I am curious...the gp2x Wiz managed to emulate NES, N64, SNES, Playstation 1, Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari, MSX, blah blah even as far as go as DosBox. Why is there not a single gp32 emulator for the Wiz? What is stopping it the gp32 to be emulated in the Wiz? I think the library and attraction the Wiz will get if the gp32 is emulated 100% in the Wiz is......astonishing. What do you guys think?
With All The Emulators Out There Why Not Gp32?
- Thread starter foody
- Start date
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
There's no N64 emulator for Wiz, nor could one be done that performs acceptably. Likewise, PS1 emulation is considered inadequate. Compared to everything else on your list, GP32 has vastly more CPU power. Even on PCs GP32 emulation is only now progressing, and is pretty slow.
A conventional approach to GP32 emulation would probably not be fast enough on Wiz. A less precise and flexible attempt of virtualization could work to at least some extent - Squidge attempted this years ago on GP2X but didn't make it beyond emulating the BIOS. One of the downsides to this approach is that you'd likely have to punt Linux, which would leave you without ant drivers (a pain when needing access to filesystems on SD cards, for instance).
A conventional approach to GP32 emulation would probably not be fast enough on Wiz. A less precise and flexible attempt of virtualization could work to at least some extent - Squidge attempted this years ago on GP2X but didn't make it beyond emulating the BIOS. One of the downsides to this approach is that you'd likely have to punt Linux, which would leave you without ant drivers (a pain when needing access to filesystems on SD cards, for instance).
skeezix
Internal Development
And in the end here's not many people who desparately want a gp32 emu intersectng with Those of the right skillset. It's a lot of work.
Jeff
Jeff
skeezix said:
I do not understand why not though? I mean, gp32 have some AWESOME game collections and huge game libraries that is just so hot for....and gp32 is a dying console...it would soon reach extinction what a shame such library of stuff would go drain with the console. They are already attempting to emulate a PSX which is not an easy system to emulate have much more power CPU and everything compared to the gp32. In fact, they have to emulate the memory card, the cd player, and on and on ...while you guys say it is inadequate it is still able to play games at a playable speed and I find it enjoyable...
So how could emulating a gp32 which is half the speed of PSX, less RAM to emulate than PSX, less colors, no need to emulate a CD rom mechanisim and so on? By emulating a GP32 you would have combined two systems in one...making a Wiz a very attractive device to own!!
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gp2.eXe
Ultra Mega GP32X Mania Hardcore
I would love a Pandora emulator. 
Anyway, Exophase, please go with your usual "emulation is not as simple as you think..."
Anyway, Exophase, please go with your usual "emulation is not as simple as you think..."
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
foody said:
Much more CPU power?
PS1: 33MHz MIPS R400, 4KB instruction cache 1KB data scratchpad
GP32: 133MHz ARM920T, 16KB instruction cache, 16KB data cache
I wonder which one really had more CPU power?
(although to be fair, commercial GP32 games only ran the CPU at 66MHz, but you didn't say that's all you wanted emulated)
foody said:
Less RAM too?
PS1: 2MB main, 1MB VRAM, 512KB SPU
GP32: 8MB RAM
Seems like GP32 has lots more, although this doesn't matter for emulation on something like Wiz.
foody said:
This doesn't really matter.
foody said:
Has to emulate SMC instead, which is much lower latency and higher bandwidth than a 2x CD-ROM. Not like this really matters for emulation.
Not to say PS1 doesn't have a lot more high overhead components to emulate, you just didn't actually mention them. Like the GTE, GPU, and SPU. These things aren't cheap, but emulating it sucks on Wiz - that's why people focus on emulating 2D games with audio off, taking GTE and SPU emulation out of the equation.
To you PS1 emulation on Wiz might by acceptable but that doesn't mean that that level of degraded performance is enough incentive for someone else to spend their time on a brand new emulator (the PS1 emulator is not brand new at all). And of course GP32 emulation can not only potentially need far more instructions emulated per second, but you'll have far less leverage in short changing the cycles as you do with PS1 emulation because it needs those cycles to soft render the screen. And since rendering is happening in the CPU you can't just apply frameskip to get back performance.
I think you don't know much about the hardware you're talking about so you should educate yourself more before making these claims.
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SO with all those "negative" but very much informative and educative response indicates that emulating gp32 is never going to happen for any new modern consoles coming out there. Never going to happen for the Wiz, Pandora or the future handheld console and that when the time it disappears from the Earth all those games for it will follow suit...that you better get one now before it becomes a very rare commodity is that what you are saying?
Shaun
Member
I would love to see such an emulator on the Pandora which could probably handle it.
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
foody said:
I never said any of that >_<
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Shaun
Member
The Wiz can reach 800MHz? I didn't know that.
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
foody said:
Do I have to explain to you now why Pandora at 600MHz is much faster than Wiz at 600MHz? It'd be easier if you just took my word for it. This is pretty common knowledge.
Besides, I never said "Wiz can't do it" or "Pandora can." You jump to way too many conclusions.
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Exophase said:
Yes, you did not say it in those words...but you did say why it is not possible to port gp32 to gp2x and be playable and useable on Wiz and you have given me detailed specifications for the reason behind it. So any person can take it in the conclusion that Wiz cannot handle running gp32 emulator and that the PC itself modern PC with duo processor running at 3 Ghz using 2 GB RAM is barely emulating.
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Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
foody said:
No, I explained why your misconceptions regarding GP32's capabilities relative to PS1's were incorrect, and also explained that conventional emulation techniques would probably yield poor results on Wiz. I said that that the current state of GP32 emulation on PC is slow (I didn't say anything about 3GHz or 2GB of RAM), but I didn't say that GP32 emulation couldn't be much faster on PC than it currently is (and it can).
GP32 emulation using virtualization techniques on Wiz and yielding acceptable results (whatever that means) might be possible. Or it might not be. I don't know, and no one will really know until they try.
Please try reading less between the lines and more on the lines.
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Exophase said:
Alright, apologize for before....but that is an excellent reason why an attempt should be done at least. At least when an attempt is made, a serious attempt and it failed there are evidence to proof the case. But where we stand now...it will always be open for discussion and on the back of your mind..."what if".
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bourbon
Member
Umm so you want to emulate a sys that mainly runs emulators for other systems? The few commercial games were not that good and most of the home brew has been ported. Same goes with most of the emus they were ported or some other emu that does the same thing took their place. Finally if you want to play a gp32 get a gp32 i still play mine just about every day.
Squidge
Certified Guru
On the GP2X & Wiz, emulation of the GP32 is not a problem. I've done it (not including sound). However, there are some stumbling blocks. You can't emulate the BIOS properly because it's constantly trying to trample over your CP15 registers, so you have to nop those out. Secondly, if it reads anything from disk and tries to execute it, chances are that it'll crash as you can't trap the memory writes and flush the cache before the execution. Some goes for nearly every GP32 app out there that has decompression/decryption built in.
Its true you could fix some of the above problems by turning off the caches, but then it'll run like a snail.
Far far easier to just use a GP32 for the GP32-only games. The rest of the library has already been ported to GP2x/Wiz.
Its true you could fix some of the above problems by turning off the caches, but then it'll run like a snail.
Far far easier to just use a GP32 for the GP32-only games. The rest of the library has already been ported to GP2x/Wiz.
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Squidge said:
Sounds like it is a problem afterall then. So then what software have you actually succeeded in emulating, outside of the modified BIOS?
The CP15 trampling and cache coherency problems seem pretty related - GP2X and Wiz have cache configurations similar to GP32's, so they'll have the same basic coherency issues. Those CP15 writes are probably to clear/writeback cache.
Technically these things shouldn't cause problems so easily because ARM9's caches are read allocating. Unless the code memory is read at some point before having code written to it the code should write to memory, not dcache. Then it'll be loaded in icache without problem. So if it really is crashing it should be something more complex.
I think that's the real heart of the problem - this kind of emulator is a bitch to debug.
Squidge said:
Can you really compare those things?
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