Where Next

[jaycee900]

@MDave - Hows ZEQ2Lite coming along?
Personally I think N64 will be playable by most peoples definition. Perfect, well hopefully at some point.
I feel like as soon as I get the pand I'll be spoilt in terms of emulation, with what's already there in general.
Doom 3 is out of our hands until source release.

[edit]

As good as N64 emulation is/will be, the pinnacle would be a decent playable Dreamcast emulation, i mean N64 emulation has been around since 1997 full speed via voodoo graphics cards while the N64 was in the shops, sure its great to have it in your hands, Dreamcast on the other hand hasn't been around that long and too see a vast improvement in the last 6 months builds is trully impressive, to emulate a 128-bit machine thats still have the odd game released for it on a handheld machine IS amazing...

Was with you till I read 128-bit

The Dreamcast was 128-bit , not that people cared by that point.

 

[juniorm33]

Was with you till I read 128-bit

The Dreamcast was 128-bit , not that people cared by that point.

101 ways to measure it! But my point is that has nothing to do with emulating it apart from propagating the bit myth race that was on back then.

 

[jaycee900]

Was with you till I read 128-bit

The Dreamcast was 128-bit , not that people cared by that point.

101 ways to measure it! But my point is that has nothing to do with emulating it apart from propagating the bit myth race that was on back then.

The bit race was over by the dc, it all got stupid with atari and the supposed 64 bit jaguar but we won't go there! Or even the pc engine which some say was 16 bit , so yeah I agree it was about 'bits' in the 90s, now it's sonys bullshit above the rest!

 

[Exophase]

People have different expectations of 'fullspeed' I think. Some people seem to think Super Mario 64 running at full speed would mean full speed emulation in general. I'd call when we see Goldeneye, Perfect Dark and Star Wars: Rouge Squadron and other more demanding games running at full speed the pinnacle of N64 Emulation, as well as no graphic glitches. But that's going to be hard to achieve unless GLES 2.0 shaders are used Is that the current plan? Or sticking with 1.1?

Indeed, Mario 64 is one of the easier games to reach fullspeed on. I think people would also like to see it at something less than 850MHz, especially when we don't even know if all Pandoras will be able to reach that speed.

As far as I'm aware OGL ES 1.1 is being used, with Adventus's wrapper, and the shaders are not a bottleneck as even with shaders that do nothing no performance is gained. Someone will probably find a way to squeeze more CPU out of the graphics plugin (and perhaps sound plugin) because history tells us that better performance is possible without even using SIMD.

i mean N64 emulation has been around since 1997 full speed via voodoo graphics cards while the N64 was in the shops

I guess 1997 must be the new 1999.

The Dreamcast was 128-bit , not that people cared by that point.

I guess Sega did, or they wouldn't have falsely marketed it as 128-bit given that it was really 32-bit. But this was the company that claimed the Genesis had "Blast Processing"...

 

[juniorm33]

101 ways to measure it! But my point is that has nothing to do with emulating it apart from propagating the bit myth race that was on back then.

The bit race was over by the dc, it all got stupid with atari and the supposed 64 bit jaguar but we won't go there! Or even the pc engine which some say was 16 bit , so yeah I agree it was about 'bits' in the 90s, now it's sonys bullshit above the rest!

oh ooooo..... don't poke that bee hive

 

[Adventus]

Indeed, Mario 64 is one of the easier games to reach fullspeed on. I think people would also like to see it at something less than 850MHz, especially when we don't even know if all Pandoras will be able to reach that speed.

MWeston's video shows it at 600mhz then at 800mhz.

As far as I'm aware OGL ES 2.0 is being used, with Adventus's wrapper, and the shaders are not a bottleneck as even with shaders that do nothing no performance is gained.

Fixed. Yeah shaders aren't a bottleneck yet, but mario 64 is basically the best case scenario. Games like banjo kazooie use some relatively complex shaders with multiple texture sources, simple shadows and lighting being blended together. If the shaders do begin to bottleneck the first thing i'll do is remove the vertex shader and use NEON instead.

 

[Asiyura]

It would be to get Total Annihilation, FreeSpace 2 and a little something working on pandora.

• There is a gplv2 engine called Spring that was basically build to do a remake of Total Annihilation, don't know how much work it would be to port it for pandora.
  But the look and feel is great. With the touchscreen, playing would be fast and accurate.
• The FreeSpace Engine source code has been released since 2002 and many upgrades to it have been made by fans.
  I mean, think about it, playing FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 on Pandora ... even online with the WiFi connection.
  There is even a complete standalone project that aims to remake the whole Wing Commander serie based on that engine.
  I miss all those great space sim games, they where my favourite games when I was a teenager.
• The third, but the most important to me would be to see my own game running on pandora.
  Atm I'm trying to learn how to handle SDL and OpenGL ES.
  I would like to make a platformer/rpg like CastleVania SotN, but with more RPG elements and with a level editor.
  Maybe I'm aiming too high, But aim at the moon, If you miss, you'll always reach the stars

 

[MDave]

@MDave - Hows ZEQ2Lite coming along?

It's coming along great We have linux builds of the inteam beta 2 up and running, so if we want to see ZEQ2Lite running on the Pandora it's not going to take much work at all As long as the nanogl wrapper plays nice with it. Until I get my Pandora to start porting it over, there's not a whole lot I can do in the mean time, unless someone with a beagle board or Pandora wants to do it first

@Adventus: Ahh I see, thanks for correcting me! That is great to hear, so this should make emulating the N64's blend modes with programmable shaders much more accurate I presume?

 

[musicalwoods]

Thought Android was already confirmed working on a Pandora? I'd love to throw 2.0 on it! Pandora would be the most powerful hand held device with Android right?

Android has been ported to the Beagleboard which should make it easier to finish the job on Pandora. Last I saw on the Beagleboard port it was missing graphics acceleration support. Also, for porting to the pandora support for WiFi, bluetooth, touchscreen and probably some hardware pieces I'm not thinking of would need to be coded... I know that there are a few people interested in working on this, or have done some work towards this but there is not a working product yet AFAIK.

Pandora would arguably be up to par with new Android 2.0 devices coming out soon such as the Motorola Droid, but not exceeding in sheer processing power IMO.

HTC has announced they are porting 2.0 to the Hero, so it will definitely run on the Pandora as the Hero as a comparatively slow processor. 2.0 is supposed to be optimized for the OMAP as well, as that is what the DROID phone is running on.

 

[Exophase]

Fixed. Yeah shaders aren't a bottleneck yet, but mario 64 is basically the best case scenario. Games like banjo kazooie use some relatively complex shaders with multiple texture sources, simple shadows and lighting being blended together. If the shaders do begin to bottleneck the first thing i'll do is remove the vertex shader and use NEON instead.

Yeah I meant 2.0, that was just a typo.

 

[Adventus]

@Adventus: Ahh I see, thanks for correcting me! That is great to hear, so this should make emulating the N64's blend modes with programmable shaders much more accurate I presume?

Hmmm, as accurate as the PC version of glN64 anyway. It seems pretty common to use fixed function texture environments to emulate the blends modes, rice_video and glN64 use them anyway (glide64 uses the glide ~equivalent). It's so they can support OGL 1.5 cards.

 

[Trip]

http://nebula.emulatronia.com/index.php

Don't think it's open source though. But it works fine on x86, had a quick go on Sega Rally.

Cheers for that. Didn't think there were as many great games for the Model 2..

Definitely an emulator that would show the Pandoras capabilities

 

[Near_Kstor]

OMG!! Sonic the Fighters!!
That was my most-played arcade of all times! =X

OK, we definitively need the Model 2 emulator on the pandora o.o

 

[hackroid]

Virtual On alone makes Model 2 emulation worthwhile

 

[mindlord]

Virtual On alone makes Model 2 emulation worthwhile

I totally agree here. The Pandora's controls are well suited to this game as well.

 

[emil10001]

Looks like there was a Virtual On released on the Dreamcast. I would really like to try that out, since I never got the original for the sega saturn.

 

[hackroid]

Looks like there was a Virtual On released on the Dreamcast. I would really like to try that out, since I never got the original for the sega saturn.

The Sega Saturn seems to be a hard Console to Emulate, but the arcade original and the Dreamcast versions would be the best bet. As mentioned above by mindlord the nubs would work perfectly for the arcade version, you may have to remap the Dreamcast controls, I've never been a big fan of the Dreamcast controller, love the system though.

 

[PoisonedV]

Lots of programs (and emulators) aren't well optimized because every computer has different hardware setups.
With Pandora, this is not the case... Everyone will have exactly the same components inside the device.
This "standard" allows developers to actually make things run a little better.
(Being the last resort in this case ARM assembly coding for some high optimizing)

So, yeah, obviously none of the things I expect from Pandora, I expect to have from day 1.
But for me is quite clear that Pandora have power enough to do it all.

nah

 

[mindlord]

I've played all three. The arcade version is superior in every conceivable way. The Dreamcast version is only good if you can grapple one of the dual stick controllers. The DC version was also quite easy, comparatively. The Saturn version is quite good, mainly because it's controls feel better, since the game was made with the normal Saturn controller in mind, and not the dual stick controller.

 

[jaycee900]

I guess Sega did, or they wouldn't have falsely marketed it as 128-bit given that it was really 32-bit. But this was the company that claimed the Genesis had "Blast Processing"...

For a start its a Megadrive, not the stupid US renamed nonsense due to copyright.
Again we could go on for weeks about the bit debate, the CPU on the Dreamcast was 32-bit sure, but the GPU was 128-bit, the same way Atari came to the conclusion the Jaguar was 64-bit, the bit race changed from the CPU to the GPU somehow along the line...but i get the understanding you dont really care, to the matter nor do I, but slagging off a company for falsely advertising something.....hmmm now let me think who is the BIGGEST bullshitter heyho Sony springs to mind....emotion engine.....you can thank Sony for the state of the games industry and the lack of independant publishers and developers...but don't get me started on that, i'd rather play games that were made before the hype train came into town.