UAE for XBox? - Page 3

LaundroMat · 01 August 2002, 14:43

I'm sure there are projects starting to get Mame ported to the PS2 Linux thingy. UAE could soon follow, no?

And maybe (just maybe), if the PS2/Linux community churns out some good stuff, Sony could be tempted to release it on official disks. Or, if you get yourself the HD and Ethernet kit, maybe you could just download such emulators and play them from your HD?

13 August 2002, 11:58

Emulators on consoles is harder than one would think and isn't as cool, because most consoles have slow CPUs with fast graphics/sound processors to make up for it. This is why they can make their games as cool as they are - fast graphics pocessor.

But if you're trying to emulate something, that graphics processor isn't going to help as much as you'd think, because the largest duty of an emulator needs raw CPU power to recreate the emulated processors on your real one.

This is why the SNES emulators for the DC are so slow, and why an A500 would have no chance on a DC.

XBox? I don't remember what processor it has in it, but it's probably not as great as one would think.

If you really want to run your emulator on a TV, get a video card for your PC with a TV out, it's a much better option than porting said emulators(especially Amiga) to a console.

Galahad/FLT · 14 August 2002, 21:14

in that the CPU emulation for the Amiga takes a lot of processing power, but its a culmination of ALL of the processors that make the Amiga and the SNES a hard job to copy. Even on a super fast PC, the copper chip on Amiga because of its many different things it can do, takes loads of power to be effective.

In this instance, DC and Xbox have better graphics capabilities as standard to duplicate the effects.

My shitty 350Mhz PC plays Snes games pretty well...... Dreamcast is infinitely better than my stupid PC, and its not the fault of the Dreamcast that the SNES emulation and the N64 Emulation are not as good as they should.

The people who ported it over are most likely relying too much on the processor and not farming enough of the work over to the other processors.

If my PC can do the SNES, the Dreamcast is easily powerful enough to do it.

I don't believe that the Xbox could carry a perfect emulation of the Amiga A5oo, but the fact that it has a 'standard' hardware, would mean that you could have highly optimised drivers that are tailor coded for the XBox's graphics and sound processors.

That is part of WinUAE's problem, in that by design, it tries to work on as many different PC configurations as it can, which is a testament to the programming prowess of the coders.... if they were coding for one hardware model, then I dare say the Amiga emulation would progress further.

As it stands, I doubt that XBox will even be a commercial concern in the next two years........ and the sad thing is.... people are wanting SNES, AMIGA, N64 games on the XBox does the Microsoft no favours..... it tells me that the games that are being released for XBox aren't holding peoples attention!

20 August 2002, 00:14

The Dreamcast GFX chip can not be used much for the emulation, the CPU is the only chip that can decode the copper/blitter/... instructions. You can't even use polys for the sprites or the copper effects will be wrong (I think, I am not an expert).
Still a fast enough Amiga or SNES emulator should be possible, something like Fellow or ZSNES. But who will code for the Dreamcast in assembler? Not many people have dev boxes and Dreamcast Emus are not yet good enough to be used for development. So there are of course only ports of easily portable (but therefore not really fast) emus.
Bleemcast proves what is possible (allthough here the 3D chip is of much more use and a DynaRec can boost the performance).
XBox has a 700MHz P3 with half the cache. Fast enough for most of todays emus. I guess Gamecubes 485MHz G3 would be even better for emus (many more registers), but most people are short of Mini DVD burners. The console CPUs are not that slow anymore. And also Dreamcast seems to have a very powerfull FPU...but that again won't help you with an Amiga500 or SNES emulator.

Galahad/FLT · 22 August 2002, 01:22

All Blitter operations can be interpreted and the Dreamcast GFX processor not the SH1 can plot the gfx........

Seeing as 90% of all Amiga games used the blitter, this would give the processor more time to do copper related stuff.

Anyway, the SNES by comparison to emulate (because the way it operates is more closely linked to PC than Amiga is to PC) means that the Dreamcast should be able to emulate the SNES in its sleep. I simply disagree with whats been said.

My PC absolutely nothing special at all... it really is junk in comparison to the Dreamcast...... Bad programming (or should I say, a lack of understanding on how to get the best from the machine!) is more the point.

I wonder just how much of the original C source code for the SNES emulators has been modified?

jmmijo · 22 August 2002, 01:33

Is part of the PC bloatware problem a lack of understanding how to code x86 M/L or what? Seems to me the way a lot of apps are coded, not games perse', is with something like C or C++ rather then in M/L.

Perhaps x86 is not conducive to coding this way like the Amiga was or 68k M/L was in general.

Please all you coding geeks, feel free to lambaste me on this one, just thought I'd interject on why some feel this can't be done or accomplished

22 August 2002, 17:18

Sorry Galahad, but "Unregistered" is much more correct than you are. Don't want to make you down, that's just a fact.

First of all, I'm sure that 100% of all Amiga games use the blitter.

But even if you COULD handle blitter operations with the Dreamcast's GFX processor, this wouldn't work well in an emu, because you have to synchronize the cpu and blitter. If the GFX processor would do blitter stuff at the same time the DC cpu is emulating the Amiga cpu, the whole emulation would fuck up.

Also, I don't even think you could handle blitter operations with the DC's GPU. The blitter uses a very different graphics format than the DC, and you'd have to convert the graphics, probably more than one time, because the blitter can do lots of different stuff with the data it blits to make it look different. It's almost impossible to handle all the different things the blitter can do.
(It would take too long to explain everything.)

Another big problem is the line-by-line system. If a game doesn't use this, it would be OK, and you could easily display a playfield (after a graphics conversion). But what are you going to do, if the copper (or even the processor) changes the scroll variables during different lines of the display? Or even the modulo registers? Or displaying another playfield in another resolution and color depth? And what are you doing with colour changes ("copper rainbows")?

About the SNES (and most other game consoles):
The way it operates is almost completly different from how PCs operate. Many of them only have a very slow processor. That's not a problem to emulate. But the graphics chip is, as it's working completly different than you would probably expect. And like the Amiga, it uses a line-by-line display, too, so you can't just display the whole picture, you have to build it up line by line, and that's definitly not, what a DC's GPU is supposed to do.

(By the way, buy a PC with an outdated Kyro2 and you got yourself a Dreamcast but with a faster CPU)

@jmmijo:
Two reasons not to use Assembler anymore:
-Todays games and apps are too big to be handled in Assembler
-Todays C compilers usually produce faster code than one could write in Assembler (what optimizing compilers do would turn your assembler prog into a big piece of chaos)

Martin - emu author http://www.smspower.org/martin/esms/

jmmijo · 22 August 2002, 17:28

Actually I'm into Chaos, a lot of it

Unknown_K · 22 August 2002, 17:52

"(By the way, buy a PC with an outdated Kyro2 and you got yourself a Dreamcast but with a faster CPU)"

Umm Kyro 2 isnt completely outdated these days, have one in my main gaming rig

When there is a game I want to play that doesnt play well the video will get updated. No use running after the latest gforce every 6 months built for games that will be out 18 months later.

23 August 2002, 00:07

For sure he didn't want to make the Kyro 2 down. It is an interesting chip (tile based rendering)...but a bit old of course.
Nobody wants to make down the Dreamcast either, but it's just not fitted for emus. The processor is to slow, the cache to small and an ordinary 3D chip does not help at all. The 350MHz PC can surely handle this better. The performance of SNES9X shows you with what kind of PC you have to compare it in this area.

Hey jmmijo, you're a demo coder, aren't you? ;-)

The real "Unknown"

23 August 2002, 00:09

Oh well...I mean...

The real "Unregistered"

(Unknown_k, you make me go weird)

jmmijo · 23 August 2002, 01:23

Quote:

Originally posted by Unregistered
Hey jmmijo, you're a demo coder, aren't you? ;-)

The real "Unknown"

Nope, did some cracking of game and apps on the C64/Amiga back in the day for Kracker Jax/Renegade/Maverick et.al

P-J · 23 August 2002, 02:52

Just get a cheap GeForce card with a TV-OUT and stop these wacky X-Box ideas

andreas · 23 August 2002, 03:12

Quote:

Originally posted by LaundroMat
I'm sure there are projects starting to get Mame ported to the PS2 Linux thingy. UAE could soon follow, no?

And maybe (just maybe), if the PS2/Linux community churns out some good stuff, Sony could be tempted to release it on official disks.

Hey, that's just it!
Linux!

Linux should be available someday in the future for Dreamcast and other machines, shouldn't it?
So you could run Linux UAE on it. Not that up-to-date like WinUAE (thanks to Toni's fricking hard work), but anyway a good Amiga emulator. And DEFINITELY not such a merciless CPU muncher.

cv643d · 10 September 2002, 19:14

Sega made their own Megadrive/Genesis emulator for their Smashpack release. The games run 100% but the music sounds wrong.

Amiga1992 · 10 September 2002, 19:32

You can hack that disk to run other ROMs.
Then again, you have many homebrew DC emus you can play with

turk182 · 06 December 2002, 14:40

I just ran xuae from CDRW , and I have to say its pretty stable & runs most games without many 'emu' frameskips..Turrican is always a good example and it seemed fine .(You dont get a chance to change the config though ,its just bog standard 1.3 with some mem).
Its bizzare to have a nextgen console and play old stuff on it

Konrad · 06 December 2002, 17:43

Well, people still now where to find the good games

01 August 2002, 14:43	#41
LaundroMat Junior Member Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: In the cellar. With your mum. Age: 49 Posts: 404	PS2/Linux? I'm sure there are projects starting to get Mame ported to the PS2 Linux thingy. UAE could soon follow, no? And maybe (just maybe), if the PS2/Linux community churns out some good stuff, Sony could be tempted to release it on official disks. Or, if you get yourself the HD and Ethernet kit, maybe you could just download such emulators and play them from your HD?

14 August 2002, 21:14	#43
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	You are partly correct in that the CPU emulation for the Amiga takes a lot of processing power, but its a culmination of ALL of the processors that make the Amiga and the SNES a hard job to copy. Even on a super fast PC, the copper chip on Amiga because of its many different things it can do, takes loads of power to be effective. In this instance, DC and Xbox have better graphics capabilities as standard to duplicate the effects. My shitty 350Mhz PC plays Snes games pretty well...... Dreamcast is infinitely better than my stupid PC, and its not the fault of the Dreamcast that the SNES emulation and the N64 Emulation are not as good as they should. The people who ported it over are most likely relying too much on the processor and not farming enough of the work over to the other processors. If my PC can do the SNES, the Dreamcast is easily powerful enough to do it. I don't believe that the Xbox could carry a perfect emulation of the Amiga A5oo, but the fact that it has a 'standard' hardware, would mean that you could have highly optimised drivers that are tailor coded for the XBox's graphics and sound processors. That is part of WinUAE's problem, in that by design, it tries to work on as many different PC configurations as it can, which is a testament to the programming prowess of the coders.... if they were coding for one hardware model, then I dare say the Amiga emulation would progress further. As it stands, I doubt that XBox will even be a commercial concern in the next two years........ and the sad thing is.... people are wanting SNES, AMIGA, N64 games on the XBox does the Microsoft no favours..... it tells me that the games that are being released for XBox aren't holding peoples attention!

22 August 2002, 01:22	#45
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	Not so! All Blitter operations can be interpreted and the Dreamcast GFX processor not the SH1 can plot the gfx........ Seeing as 90% of all Amiga games used the blitter, this would give the processor more time to do copper related stuff. Anyway, the SNES by comparison to emulate (because the way it operates is more closely linked to PC than Amiga is to PC) means that the Dreamcast should be able to emulate the SNES in its sleep. I simply disagree with whats been said. My PC absolutely nothing special at all... it really is junk in comparison to the Dreamcast...... Bad programming (or should I say, a lack of understanding on how to get the best from the machine!) is more the point. I wonder just how much of the original C source code for the SNES emulators has been modified?

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13 August 2002, 11:58	#42
Unregistered Posts: n/a	Emulators on consoles is harder than one would think and isn't as cool, because most consoles have slow CPUs with fast graphics/sound processors to make up for it. This is why they can make their games as cool as they are - fast graphics pocessor. But if you're trying to emulate something, that graphics processor isn't going to help as much as you'd think, because the largest duty of an emulator needs raw CPU power to recreate the emulated processors on your real one. This is why the SNES emulators for the DC are so slow, and why an A500 would have no chance on a DC. XBox? I don't remember what processor it has in it, but it's probably not as great as one would think. If you really want to run your emulator on a TV, get a video card for your PC with a TV out, it's a much better option than porting said emulators(especially Amiga) to a console.

20 August 2002, 00:14	#44
Unregistered Posts: n/a	The Dreamcast GFX chip can not be used much for the emulation, the CPU is the only chip that can decode the copper/blitter/... instructions. You can't even use polys for the sprites or the copper effects will be wrong (I think, I am not an expert). Still a fast enough Amiga or SNES emulator should be possible, something like Fellow or ZSNES. But who will code for the Dreamcast in assembler? Not many people have dev boxes and Dreamcast Emus are not yet good enough to be used for development. So there are of course only ports of easily portable (but therefore not really fast) emus. Bleemcast proves what is possible (allthough here the 3D chip is of much more use and a DynaRec can boost the performance). XBox has a 700MHz P3 with half the cache. Fast enough for most of todays emus. I guess Gamecubes 485MHz G3 would be even better for emus (many more registers), but most people are short of Mini DVD burners. The console CPUs are not that slow anymore. And also Dreamcast seems to have a very powerfull FPU...but that again won't help you with an Amiga500 or SNES emulator.

22 August 2002, 01:33	#46
jmmijo Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: PDX Age: 62 Posts: 2,395	Is part of the PC bloatware problem a lack of understanding how to code x86 M/L or what? Seems to me the way a lot of apps are coded, not games perse', is with something like C or C++ rather then in M/L. Perhaps x86 is not conducive to coding this way like the Amiga was or 68k M/L was in general. Please all you coding geeks, feel free to lambaste me on this one, just thought I'd interject on why some feel this can't be done or accomplished

22 August 2002, 17:18	#47
Unregistered Posts: n/a	Sorry Galahad, but "Unregistered" is much more correct than you are. Don't want to make you down, that's just a fact. First of all, I'm sure that 100% of all Amiga games use the blitter. But even if you COULD handle blitter operations with the Dreamcast's GFX processor, this wouldn't work well in an emu, because you have to synchronize the cpu and blitter. If the GFX processor would do blitter stuff at the same time the DC cpu is emulating the Amiga cpu, the whole emulation would fuck up. Also, I don't even think you could handle blitter operations with the DC's GPU. The blitter uses a very different graphics format than the DC, and you'd have to convert the graphics, probably more than one time, because the blitter can do lots of different stuff with the data it blits to make it look different. It's almost impossible to handle all the different things the blitter can do. (It would take too long to explain everything.) Another big problem is the line-by-line system. If a game doesn't use this, it would be OK, and you could easily display a playfield (after a graphics conversion). But what are you going to do, if the copper (or even the processor) changes the scroll variables during different lines of the display? Or even the modulo registers? Or displaying another playfield in another resolution and color depth? And what are you doing with colour changes ("copper rainbows")? About the SNES (and most other game consoles): The way it operates is almost completly different from how PCs operate. Many of them only have a very slow processor. That's not a problem to emulate. But the graphics chip is, as it's working completly different than you would probably expect. And like the Amiga, it uses a line-by-line display, too, so you can't just display the whole picture, you have to build it up line by line, and that's definitly not, what a DC's GPU is supposed to do. (By the way, buy a PC with an outdated Kyro2 and you got yourself a Dreamcast but with a faster CPU) @jmmijo: Two reasons not to use Assembler anymore: -Todays games and apps are too big to be handled in Assembler -Todays C compilers usually produce faster code than one could write in Assembler (what optimizing compilers do would turn your assembler prog into a big piece of chaos) Martin - emu author http://www.smspower.org/martin/esms/

22 August 2002, 17:28	#48
jmmijo Junior Member Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: PDX Age: 62 Posts: 2,395	Actually I'm into Chaos, a lot of it

22 August 2002, 17:52	#49
Unknown_K Registered User Join Date: May 2002 Location: Ohio/USA Age: 55 Posts: 1,380	"(By the way, buy a PC with an outdated Kyro2 and you got yourself a Dreamcast but with a faster CPU)" Umm Kyro 2 isnt completely outdated these days, have one in my main gaming rig When there is a game I want to play that doesnt play well the video will get updated. No use running after the latest gforce every 6 months built for games that will be out 18 months later.

23 August 2002, 00:07	#50
Unregistered Posts: n/a	For sure he didn't want to make the Kyro 2 down. It is an interesting chip (tile based rendering)...but a bit old of course. Nobody wants to make down the Dreamcast either, but it's just not fitted for emus. The processor is to slow, the cache to small and an ordinary 3D chip does not help at all. The 350MHz PC can surely handle this better. The performance of SNES9X shows you with what kind of PC you have to compare it in this area. Hey jmmijo, you're a demo coder, aren't you? ;-) The real "Unknown"

23 August 2002, 00:09	#51
Unregistered Posts: n/a	Oh well...I mean... The real "Unregistered" (Unknown_k, you make me go weird)

23 August 2002, 02:52	#53
P-J Registered User Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Moorpark, California Age: 44 Posts: 1,153	Just get a cheap GeForce card with a TV-OUT and stop these wacky X-Box ideas

10 September 2002, 19:14	#55
cv643d Registered User Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Sweden Posts: 762	Sega made their own Megadrive/Genesis emulator for their Smashpack release. The games run 100% but the music sounds wrong.

10 September 2002, 19:32	#56
Amiga1992 Registered User Join Date: May 2001 Location: ? Posts: 19,645	You can hack that disk to run other ROMs. Then again, you have many homebrew DC emus you can play with

06 December 2002, 14:40	#57
turk182 Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: london Posts: 188	I just ran xuae from CDRW , and I have to say its pretty stable & runs most games without many 'emu' frameskips..Turrican is always a good example and it seemed fine .(You dont get a chance to change the config though ,its just bog standard 1.3 with some mem). Its bizzare to have a nextgen console and play old stuff on it

06 December 2002, 17:43	#58
Konrad Registered User Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Germany Age: 43 Posts: 742	Well, people still now where to find the good games

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