Ok, I have played the gamepark and love it. It really is an amazing machine capable of great emulations.
So I always have fun breaking out my crystal ball to look into the future. Please note, this is just my personal opinion and may be inaccurate. I am just going off on a tangent here
Right now, with the gamepark, it looks like the most powerful machines it can emulate are:
group #1
In theory: Running at 30 fps, frameskip 1
SNES
GENESIS
CPS1
AMIGA
These will probably be optimized, but never reach full speed. Probably something like half speed with sound.
So what would it take for the gamepark2 or tapware or whatever to emulate the next tier of systems, specifically:
group #2
In theory: Running at 5 fps
Playstation
Nintendo 64
Complete MAME
Gameboy Advance
The processor on the gamepark is an arm9 running at 133mhz. It looks like state of the art right now is the DragonBall i.MXL, which is the processor that the tapware will probably use. It runs at 200 mhz.
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/...FQZrDR#features
The gamepark has 8 megs of ram. Currently it would be possible to drop in a chip with 32 megs of ram. So in theory our hypothetical next generation system might have 4 times as much ram as well.
Let's just assume that it is twice as fast as the gamepark processor with other on-chip optimizations and has four times the ram. So what will twice the speed bring us?
Not too much I would expect. It would probably double the speed of the group #1 emulators so they would now be running at full speed. That will be great, but will the doubling of speed really be worth it? Most games are pretty playable at 30 fps anyway.
But the group #2 games will only go from 5 fps to 10 fps. 10 fps is still completely unplayable. Now if there are 3d coprocessors than this figure might change, but tapware is not speced for such a chip (will have 2d coprocessor though) and it is doubtful the gamepark ever will have something like that.
What this means is that the next generation of portables will be completely unable to emulate the group #2 consoles (without overclocking) and will not until we can get the processors up to 400 mhz or so.
The exception might be the GPA which if the rumors are true is running at maybe 10 fps and might be playable with a doubling of the processor speed and more optimizations.
What do you guys think about this? Is this flawed reasoning or do you suspect there will be enough power and/or genius programmers to take on the group #2 emulators?
So I always have fun breaking out my crystal ball to look into the future. Please note, this is just my personal opinion and may be inaccurate. I am just going off on a tangent here
Right now, with the gamepark, it looks like the most powerful machines it can emulate are:
group #1
In theory: Running at 30 fps, frameskip 1
SNES
GENESIS
CPS1
AMIGA
These will probably be optimized, but never reach full speed. Probably something like half speed with sound.
So what would it take for the gamepark2 or tapware or whatever to emulate the next tier of systems, specifically:
group #2
In theory: Running at 5 fps
Playstation
Nintendo 64
Complete MAME
Gameboy Advance
The processor on the gamepark is an arm9 running at 133mhz. It looks like state of the art right now is the DragonBall i.MXL, which is the processor that the tapware will probably use. It runs at 200 mhz.
http://e-www.motorola.com/webapp/sps/site/...FQZrDR#features
The gamepark has 8 megs of ram. Currently it would be possible to drop in a chip with 32 megs of ram. So in theory our hypothetical next generation system might have 4 times as much ram as well.
Let's just assume that it is twice as fast as the gamepark processor with other on-chip optimizations and has four times the ram. So what will twice the speed bring us?
Not too much I would expect. It would probably double the speed of the group #1 emulators so they would now be running at full speed. That will be great, but will the doubling of speed really be worth it? Most games are pretty playable at 30 fps anyway.
But the group #2 games will only go from 5 fps to 10 fps. 10 fps is still completely unplayable. Now if there are 3d coprocessors than this figure might change, but tapware is not speced for such a chip (will have 2d coprocessor though) and it is doubtful the gamepark ever will have something like that.
What this means is that the next generation of portables will be completely unable to emulate the group #2 consoles (without overclocking) and will not until we can get the processors up to 400 mhz or so.
The exception might be the GPA which if the rumors are true is running at maybe 10 fps and might be playable with a doubling of the processor speed and more optimizations.
What do you guys think about this? Is this flawed reasoning or do you suspect there will be enough power and/or genius programmers to take on the group #2 emulators?