Xbox/Gamecube/PS2 emulator

[Twimfy]

Ok this one isn't as crazy as the lightgun idea as I think it is possible but impossible for some one to complete in a single lifetime.

I've always had a theory that any game can be 'emulated' on any machine with a screen and an acceptable colour pallette.

How it works (in theory)

Get a copy of say Unreal 2 for the PC, decide that you are only going to make one room playable, with one weapon on the GP32. Then either manually (practically impossible) or automatically (via a custom made tool) take a screenshot of every available position whilst in this room in every direction, pixel by pixel (or maybe say every 10 pixels and the GP32 lcd can fill the rest).

Then build a 'emulator' for the GP32 that simply plays through a slideshow of the pictures, where the speed of the picture changing and to what picture is determined by what button is being pressed and for how long.

Now in THEORY it is possible, it would require extreme coding and would probably require an entire SMC just for the pictures and they would have to be compressed as much as possible. The only thing that would determine how well it would run would be how many pictures can fit in the RAM that's left over after the code is in effect, and how quickly the GP32 LCD can recieve them and then fill the ram back up again in time, also how quickly it could transition between the pics.

Ok so the game would be more ported than emulated and it wouldn't be true 3D but it would be the ultimate impressive app to show people who hadn't seen the GP32 before and you could feign loss of battery power just before they ask why you can't go into the next area on half-life 2.

Anyhoo just a thought.

 

[Mofokubik]

Meh, you could just mod doom to use some new levels and textures... Or just make/port a new engine...

 

[Twimfy]

But what about non-FPS anything could be ported, anything at all, from any system.

 

[Chip]

That's not really porting. That's just making an interactive walkthrough. Dragon's Lair was made like this, as was that hokey Sega hologram arcade game. The main problem with this is that it takes up HUGE ammounts of storage. DL and that holo game were laserdisc and hard disk based games, respectively

You couldn't make more than 1 or 2 rooms before you ran out of storage space. Not even that much if you wanted enmies. It's the most thoroughly impractical idea I've ever heard. :rolleyes:

 

[Twimfy]

That's not really porting. That's just making an interactive walkthrough. Dragon's Lair was made like this, as was that hokey Sega hologram arcade game. The main problem with this is that it takes up HUGE ammounts of storage. DL and that holo game were laserdisc and hard disk based games, respectively

You couldn't make more than 1 or 2 rooms before you ran out of storage space. Not even that much if you wanted enmies. It's the most thoroughly impractical idea I've ever heard. :rolleyes:

Oh of course it's impractible but it would be interesting to see done I'm not being serious I just thought I'd speak my mind, if done correctly it wouldn't be like a walkthrough it would be like the real game because essentially that's what the graphics card of a PC does it just displays the appropriate screen for the input.

I suppose it could be used for more simplistic games (some GBA games perhaps) rather successfully again I'd imagine though, several SMC's would be required.

Actually I'm very tempted to just create a demo of this working involving screens of deus ex only going in the foward direction. If you were to go backwards it would just crash or display blank, but going directly fowards controlling the speed with the stick would put it a step above watching an Avi doing the same thing.

 

[jlebrech]

thats impossible theres infinite possibilities in a game, not to mention in 3d.

I thought umeant resolution and pallete shrinking and preemulation?

if you reduce the resolution then emulation is possible.

what example is a machine is 4 times as powerful then u can emulate it if you reduce the resolution by a quarter. thats would apply if most processing power is in the rendering code.

 

[Twimfy]

There aren't infinite possibilties if you remove AI and limit everything to one, therefore one weapon one viewpoint etc. Then there are only as many possibilities as there are x,y,z co-ordinate pixel numbers within the space of the room which should be a few million.

 

[JDUK]

So it would basically be like Bards Tale or Dungeon Master with crappy quality U2k3 gfx? <_<

...You hear a plasma burst to the south,
...A giant rat attacks you for 3 points of damage
...You activate the wand of Zordor
...The rat takes 74 damage
...You gain 14 experience
...You are covered in gibs...
...A voice to the North bellows "Unstoppable!"

craazzzzeeeeeeeeee fun !

 

[bradley]

baka

 

[Rigor Mortis]

The only good this would do would be to fool the ignorant into buying GP32s to play Deus Ex and Half Life, etc....

On the other hand, a GP32 remake of Deus Ex using the Doom Engine would be SWEET. Of course, it would be a VERY loose remake because so much would have to be changed to make it playable on the Doom engine... actually it would be more like a Doom mod that just happens to share a storyline and weapons and enemies and such with Deus Ex.... Still, it would be cool

 

[klay51]

Yeah, the storage space owuld eb enormous. Think of takign a picture of ever single angle and even if theres only one enemy then ud have to take a picture of every single possible position the enemy could be in in relation to the main character. I mean its possible in a way..just UBER impractical

 

[JDUK]

..... Please insert Unreal 2: SMC No. 178 of 9000
"Wha?!? i only wanted to move forward 3 ft !"


Twimfy if your thinking of getting in to programming your GP, I think you should do a little research on the theory behind how games "work". I'm not being funny with ya' but the idea that every thing on screen is one single big image and every possibility needs to be mapped out without an actual engine is a pretty big misconseption.



Oooh my last post just gave me an idea who's gona remake Hired Guns on the GP for me ?

 

[atrkidd]

let's say you need 4 screenshots a second, and let the "lcd fill it" :

320x240x8 bits x4

now let's say it takes 2 seconds to do a full turn, and there are no animations for characters, weapons, or enemies, but just the room :
x2

now let's say you can look up or down by just a certain angle :
320x240x8 bits x4 x2
+
320x240x8 bits x4 x2
+
320x240x8 bits x4 x2

now let's say you'll move 1 step : same thing + new :
2x(320x240x8x4x2 x3) = 2x(14745600) bits

now for every different step, you'll have :
2x(14745600),
3x(14745600),
4x(14745600)
....

now let's say there's also weapons, chars, monsters...
this adds even more factors

consider the smc can't load things that fast, that there isn't enough ram, that the frame rate would be choppy anyway...

what about if you lose life, does that add 99 copies of each frame too ?

this is impossible

 

[khephren]

Twinfy, this idea is crazy, but it's made for a good discussion, so cheers!
Didn't one of the later Zork games use something similar to this? (nemesis maybe) you could walk in any one of eight directions, and then it would give you a new 360 degree image (a bit like quicktime VR), it was cool for RPG's. Crazy idea's can sometimes work though, ever seen bump mapping on a PS1 game? we had it in a tech demo once....
Hired guns was sweet. How about hired guns, with a doom engine, with wireless support. THat would be brilliant.

 

[mithris]

Hehehe, this was a kinda fun idea..
because, you first have to define a discreete unit in space..
lets say 1cm.. and you have a room that is 5x5x5 meters
that would mean 500x500x500 positions.
Then, you would like to view the room from each of those positions from every angle..
Than would be a huge amount of angles, so just let us use a hack, and select 1024 normals from a sphere, which gives us 1024 different viewing angles.
Then we have 500x500x500x1024 different images.
And thats 128 billion images..

Lets then say we use a lowish resolution.. like 80x40 pixels and tough jpeg compression, and then each image would be around 1kb
that would be 119.2 terrabytes of data.
And that would result in
976562.5 128mb SMC's

And thats only one room.
in a really crappy resolution etc.


---
mithris

 

[Twimfy]

..... Please insert Unreal 2: SMC No. 178 of 9000
"Wha?!? i only wanted to move forward 3 ft !"


Twimfy if your thinking of getting in to programming your GP, I think you should do a little research on the theory behind how games "work". I'm not being funny with ya' but the idea that every thing on screen is one single big image and every possibility needs to be mapped out without an actual engine is a pretty big misconseption.



Oooh my last post just gave me an idea who's gona remake Hired Guns on the GP for me ?

Oh I know how games 'work' just I thought of this waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back before the GP32 was around, I always thought that it might be interesting for other people to hear, I've just been waiting for the right time to unleash it on the world.

 

[atrkidd]

this is why you make myst games.

 

[Twimfy]

Speaking of myst, wouldn't it be the easiest port in history?

 

[Chip]

Ok this one isn't as crazy as the lightgun idea as I think it is possible but impossible for some one to complete in a single lifetime.

In hindsight, I'd say it's considerably MORE crazy than the lightgun idea.

 

[Mofokubik]

How about you make windows with twimfys idea... Just take a series of screenshots reduce to 320x240 and have the mouse move around, when you click around in diff areas on the screen it shows another picture.. :lol: