Gp2x Vs Psp Snes Emulating Potential


minkster

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It seems like lately the GP2x has great potential in emulated SNES at fullspeed. Ever since Squidesnes .37a and with overclocking to 266mhz, most games run at a smooth framerate on 0-1fs. At the moment (for people that have both a psp and gp2x) which has advanced farther? Do you guys believe the GP2x has potential in getting this emulator up to par and near perfect like DrMd?
 
The PSP is a bit better suited to emulation of the SNES as things like the ever-aggravating transparency work can be offloaded to operate on the GPU with some effort-- while the GP2X has to do this in software on the ARM920T. The 940T would be unlikely to provide an appreciable performance gain in this task. As for raw emulation horsepower for simulation of the 65c816 (CPU), audio and video hardware, the GP2x's ARM9-series and the PSP's MIPS processor appear to be about evenly matched.

The main tradeoff the PSP has to make, however, is that its display's aspect ratio does not suit the SNES' resolution nearly as well as the GP2x's does, leaving you to pick to leave a huge part of the wide screen empty, or to scale it out to the strange PSP resolution which looks very, very tacky.
 
The question is which will have the best emulation ultimately.

The answer is likely the GP2X, it is open and there are more people able to use source from pre-existing ARM SNES emulator's.

The PSP requires a mod-chip, or a lot of crapping around with backdoors to even use the emulator.

I am not such a fool as to spend my hard-earned money on a closed system that forces upgrades that kill my software, not to mention that SD is half the price of the Memory Sticks! $86.99 for a 4GB SD last I checked :p.

I bet that ultimately the optimization is going to overtake the other things the PSP may have over the GP2X.

Optimization requires the hardware be open for access. The PSP is closed, it can be backdoored into, but testing and coding are not nearly as easy as on a system with USB Samba and a Serial Telnet client for debugging.

Does the PSP even have JTAG?

The PSP is a bit better suited to emulation of the SNES as things like the ever-aggravating transparency work can be offloaded to operate on the GPU with some effort-- while the GP2X has to do this in software on the ARM920T. The 940T would be unlikely to provide an appreciable performance gain in this task. As for raw emulation horsepower for simulation of the 65c816 (CPU), audio and video hardware, the GP2x's ARM9-series and the PSP's MIPS processor appear to be about evenly matched.

The main tradeoff the PSP has to make, however, is that its display's aspect ratio does not suit the SNES' resolution nearly as well as the GP2x's does, leaving you to pick to leave a huge part of the wide screen empty, or to scale it out to the strange PSP resolution which looks very, very tacky.

Oops. I forgot the TV-Out, PSP is stone-cold dead for that feature :).

I think great strides are being made already with the GP2X SNES emu, if it ever runs outside of Linux and rids itself of all hacks from the GP32, and adds all speed hacks for the MMSP2 (see sig), it will be the best.

One need only look here to see the major reason the GP2X is best for emulating the SNES:

http://www.retrousb.com/

Hint: does the PSP have USB keyboard/mouse/SNES USB joypad support? I thought not.
 
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It seems like lately the GP2x has great potential in emulated SNES at fullspeed. Ever since Squidesnes .37a and with overclocking to 266mhz, most games run at a smooth framerate on 0-1fs. At the moment (for people that have both a psp and gp2x) which has advanced farther? Do you guys believe the GP2x has potential in getting this emulator up to par and near perfect like DrMd?


The GP2X will probably get full speed with sound SNES eventually with the exception of the transaprencies. To me this is a major thing as not having them ruins many games, so the sad fact is the PSP will always be better at SNES due to the ability to do transparencies. Some stupid design decisions by GPH like not giving the 940 core it's own RAM severly cripples the second core which is mostly good only for video.

The PSP has other problems but just for the purpose of emulating SNES at full speed with all features, PSP wins.

I think the GP2X will be better at emulating a NeoGeo MVS though because it has more RAM than the PSP. I think the PSP still only has NeoCD because of this. NeoCD is not as practical due to the huge amount of card space taken by ISOs.
 
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The GP2X already runs NeoGeo MVS titles at 60 FPS on average, with a healthy overclock. Things will only get faster, even if not by that much. When the hardware scaling code is ASM and not C, that'll give a nice boost to the games that use scaling heavily.
 
The other advantage the PSP has is that the 3D hardware on the PSP takes a lot of work out of the emulation of the SNES (think tiling, Z buffering, transparency). Also the GPU on the PSP is very useful, certain more so than the 940 on the GP2X.

However, there are tricks on the GP2X as well - they just need to be found :)
 
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