped making money on it, and many can be ridiculously expensive...
im going to just shut up before i get b&.
anyway, i just recently got a dreamcast from ebay, absolutely love it.
mainly for hydroo thuuuner, honestly.

 

[Exophase]

It'll be atleast 5 times faster before you even start dynrec from ARM to ARM rather than ARM to MIPS in teh future.

So 5 FPS on the hardest game of the bat if it is CPU bound. I would be impressed if we get that. Anyway, GPU and audio should mostly be handeled by other processors, so their impact will be much less than the CPU.

Dreamcast is SH4. Although there is an ARM coprocessor in Dreamcast it is not where a bulk of the emulation goes. ARM can perhaps map SH4 a little better in many ways and can do more sophisticated optimizations, but MIPS has enough registers to map them all w/o any kind of partial allocation, and PSP's Allegrex CPU can handle SH4's vector instructions much more efficiently than NEON can.

nullDC for PSP isn't using a recompiler yet anyway, but it's also silly to compare because it's emulating a very underclocked Dreamcast.

 

[argor]

true. If it is memory bound, we might not see that on the Pandora and get a massive increase. If it all fits in 64MB, it would be CPU bound. The Pandora CPU would be many-many times fast than the PSP when clocked at 900-1000MHz.

900 vs 333 mhz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth :rolleyes:

 

[icurafu]

Sorry exophase. how could I be so dumb to confuse that?

 

[jaycee900]

Now if the early version for the PSP is getting 1fps, and lets say the max he may get out of it will be 5fps, obviously no clue about developing, but so for arguments sake a pandora port will be 3 times faster CPU wise say 15fps, will a Pandora port if developed in such a way would be possible to use the PowerVR GPU to handle the graphics since the DC also used roughly the same architecture and take aload off the CPU allowing a few more fps?, would this seemingly mean less of a pipe dream for a semi-playable emulator for the Pandora now? (Knowing a lot of work would obviously needed to be put into it)


Edit: Sorry didnt' see! thread about DC Emu (Yeah i know!) mod please move post into that thread.



http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=125872

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/07/29/dreamcas...al-really-slow/

[EDIT 29/7/2008 18:01 - Done - Tobriand]

 

[GuchaRU]

about DC emulation
look here http://pspupdates.qj.net/Videos-nullDC-Dre...g/49/aid/122650
its probably fake, but if it's not then pandora 100% will can be emulate DC
if even psp can do it.

 

[quadomatic]

about DC emulation
look here http://pspupdates.qj.net/Videos-nullDC-Dre...g/49/aid/122650
its probably fake, but if it's not then pandora 100% will can be emulate DC
if even psp can do it.



It's not fake, those videos are what we've been basing this discussion off of for the past couple pages...

drkIIRaziel is making that. He also announced that he would be making a port of nullDC to Pandora.

 

[Tinnus]

...it's not fake, and if you could read the last 3 pages you'd see that we were discussing EXACTLY because of these.

Obviously anything can emulate anything providing it's got enough storage/memory. That is, if you ever learned something about Turing machines Emulating at full speed is of course another thing altogether, and that's basically the point here.

 

[Kayday]

If this emu gets to the point of playable, what a huge boost it would be for Pandora sales.

 

[conso]

If this emu gets to the point of playable, what a huge boost it would be for Pandora sales.

Only if it is really playable on pandora but not on psp.

 

[God Ginrai]

buying dreamcast games?

Of course. It's one of the few consoles I won't be able to emulate on the Pandora, and definitely the best of those few.

-God Ginrai

I do believe he's referring to the ease of which you can burn Dreamcast games yourself, though talking about such things is most likely taboo here...


True, I didn't even think that was what he meant. However, I'm adverse to burning DC games because of all the arguments about how it kills the laser. Besides, I like to have my DC games with the logos and original cases and manuals.

-God Ginrai

 

[nubie]

True, I didn't even think that was what he meant. However, I'm adverse to burning DC games because of all the arguments about how it kills the laser. Besides, I like to have my DC games with the logos and original cases and manuals.

-God Ginrai

"kills the laser"?!?!?!

1. The laser IS a CD laser, just with different software to read tighter tracks
2. DC can play CD's, if that "ruins laser" then there is serious problem
3. The inside track of all DC disks are standard CD spaced tracks
4. The laser will read a CD track of its own volition across the whole disk.

I wouldn't burn them for real reasons:

1. The lower quality textures/video will look like crap on my 80" 640x480 projector with the VGA cable on my dreamcast.
2. The games are very affordable used on eBay
3. IF I was worried about overburned disks forcing the laser to read off the end of its track I would make sure that my CD was not overburned.

But even onto the PC, DC emulation needs a powerful system.

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.

Well, you have to realize that PC ports don't get optimized very well when a $100 spent on faster video card/cpu/memory will make the emulator much faster than spending all your time optimizing.

I mean look at the price of a 2ghz "pentium" core2duo these days, around $50, and it should overclock to nearly 3Ghz, so there is no reason to make the PC emulator any better when there is no lack of processing power.

On a handheld though you are dealing with a set amount of power. The bonus is hardware/software compatibility on all units, this means you can pretty much take for granted that all units work the same and implement optimizations that wouldn't be possible in a Desktop PC.

 

[quadomatic]

buying dreamcast games?

Of course. It's one of the few consoles I won't be able to emulate on the Pandora, and definitely the best of those few.

-God Ginrai

I do believe he's referring to the ease of which you can burn Dreamcast games yourself, though talking about such things is most likely taboo here...


True, I didn't even think that was what he meant. However, I'm adverse to burning DC games because of all the arguments about how it kills the laser. Besides, I like to have my DC games with the logos and original cases and manuals.

-God Ginrai


I'm gonna say that it wouldn't do any damage whatsoever as long as you burned at a slow speed. Its DVD's that break lasers.

The only thing I would worry about breaking with the Dreamcast relates to playing it to much, where some pins or something get hot and move and cause the system to short. That only takes about 5 minutes to fix though.

 

[God Ginrai]

buying dreamcast games?

Of course. It's one of the few consoles I won't be able to emulate on the Pandora, and definitely the best of those few.

-God Ginrai

I do believe he's referring to the ease of which you can burn Dreamcast games yourself, though talking about such things is most likely taboo here...


True, I didn't even think that was what he meant. However, I'm adverse to burning DC games because of all the arguments about how it kills the laser. Besides, I like to have my DC games with the logos and original cases and manuals.

-God Ginrai


I'm gonna say that it wouldn't do any damage whatsoever as long as you burned at a slow speed. Its DVD's that break lasers.

The only thing I would worry about breaking with the Dreamcast relates to playing it to much, where some pins or something get hot and move and cause the system to short. That only takes about 5 minutes to fix though.


The argument for those who say it breaks it is that the laser has to hunt for data that isn't where it is supposed to be, and therefore gets overworked.

-God Ginrai

 

[quadomatic]

The argument for those who say it breaks it is that the laser has to hunt for data that isn't where it is supposed to be, and therefore gets overworked.

-God Ginrai



ic, well if you're worried about it, I suppose you shouldn't break it. Dreamcasts aren't so easy to come by anymore...unless you go on eBay though :lol:

On another note, can we sticky this thread? Not because I think that this is a SUPER important thread or something, but because people have continued to make DC emulation threads, and this sort of discussion will never disappear.

Sorry for the quote pyramid, lemme try fixing it.

 

[CronoTriggerfan]

Eh, I'll only burn a disk for a backup or if I want to try one out before purchasing it. I'm with God Ginrai, I like having the complete set; not that I'm much of a collector or anything, but it feels much more authentic that way.

 

[waffles]

i have a couple extra xbox cases, i just flip them around and print on em, it looks pretty nice.
anyway, it seems like the games i would like to buy go for about 10$, and considering i only payed about 18$ for the system, it feels hard to justify.

 

[ish420]

Well word on zzdt's blog is that raazel, will port nullDC to Pandora when he gets one. I know i totally screwed up their names, but i think you who I mean.

Edit. It's been reported. Sorry, that what happens when you skip a page or two.

 

[khephren]

Well, Ive not posted on here for a while, so hello to any old faces...

I used to develop on the dreamcast back in the day, and one of the main differences (from an artist/designers point of view) was that the PVR2 chipset used tile based defered rendering, unlike most other GPU's that used Z-buffers for occlusion, and for checking which poly's are off screen. This makes it a lot slower to emulate the them on modern GPU's.
However, If the pandora's PVR5 GPU still uses tile based rendering, you could be in for a pleasant surprise on that front.

Also, I remember one of our coders being very happy that the DC sound chip was ARM based, 'cos he was an old Acorn programmer....which means there is a chance that the sound chip OP codes can be ran direct without emulation? ....This bit is artist fuzzy logic, I guess a coder will have to look into that.


Also, doesn't the pandora have a beefy DSP that could be used as well?

Hope this has made things even more confused!


Kheph

 

[icurafu]

Apparently the Pandora DSP at 420MHz is beefy, but I do not know how to demonstrate.

Apparently, it can run an MPEG4 movie at 720P.