if the wii can ahndle sega saturn emulation why not the psp?

[Strangler]

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/16/rumor-sega-saturn-games-to-appear-on-wii-virtual-console/

or at least why doesnt sega make a best of saturn compilation umd for the psp instead of the huge leaps of crap they keep releasing on the psp like sonic rivals or after burner or monkey ball (sucky game compared to the old games)?

[ICE]

for good emulation the emulator system needs to be 10x more powerful than the system its emulating. the psp is not 10x more powerful than the saturn. it cant even do n64 very well yet. thats just a stupid question... uninformed really.

[Triv1um]

indeed.

the saturn is actully a suprisingly powerful machine.

[JKKDARK]

Saturn is really powerful. But don't forget it can be emulated thanks to the job from Sega and Nintendo (AKA professional people), not homebrew coders.

[ICE]

true dat. im not saying it couldnt be done... it could be just not by homebrew coders...

[Torak]

true dat. im not saying it couldnt be done... it could be just not by homebrew coders...

Well you never know really... Lots of things have been done that no one thought could... It just depends on whose doing it.

[Shadowblind]

true dat. im not saying it couldnt be done... it could be just not by homebrew coders...

I remember the same thing being said about the n64 for PSP way back when.

[ICE]

n64 still doesnt run properly on psp. you cant really say that if n64 can be done so who knows if n64 hasnt been done yet. yeah it runs and im very happy about that but is it really a proper emulator? no its not. its a work in progress.

EDIT: also the title of this thread makes ene laugh. if the wii can handle sega saturn emulation why not the psp? :rofl: the wii is just a wii bit more powerful than the psp plus the fact that right now there isnt a saturn emu for wii official or otherwise. its like asking if rocks can talk than why cant trees?

[Strangler]

well why doesnt sony and sega make one than?

[Shadowblind]

...Are you kidding? o_0

Sony hates homebrew almost as much as they do losing 1 cent of money (which it turns ou they hate alot). It'd take nothing short of a miracle to make them even accept homebrew, let alone make it.

[ICE]

well why doesnt sony and sega make one than?

:rofl:

[JKKDARK]

I remember the same thing being said about the n64 for PSP way back when.
man, you must be the first person who believe the N64 is harder to emulate than the Saturn :rolleyes:


...Are you kidding? o_0

Sony hates homebrew almost as much as they do losing 1 cent of money (which it turns ou they hate alot). It'd take nothing short of a miracle to make them even accept homebrew, let alone make it.
It's not homebrew, it's not made by independent developers.

[Tesseract]

The existing tenet of "10x power" kinda stops short when looking at the near-flawless PSX emulation on the PSP (As far as I know, the official PSX emulation still runs at 233 or 266 MHz). Also, there are plenty of consoles that still don't have accurate emulation even though the host system is much more than simply 10x more powerful (Genesis Emulation on the Dreamcast is wretched).

Most emulators attack emulation by brute force. It might be interesting to see what an emulator could do on a device like the PSP if it used the CPU to emulate MOST of what was needed, and left the graphics chip to handle graphics processing. Hell, there's a Jaguar emulator for the PSP and I know that was a rather nasty beast to emulate proprely even on a PC.

I'm not saying that Saturn Emulation would reach full power anytime soon, if at all. But perhaps it MAY be possible. It'd be an awesome proof-of-concept just to get the BIOS running.

[ICE]

ok re-phrase- emulators made by non-professional coders need a hos system FAR more powerful than the system its emulating. also the scea psx emu for psp runs at 333mhz i believe (correct me i f im wrong please.)

[Cap'n 1time]

The problem with Saturn emulation is not only a question of the raw power it would require (the 10x thing Is just something someone made up to shut people up sort of). From what I understand, the Saturn has some extremely complicated hardware, not all of which is fully understood even today. The non proprietary Saturn emulators require extremely hefty machines, More so then what the Wii can offer. BUT! Nintendo and Sega have all the documentation. Not only that, but they pay people. Because of this they can pull together a very accurate, very powerful emulator.

Also, because of the similar hardware, BlueCrab (one of our own coders) feels pretty confident that he can port one of the free non proprietary Saturn emulators to the Dreamcast and eventually get a reasonable speed out of it. That will be a great achievement if it's ever done since no console has ever seen a very accurate saturn emulator before.

Also, the PSP is a very powerful hand held... but in terms of processing power... well it's no where near as powerful as a Wii.

[Strangler]

...Are you kidding? o_0

Sony hates homebrew almost as much as they do losing 1 cent of money (which it turns ou they hate alot). It'd take nothing short of a miracle to make them even accept homebrew, let alone make it.

than y did they make a ps1 emulator and flash for browsing?

[xg917]

because ps1 is one of their systems. im sure if it was possible, sony would make a saturn emulator if it was their system

[Triv1um]

Sony cant change PSPs hardware like magic.

Thats like saying 'lets run ps3 games in a snes.'

It wont happen, psp isnt powerful enough

[Kichigai Mentat]

The problem with Saturn emulation is not only a question of the raw power it would require (the 10x thing Is just something someone made up to shut people up sort of). From what I understand, the Saturn has some extremely complicated hardware, not all of which is fully understood even today. The non proprietary Saturn emulators require extremely hefty machines, More so then what the Wii can offer. BUT! Nintendo and Sega have all the documentation. Not only that, but they pay people. Because of this they can pull together a very accurate, very powerful emulator.
There's the answer to the entire issue, and it partially explains the Saturn's demise ($400 due to complexity of hardware, suffered a lack of games because developers had a hard time working with the complex hardware). Just so people are aware of how insanely complex the Saturn was, and how poorly optimized Saturn emulators are right now, let's consider the Saturn specs, and Yabause (http://yabause.sourceforge.net).

The Saturn had a pair of 28.6 MHz SH2 CPUs, and (yes, a third CPU) an SH1 at 20 MHz and it had five RAM banks (Work, Audio, Backup, Video, and CD Buffer, totaling 36.25 Mbits, or 4.5 MBytes). I compiled Yabause on a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 (with AltiVec, a processor well suited to emulation) running OS X 10.4. Considering the Saturn was capable of 25 MIPS per SH2, and 17 MIPS on the SH1 (67 MIPS total, probably somewhere around 50 MFLOPS), and the PPCG3 at 233 MHz is rated at 525 MIPS in 1997, you'd imagine a PPCG4 at 1 GHz would be something like 1.5 GIPS (likely at least 1 GFLOPS). While MIPS isn't a very reliable method of comparing architectures, it does give a good comparison of the massive difference in processing power we're talking bout. Anyway, the Saturn can churn out about 50 MFLOPS and the PPCG4 about 1 GFLOPS, about 20 times faster. Yabause, when compiled on the G4 with all available optimizations used, can barely animate the Saturn boot screen, and produces an unusably slow BIOS screen. BIOS interaction is relatively low level stuff, so if the BIOS barely runs, you can only imagine what would happen if I were to try and run a game on this system. The PSP is a 333 MHz MIPS (the architecture, not the benchmark) CPU, and probably measures somewhere around PPCG3 benchmarks. Unless Sega and Sony collaborate, it's highly unlikely that we would ever see the Saturn on the PSP. In the event that Sega were ever to re-release Saturn games on the PSP, it would be most likely that they would simply port the game, since emulation would be inefficient.

Now, just for comparison, for everyone who's out there saying "well, they said PSX and N64 emulation was impossible, but look at it now!" the N64 ran a 64-bit modified R4000 MIPS CPU at 93.75 MHz (125 MIPS/100 MFLOPS), and a Sound/Graphics processor at 62.5 MHz. Comparatively, the N64 uses simpler hardware, and renders about half as many polygons (with all effects, 200k polys for Saturn and 100k for the N64). Simpler hardware capable of less complex graphics. That's it. It's not pessimism, it's not overly enthusiastic "anything can happen" optimism, it's realism. It's a vastly complex machine that's twice as capable of more complex graphics than even the PSX (not that anyone was ever able to code anything efficient enough to take advantage of that).

[kharaboudjan]

just think about how hard it is to get the Amiga playable on the psp.. then you all should understand that everything over 16 bits consoles/computers are extremly difficult to emulate on the psp!!

(and there are genious ppl like NJ and Exophase, but that is another story)

[tgm123]

most homebrew coders are actually professional coders with years and years of experience

[Cap'n 1time]

most homebrew coders are actually professional coders with years and years of experience

That is sometimes the case, but even so emulating a console with limited documentation is extremely difficult. Master Programmer or not, its generally a long and daunting task.

How many years has ZSNES been in development now for? ~10. There are still things that havnt been completed. It was only a few years ago that we were finally able to play games that made use of the S-DD1 without using decrypted stuff.

[Strangler]

http://boards2.sega.com/sega_board/viewtopic.php?p=1702973#1702973

[Strangler]

why dont they make a virtual console on the psp?

[JKKDARK]

http://boards2.sega.com/sega_board/viewtopic.php?p=1702973#1702973


why dont they make a virtual console on the psp?

First of all, gametap is for PC. PC specs are A LOT better than the PSP. Enjoy your dreams, kid.

[tgm123]

wii runs at 733mhz
psp runs at 333mhz when overclocked

and psp cant even do mario kart at full speed

[Wally]

Why does everyone say OMG MHZ!!!!

Its not about MHZ, its about how well the coder can code something for that platform.. No console ever uses the full processing power for any game (Some might not have enough ram, such as the N64 which is why conker might lag a tad) Doesnt mean that we need a super computer to run it.

A coder could possibly emulate a saturn at full speed with various optimization techniques.

PSmonkey once told me that the N64 is not true 64 bit. Only 1/3 of the power is 64 bit hence 2/3 being 32bit. There aren't many 64bit opcodes hence making emulation on a PSP easy.

Which means that the saturn might not be using all its power.

I don't even know why i replied to such an crazy topic :/

Wally

[quzar]

There are two things that make the N64 EXTREMELY easy to emulate (one 'on the psp' and the other 'in general'): the CPU is of the same family as the PSPs, which makes running code much easier (somewhat as to how saturn emulation has a strong possibility of happening on the Dreamcast) and the fact that most every game for the system was written using high level libraries, which means you don't have to emulate the video hardware. In fact, there is currently no emulator that fully emulates the video hardware of the N64, only runs the games. This is why certain games (which were made w/o those high level libs) barely run on emulators or have severe problems.

The reason the PlayStation was so easy for Sony to emulate on the PSP was for basically the same reason with the processor. The video hardware is also in a way descended from the PS as the PS2's video was based on it, and then the PSP was based off that (well not entirely but in a way). They also know how to gain access to all the hardware in the PSP in order to use it to it's fullest.

Most homebrew coders are not professional programmers, and the ones that are usually do not work professionally with the same kinds of programming that emulation demands (I know at least 2 emulator authors who are professional programmers, but who work 100% in java development, with C programming and emulation simply being a hobby).

[gunntims0103]

If only the psp were open source it would make emulation development so much easier. A coder would have the full specification's and technological hardware parameters to thus go about emulating something like N64 on the PSP with ease.

A fevered dream at best.