Emulator Mhz's


I was just wondering if someone knows wich emulators run at a decent pace at 66mhz??


This because of the battery usage.


I found that a coleco emu runs at full speed @ 66mhz...

Otherwise i guess i have to carry a 10 pack of batteries everywhere :p
Fer gawd's sake! Just enjoy the things without worrying about battery life all the time!

It's great to have decent emulators, and I for one am not at all unhappy with the battery life at 166Mhz!
 
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IM SO HAPPY but couldnt help wondering.

BTW possible future zodiac worshippers:
the zodiac might be faster but much more expensive and weigs a whopping
510 grammes.

There goes the "portable" mp3 player
 
Sure the GBA emulators are good - they run at decent speed at 15mhz. But the rise of the zodiac makes it highly unlikely that the GP32 community are ever going to move to developing emulators that run natively in ASM (like pocketnes, drsms or ZXadvance) - its just not portable.

The fact that our emulators are ports from other platforms is mostly a good thing - it means that devlopers can at least code for the GP32 and the Zodiac side by side (sort of!). I think this is more important than a bit more battery life.

Batteries are more replaceable than good emulator developers.


Erm, you mean like Cyclone and PicoDrive, which was ported to the GP32, Pocket PC, P800, P900, Nokia 6600, 7650, 3650, N-Gage, Smartphone SPV and Cyclone which was used in LJZ on the Zodiac?

They are fairly portable even with small parts in Assembler, because they all have the same family of chip - the ARM processor. Just be careful of r9 and r10 on PalmOS, and if you want target PocketPC don't use Thumb.

As I've said though, I wouldn't dev anything more than the cpu core in assembler. There's just no point.

As for battery life versus dev time, I agree with the original post, I'd like to see more optimised emulators. I think battery life is important.
 
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The battery-whiners should try to think longer about what they prefer. Optimising an emulator and entirely recoding parts of it in ASM is a pain in the ass, it takes lots of time. In fact it take more time than a simple port. So here is the real choice :
- having many emulators that run perfectly at 133 or more MHz
- having few emulators that run nice at 66 MHz
I already know my choice: the more the better.


Actually, though I agree choice is nice, personally I'd be playing the few emulators that run at 66Mhz thanks! Some lazy port of SNES9x isn't my idea of quality.

Sorry, that's my view on the matter - I'd rather see talented coding instead of a disappointing battery life.
 
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Erm, you mean like Cyclone and PicoDrive, which was ported to the GP32, Pocket PC, P800, P900, Nokia 6600, 7650, 3650, N-Gage, Smartphone SPV and Cyclone which was used in LJZ on the Zodiac?

Good point :)

I was kind of thinking more along the lines of tyrrells excellent spectrum emulator which I can now play on my dreamcast as well! A port that probably wouldn't have been possible if coded with an ASM core (to be honest I haven't a clue what sort of chip is in this dreamcast so I'm probably wrong about that as well!)

It is great that there are emu developers who are taking battery life into consideration but I would suggest that you are in the minority fDave.

Whether we like it or not 'lazy ports' are rapidly becoming the norm in commercial software (just ask a PC gamer what he thinks of Deus Ex 2 - virtually an X box port). So I don't see the emulation scene becoming any different as emulation devrs tend to have less time and money.

I would love a highly optimised spectrum emulator along the lines of ZXadvance for the GP32 (ZX advance@ 15mHz ................ speccyal'K@ 110 mhz) imagine the battery life savings!

But I'm not holding my breath - anyway I better go stick my batteries back in the charger ;)
 
SNES and Genesis running full speed at 133mhz would be awesome enough for me :) no need to go lower. :p
 
I've read this topic and I have an interesting point to bring up:
Optimizing emulators by recodeing in ASM reduces the needed processor power. Couldn't this higher effiecency not only conserve battery power, but open the doors for more powerful emus? If an unoptimized Genesis Emulator runs perfectly at 166 mhz, and is then optimized so it runs perfectly at say 66 mhz, couldn't the extra 100 mhz of processor power then be used to upgrade to Sega CD or 32X emulation? They only way to unlock the GP32's ultimate potental appears(atleast to me) to lie in the development of optimized emulators.

There you have it, my opinion on emulation optimization.

P.s. Of course even if optimization allowed Genesis Emulation to be upgrade to Sega CD emulation, you would need a tool that could remove the videos from the iso(this would cut sonic CD from 120 MB to 20 MB BTW), and probably have to use midi for the soundtrack.
 
I've read this topic and I have an interesting point to bring up:
Optimizing emulators by recodeing in ASM reduces the needed processor power. Couldn't this higher effiecency not only conserve battery power, but open the doors for more powerful emus? If an unoptimized Genesis Emulator runs perfectly at 166 mhz, and is then optimized so it runs perfectly at say 66 mhz, couldn't the extra 100 mhz of processor power then be used to upgrade to Sega CD or 32X emulation? They only way to unlock the GP32's ultimate potental appears(atleast to me) to lie in the development of optimized emulators.

There you have it, my opinion on emulation optimization.

P.s. Of course even if optimization allowed Genesis Emulation to be upgrade to Sega CD emulation, you would need a tool that could remove the videos from the iso(this would cut sonic CD from 120 MB to 20 MB BTW), and probably have to use midi for the soundtrack.


Yes that is the whole point of Cyclone (besides getting them to run on 100mhz and lower machines of course) - on the higher machines you can run more of them. And maybe emulate Out Run, After Burner, Galaxy Force, Power Drift and stuff
 
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Whether we like it or not 'lazy ports' are rapidly becoming the norm in commercial software (just ask a PC gamer what he thinks of Deus Ex 2 - virtually an X box port). So I don't see the emulation scene becoming any different as emulation devrs tend to have less time and money.

Eh - porting Deus Ex 2 is okay - the XBox and PC are pretty much the same. What else would you do other than a port?
Ports are sensible - you don't waste dev time


But porting something designed for a >=500mhz PC to a 133mhz GP32, well it's going to run slow
 
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Eh - porting Deus Ex 2 is okay - the XBox and PC are pretty much the same. What else would you do other than a port?
Ports are sensible - you don't waste dev time

Umm - if you've just spent nearly 2 grand on the latest gaming rig you won't be happy if the games you are playing are almost exact ports from an X-box (equivalent of about 800mhz with geforce 2 graphics).

Porting works both ways - either your porting on to a less powerful system where your code will run slow, or you port to a system where your program doesn't make the most of the possibilities the new hardware offers (So a load of PC gamers with more money than sense end up paying through the nose for .... not much)

Deus Ex2 was designed with X-box limitations in mind and doesn't push PC technology in the way the original game did - but I digress.....
 
The way I see it, the more optimised the better, and if this brings down the battery life then it's great.

It doesn't seem like a massive importance though.
 
Umm - if you've just spent nearly 2 grand on the latest gaming rig you won't be happy if the games you are playing are almost exact ports from an X-box (equivalent of about 800mhz with geforce 2 graphics).
X-box is actually based on an advanced Geforce 3 core, it is between a Geforce 3 and a Geforce 4. Also, the Xbox runs stuff at 640 x 480, if you ran games at that res on a great PC they would run extremely fast.
 
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Hey - I'm quite happy with 'lazy' ports of console games.
Most of them run quite happily on lower res on my PC (with nearly all of the options turned down).

But there are a lot of guys out there who are dissapointed with games that are developed cross platform as they tend not to make the best of the PC's hardware. (I chose deus Ex 2 because its gameplay is not nearly as complex as the game it is a sequel to as it was designed with the Xbox in mind - the original pushed the PC all the way at the time)

If commercial software developers don't have the time or money to optimise the PC ports of console games to make better use of the hardware - most emu coders are not gonna have time to make a GP32 emulator (THAT ALREADY WORKS!) run at a slightly slower clock rate for the sake of a few batteries.

Emulators at lower clock speeds? :I still say its a bit unlikely at this stage!
 
ASM optimization isn't the only reason that the GBA can run NES well @ 16MhZ (I think): The GFX hardware (GP32 doesn't have any - pure processor & sound) helps take away lots of load from the processor.

But mabye if someone tried very hard, they could do NES @ 66MhZ. Not that I need that anyways, my FLU lasts a whole cross atlantic plane trip with 4 NiMh's @ 156MhZ even if I use it the whole time.
 
Hi everyone.
As soon as i got my GP32 gp32_console i went and got a pack of four 2300ma NIMH's and they are great.
They last hours and thats with the FLU on.
I got them from Argos and they cost £14.99 for the four but i,m sure they will NOT charge with a 3 Volt Adapter connected UNLESS it is one specific to NIMH Batteries.

Davey Fontan....the Original Mystical Ninja. :ph34r:
 
i remeber reading in another thread somewhere that reesy had ported drsms over to the gp32 and that it was runnin full speed at 66mhz.

but he never released it, because he couldnt figure out how to load the roms off the smc or sumthin.
 
wait
someone ported something done is asm
wow i thought what more or less impossible
i wish he released the source code
i bet some other devs could figure it out (and smc doesn't sound that much different than a cart)

if someone starts porting gba emulators i hope pocket snes gets done
that would be so amazing
so so so amazing

i am doubt this will ever happen
what percent speed does poket snes run at?
 
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