What Is The Clock Frequency Of The Pandora ?

[hlidegp2x]

Exophase had prior been stating the GBA outclassed anything else emulated on the GP2X except the PS1 and Jaguar, which is blatantly false. The reason I said GBA CPU emulation shouldn't be that much more stressful than many other platforms on the gp2x is because the CPU architecture is the same which, to my understanding, would enable you to run a lot of code natively. If not, oh well. But the biggest hurdle should be the graphics sub-system.....

"... WOULD enable you ..." so you admit your ignorance. To run a lot of code natively ? well, for my little experience about it, it is VERY HARD to run a foreign code as a native code on another platform even if they share the same ISA. There is always a lot of things you still need to emulate and for this reason you cannot easily mix "foreign/native" code (that is, chunk of unmodified code) with emulated code. Most time, you need to rename registers to make it realistic, which means "enabl[ing the host machine] to run a lot of code natively" is "blatantly false" as well.

 

[StealthBagel]

Yes that is very obvious because the memory map of the emulating handheld and the emulated platform are different...... very different. This is part of why dynamic recompilation is so common, because the code can't run as-is. The more similar the architectures though, the simpler that process should be....

I find your tone really curious when you admit 'limited knowledge' then rage against me for 'ignorance'. Wild....

 

[Clad]

Hmm, I was wondering... If the GBA, that seems visually pretty close to the SNES, has so much motr beef, what about the N64 to the NDS ?

I mean, to my eyes, it also seems pretty much the same (maybe even less impressive due to the lack of texture filtering), but how does the N64 compare to the DS ?

The DS is basically an ARM9, an ARM7, and at least the GBA custom hardware... would you say it's safe to assume than emulating the NDS would require about as much power as required to run an instance of a GBA emulator and another of a GP32 emulator ? If so, that would mean the NDS would certainly be in the reach of the Pandora.

 

[icurafu]

DS wouldn't be that hard.

It would also be lame, considering it's still a commercial product and therefore not retro at all.

If you really want to play DS roms, get a DS and a card. Talking about emulating current game systems is just asking for trouble.

 

[Exophase]

Hmm, I was wondering... If the GBA, that seems visually pretty close to the SNES, has so much motr beef, what about the N64 to the NDS ?

I mean, to my eyes, it also seems pretty much the same (maybe even less impressive due to the lack of texture filtering), but how does the N64 compare to the DS ?

Difficult to say, N64 and DS are pretty different archs.

The DS is basically an ARM9, an ARM7, and at least the GBA custom hardware... would you say it's safe to assume than emulating the NDS would require about as much power as required to run an instance of a GBA emulator and another of a GP32 emulator ? If so, that would mean the NDS would certainly be in the reach of the Pandora.

My rough estimation (don't hold me to this) is that DS emulation needs around 4x to 6x power as GBA emulation. 67MHz ARM9 is over 4x as powerful as the ARM7 on GBA but is on a 33MHz bus and has mysterious additional penalties, although when running in cache/ITCM/DTCM it should sustain over 4x GBA speed. The ARM7 is 2x, so add them together and it's over 6x the potential CPU power. The ARM9 is also running pure ARM code more of the time because of its cache. The ARM7 is probably not aggressively utilized because in commercial games it only runs Nintendo library code. Like always few games will push the CPU to the limit so it'll vary from game to game, and hopefully they don't use idle loops that much.

But it's not just the CPU, the video hardware is a lot more featured than the GBA hardware.. first you can have more raw layer output, now there can be 2 text layers + 2 affine layers, although I doubt it ever makes that much of a difference. There's 3D output and the resolution is a little higher too, but most of all there are two separate engines entirely for both screens (only one can do 3D) and there's capture hardware that's actually heavily used. One of the emulated screens can probably be heavily frameskipped a lot of the time though.

Finally they improved the sound by adding 16 channel wavetable, fortunately it's not heavily featured...

I think DS might be possible on Pandora but we have to wait and see first.

 

[hlidegp2x]

what about the N64 to the NDS ?

To run it on a NDS ? are you sarcastic ?

 

[icurafu]

He is just saying, comparing the hardware of N64 to the NDS.

It's been a while since someone has suggested n64 on nds.

 

[hlidegp2x]

Yes that is very obvious because the memory map of the emulating handheld and the emulated platform are different...... very different. This is part of why dynamic recompilation is so common, because the code can't run as-is. The more similar the architectures though, the simpler that process should be....

I find your tone really curious when you admit 'limited knowledge' then rage against me for 'ignorance'. Wild....

because of my "little" experience ? I coded an unfinished PSX to PSP dynarec and i'm actually coding it for iphone and hope to do it for pandora. PSX ISA is merely a subset of PSP ISA and still any attempt to run it "natively" just happens to be unrealistic (oh well i didn't check SONY pops as it does well), so i would bet GBA to ARM-based wouldn't run "natively" (this is where you may call my 'limited knowledge') because of the same difficulties we could meet.

NOTE : memory map is not the only obstacle, there are other obstacles but i wouldn't detail them here as it is not an important matter. I just wanted to point out the fact to have an ISA compatibility doesn't mean a better emulation.

He is just saying, comparing the hardware of N64 to the NDS.

It's been a while since someone has suggested n64 on nds.

you're right

 

[StealthBagel]

Changing gears I don't think pirates need to be trying to run DS games on a pandora and should just buy a DS..... but I would personally enjoy running them on there to cut down on the number of devices I'd carry. I own a DS and a large number of games, and an M3 lite, but I normally carry that, an iPod, a PocketPC, my wallet and keys in my pockets.... that is a lot of shit and it's uncomfortable. I'd like pandora to cover my gaming, organizational, and music playing tasks and free up a few pockets. If it can run my DS games so much the better....

 

[Squidge]

Maybe the Pandora can handle all these Alpha-Transparency Stuff in Hardware to, could be a incredible speed boost in the SNES Emulation compared to the GP2X.

The alpha-transparency stuff isn't the slow part of snes - its drawing two copies of the backgrounds thats the slow parts. Merging them into one doesn't take long at all.

 

[StealthBagel]

Lots of smaller optimizations and accelerated bits would add up to some serious gains though...

 

[Clad]

(only one can do 3D)
It's what I always thought, but have you played Phantom Hourglass ? In some boss battle, both screen do 3D. I mean, each screen really have complex real time 3D with a lot of polys, and it's not pre-rendered or otherwise faked, both screens display mario64-grade 3D at the same time.

In MKDS, there were already a few example of 3D on both screen (race opening), but with one screen having definitly less stuff to draw I assumed it wasn't using specific 3D hardware and was rendering in software, but Zelda really impressed me with the quality of the 3D on both screen. Any idea how they did that ? Did they finally managed to enable the use of the 3D hardware on both screen ?

 

[craigix]

I only did a little dev for the DS but you can probably flip between screens with 3D reducing the frame rate by half (so 30fps 3D on each screen maybe?).

 

[Exophase]

I only did a little dev for the DS but you can probably flip between screens with 3D reducing the frame rate by half (so 30fps 3D on each screen maybe?).

Yeah, craig is right, only one screen can do 3D at a time, the other one has to capture the image it's rendering and display it statically next frame using the secondary engine (which is purely 2D). In addition to halving your framerate it also costs a bunch of VRAM.

Stealth Bagel; You can't always just partially accelerate something. The overall rendering will usually require a particular format that might not fit well with what your accelerator can do.

 

[Orkie]

I only did a little dev for the DS but you can probably flip between screens with 3D reducing the frame rate by half (so 30fps 3D on each screen maybe?).

Yes, that is exactly how it is done.

 

[icurafu]

Just to let people know. At OpenPandora.ca there is a change of specs.

Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor at 625MHz.

 

[Exophase]

Just to let people know. At OpenPandora.ca there is a change of specs.

Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor at 625MHz.

Neat :a

I wonder what brought this about.

 

[MWeston]

Just to let people know. At OpenPandora.ca there is a change of specs.

Texas Instruments OMAP3430 processor at 625MHz.

Neat :a

I wonder what brought this about.

TI has made a public release of their 3430 kernel with this clock and others listed as supported options. I thought it would be a nice addition to my site.

 

[sbock]

Thanks for this info. Can you also tell us the clock frequency of the GPU core or is that under NDA?

Regards,
Stephan

 

[Peter R]

Could you post a link to the TI release of this information?