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

[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

...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.

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)