1ghz pandora dreamcast emulation


Wrath Of Khan

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how good could dreamcast emulation be on the 1ghz units.What factors or technical aspects would be involved in doing this.What would be the difficulties?
 
Why are people asking questions like this?


The 1GHz Pandoras aren't some dramatic new technology. For most software that is CPU bound you can roughly multiply the benefit by whatever higher clockspeed you'll get. But since no one knows how well a Dreamcast emulator could run on a current Pandora no one can really answer your question.


The faster Pandora won't encourage anyone to program more. These efficient emulators of recent platforms are a tremendous amount of effort. drk||Raziel long since focused on developing for phones, which have long since exceeded DM3730 level of capability - if they aren't running Dreamcast emulators yet then the new Pandora probably won't help.
 
The version of the emulator we got ran pretty well on the 600mhz units. It's a shame it was never developed further.
 
is the code for that emu freely available or was it quite primitive.Are there dreamcast emus for mobile phones that work well at all as a somewhat proof of concept?
 
Drkraziel behind null dc had a crack at dreamcast emulation for phones and released a few proof of concept videos that can be found on youtube, however he has dropped of the radar about 2 years ago and decided released the source for null dc but not for the work he had done for phones. so no one can continue the progress he had made its a case of starting from scratch again, if anyone fancied/has already picked up the challenge as far as i am aware
 
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Thats a very valid question, do not listen to anyone who scolds you for asking a question you did not know the answer of. Not everyone has had the education to understand these things. And Im sure many others including potential buyers were wondering the same thing. Rememer with great power comes great responsibility. First post ever here hello everyone, I do not like when people scold for invalid reasons.
 
Thats a very valid question, do not listen to anyone who scolds you for asking a question you did not know the answer of. Not everyone has had the education to understand these things. And Im sure many others including potential buyers were wondering the same thing. Rememer with great power comes great responsibility. First post ever here hello everyone, I do not like when people scold for invalid reasons.
I completely agree with you.I have knowledge about things not related to programming or emulators but I know that others do do not have the same knowledge i have in that regard.Equally other people know stuff that I don't know.I don't understand people getting high and mighty when they have a little knowledge.everybody starts out knowing nothing and has to learn.
 
brokemike said:
First post ever here hello everyone, I do not like when people scold for invalid reasons.
Hi there... welcome!


I think dreamcast emulation will be faster but who knows to which extent. The DM3730 is fully compatible. So programmes should use the extra power without any tweaks. Lets see what results the first 1Ghz batch brings...


@Wrath of Khan *thumbs up*


You have a good attitude. Just ignor it and keep on asking. At least its fun to speculate ; )
 
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Thats a very valid question, do not listen to anyone who scolds you for asking a question you did not know the answer of. Not everyone has had the education to understand these things. And Im sure many others including potential buyers were wondering the same thing. Rememer with great power comes great responsibility. First post ever here hello everyone, I do not like when people scold for invalid reasons.
I completely agree with you.I have knowledge about things not related to programming or emulators but I know that others do do not have the same knowledge i have in that regard.Equally other people know stuff that I don't know.I don't understand people getting high and mighty when they have a little knowledge.everybody starts out knowing nothing and has to learn.
It's true that there's no such thing as a stupid question, but it's also true that few people will be bothered to give a reasonable reply to a question if the person who asked appears to have been lazy.


This doesn't have anything to do with scolding, on the contrary. People who want to scold will simply not write anything at all, instead of informing that the way you've asked was way less than ideal. Assuming the goal is to find a useful answer, it's obviously a good thing to prefer the latter.


I have no intention to start a debate about this. This is just an explanation of what's happening here.
 
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I have no intention to start a debate about this. This is just an explanation of what's happening here.

"I won't tolerate anyone disagreeing with me. I stated a COLD HARD FACT that the question wasn't being asked the 'Smart Way', and this was in no way scolding."


Back to topic...


We'd need to know the theoretical performance of a relatively optimized DC emulator, and that we don't know. We have some pretty early videos of a functional emu that wasn't at playable speeds (well, not playable to me, anyway)--from my recollection I don't think even so much as a 50% performance boost would do the trick. Now, if the emu were optimized AND we had a significant performance boost, that might be a different story.


In short, whether it's primarily a software issue or a hardware issue is an open question.
 
Sorry for going off-topic again, but does "I have no intention to start a debate about this." imply that the person saying it is not open to discussion? (If so: that was not what I was trying to say.)
 
Sorry for going off-topic again, but does "I have no intention to start a debate about this." imply that the person saying it is not open to discussion?

Yes, that's exactly what it means.


Edit: The phrase you were looking for was:


"I regret that I have neither the time nor the inclination for an argument involving insults about this particular topic, but I must state that reasoned debate would be most welcome provided that insulting behaviour does not enter therein"


D.
 
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I have no intention to start a debate about this. This is just an explanation of what's happening here.

"I won't tolerate anyone disagreeing with me. I stated a COLD HARD FACT that the question wasn't being asked the 'Smart Way', and this was in no way scolding."


Back to topic...


We'd need to know the theoretical performance of a relatively optimized DC emulator, and that we don't know. We have some pretty early videos of a functional emu that wasn't at playable speeds (well, not playable to me, anyway)--from my recollection I don't think even so much as a 50% performance boost would do the trick. Now, if the emu were optimized AND we had a significant performance boost, that might be a different story.


In short, whether it's primarily a software issue or a hardware issue is an open question.

That's something id be curious about too.It would be interesting to see how far dreamcast emulation could be pushed on the pandora and particularily on the 1ghz units.


I wonder is there particular impediments or what?
 
iirc, it ran at about half speed with no sound. I doubt even a 1GHz CPU would have much impact on that.

D.

MWeston posted a video of it running on an old Pandora prototype in 2009:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0gYfwtj7Mok?feature=oembed

I timed some of the sequences in Shenmue against those running at proper speed on youtube and it's about 2.64x slower for the post-title opening part we see and 2.5x for the in-game opening. The other stuff is hard to test against since it looks like it was interactive. I don't know how representative this is of overall performance but if anything I'd expect cutscenes to be less demanding on CPU time because they're scripted.


The CPU was clocked at 800MHz and like you said, no sound. So even on a 1.3GHz new Pandora this would still be pretty slow, but a lot faster at least.
 
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Don't you think that's pretty good considering a) it's from 2009 and B) the DC was a pretty powerful machine?


There is obviously room for improvement too.


I'd rather have it running at half speed than no DC emulator at all.
 
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