Is mega cd emulation possible?

[evioine]

Hi, Iwas just wondering why if there why there doesn't seem to be any sega/mega cd emulator for the psp, when there are some very good mega drive emulators. Is there some extra difficulty with emulating the add-on that doesn't occur for pc megadrive/mega-cd emulators? It would be cool to run old mega cd games on psp , like Snatcher.

[Tinnus]

The Sega CD had some 2 or 3 extra chips, so that would run too slow to be usable.

Not the first time this is asked too.

[evioine]

Thats a shame

If the psp can't do it, would that mean the dreamcast couldn't either? N64 emulation has been done on the psp but not the dreamcast so im assuming the psp must be more powerful- or is that just the psp being able to store large roms on a memory stick gives it an advantage with regard emulation of cartridge-based consoles?

[JKKDARK]

Thats a shame

If the psp can't do it, would that mean the dreamcast couldn't either? N64 emulation has been done on the psp but not the dreamcast so im assuming the psp must be more powerful- or is that just the psp being able to store large roms on a memory stick gives it an advantage with regard emulation of cartridge-based consoles?

Wrong. The PSP is not more powerful than the Dreamcast. You will not see a dreamcast emulator for PSP never!

[SpacemanSpiff]

Not this argument again. The PSP is much more powerful than the Dreamcast. Anyone who isn't blind (i.e. not a Sega fan) can see this pretty easily by looking at the available software.

[Tinnus]

Wrong. The PSP is not more powerful than the Dreamcast. You will not see a dreamcast emulator for PSP never!

As if "more powerful" meant "an emulator can be done".

Also "more powerful" is a very vague expression....

Anyway, to emulate something you need a system WAY more powerful, not just more powerful, so yes, there will be no Dreamcast emulator for PSP, although the PSP is more powerful than the Dreamcast!

[quzar]

Thats a shame

If the psp can't do it, would that mean the dreamcast couldn't either? N64 emulation has been done on the psp but not the dreamcast so im assuming the psp must be more powerful- or is that just the psp being able to store large roms on a memory stick gives it an advantage with regard emulation of cartridge-based consoles?

The only reason we don't have n64 emulation is that we don't have coders as dedicated as psmonkey was to undertake it. The Dreamcast is well able to perform n64 emulation.

Not this argument again. The PSP is much more powerful than the Dreamcast. Anyone who isn't blind (i.e. not a Sega fan) can see this pretty easily by looking at the available software.

Such as? You could make the same argument in favor of the Dreamcast by saying that we had a fullspeed playstation emulator able to increase the quality of the graphics of the games it plays. As for commercial games, well...

Between the Dreamcast and PSP there are places where each excelles

Odds are there will eventually be SegaCD emulation availible for both systems. It has been shown by adventerous hardware hackers that for a few games, the second m68000 in the CD expansion is not used at all, and without having to emulate it, the other chips are a relatively simple matter.

I think the Dreamcast frankly has a better chance of doing this for two reasons. 1) We can do CDDA play for free, no cpu intensive mp3, or $#@!bersome memory thrashing wav. 2) we have a dedicated sound processor, which has yet to be used intelligently for emulation, but has the capability of running some sound emulation on it, and could be especially useful because it has the capability of playing adpcm sound (whose conversion to standard audio is expensive).

As for the remark about the psp with cartridge based consoles, it's not so much the memory stick (although reading from the memory stick is faster than from the CD) it's more the amount of main ram. PSP has 32mb, DC has 16.

[Darksaviour69]

i would also point out its a little unfair to compare 5-8 year old dreamcasts games to new psp games and the development tools and coding technquies have improved since then techniques

i just knew quzar was going to post in this thread lol

[psiko_scweek]

quazar = DC Fan

eitherway, Quazar is right, when it comes to sound processing for the DC the DC wins because of the points he has, now if we just wanted SegaCD emulation i think the PSP could handle it without too much of a problem, but again its all up to how the program is coded.

btw, about the N64 and PSmonkey, I wonder how he is doing with the N64DD emulation, that would be cool!

[quzar]

quazar = DC Fan

eitherway, Quazar is right, when it comes to sound processing for the DC the DC wins because of the points he has, now if we just wanted SegaCD emulation i think the PSP could handle it without too much of a problem, but again its all up to how the program is coded.

Quite frankly, at this point it time, it would be easier on the Dreamcast. We have (a unique) hardware rendering system for our genesis emulator as well as an extremely fast 68000 core, and (probably the most important of all) the ability to play CDDA for free, which was one of the things the sega CD had in abundance. Playing from mp3, the psp would not be able to handle SCD emulation. Otherwise, it's quite possible.

The problem with systems like the SegaCD is that it's not practical to have a dynamic recompiler, as the overhead of it is most likely to outweigh the benefits over a well written assembly interpreter, so in some ways (due in great part because of the fact that both the playstation and n64 had processors in the same family as the psp) it would be more problematic to emulate the SegaCD on the psp than the playstation.

Basically, the PSP appears to be much more powerful than it is because of the amount of high level emulation that can be done on it with the playstation and n64. On both of those you are getting really fast cpu emulation due to the similarities, and really fast graphics due to the high level rendering of the graphics. In powerful 2D systems like the SCD, 32x or Saturn; you lose all those advantages.

It's not so much that I'm a Dreamcast fan (although I am) it's that I'm extremely familiar with it's capabilities. I would never argue this kind of point against the gamecube or xbox360, but even the xbox is in some ways less powerful than the Dreamcast (slightly less powerful fpu, and has no ability like the PVR2 to intelligently ignore rendering of things that are not in the frame of view [allowing for scenes that would normally need to be made up of 3x the polygons to be rendered]). And such is the Dreamcast to many things.

The reason the Dreamcast can do this is because it's hardware had lots of really weird quirks that are relatively unique to it that made it's performacne in some things astronomical.

Anyways, it's like comparing apples to oranges, home consoles to handhelds. Hell, psp can't do 640x480, or 800x600 so =P, it's a bit easier to carry around a PSP, a DC can be bought for 1/10th the price, etc etc.

For the record, I'm not the one who starts psp vs. dc things, for some reason a lot of people like to use the DC as a comparison point for homebrew/emulation though (probably because we're THE reference point for it =P)