PSX Emu on the PSP, Possible or Not ?

[quzar]

Quzar>Have you ever done any coding for the XBOX? Would you ever consider doing a PSP project?

Neither. Until the opensdk becomes more mature it really isn't worth doing nice advanced stuff on xbox (by advanced I mean things that it can't run with). The reason I got into DC stuff other than owning one was for the challenge. With the xbox, no matter how much those coders complain they are working with very few limits.

As far as psp, I see it the same way (to a point). Right now it's development tools are very immature and early scene things are all about speed and not accuracy, complexity and compatability.

The only consoles other than Dreamcast I have considered trying out emulation on are the ngage/s60 cellphone line (mostly because I own a 6600) and the gba. The gba I discount almost immediately as a passing fancy simply because of the multitude of very dedicated and low level coders who have put out things already for it (basically there wouldn't be a point except purely to learn).

You seem to be knowlagible on the sblect. Do you recomend amd or some other off brand. I Realize amd isnt the best in the universe compard to other unmentioned brand names like intell. my question is if you where to pick the perfect pc processor, what would it be in your opinion ?

There really aren't such things as 'off brands' nowadays. There is Intel and AMD. Aside from them there are basically only two other RELATIVELY mainstream processor makers: Transmeta and Cyrix/VIA. Both of those companies specialize in low power usage embedded x86 processors though.

I reccomend AMD mostly for the great cost/performance ratio and the ability to tweak, hack, OC, and mod them (compared to intel).

[J@F]

I love it how people always say "coded from ground up" as if that is the holy grail of console emulation. Here's a little no-so-secret piece of info you should all know about bleemcast: the only reason it was coded in 100% asm is because that is what rand codes in.

Every single thing he has ever done has been 100% asm, he doesn't work any other way, and is most comfortable writing assembly for whatever machine rather than C or C++ or whatever else.

Around 90% of all code in an emulator (excluding processor emulation) cannot be made to be any faster simply by writing it in asm. There are two very important things to do in order to make a port as fast as possible (as fast as noticably possible): writing CPU emulators that are in one way or another optimized for the target processor (wether or not it's in asm) and writing A/V outputs that utilize the A/V hardware of the target console.

(EDIT: resource wise) Writing in assembly is almost always better. For most tasks, coding in assembly uses less resources, esspecially on embbeded systems. The part about making optimized emulators is absolutely right though.

[RedKing14CA]

so whose going to start making this emulator? i cant, i cant even make an eboot....

[quzar]

Writing in assembly is almost always better. For most tasks, coding in assembly uses less resources, esspecially on embbeded systems.

for almost everything it makes no difference. You can write the most optimized assembly you want, then do the same thing in C and get the assembly output from gcc with -O3 or -Os and it will be identical (if not better) than what you did originally yet it took 10x the amount of time and is 100x less readable.

[J@F]

are you talking about on the dreamcast, in general, or what? your right about it being a complex language, it's usually far better to use C.

[CannedSoup]

Only thing ASM is still good for is emulation cores. Thats why zsnes team is changing everything over to C thats not a core and wouldnt have any effects on the gameplay. Menus, special chip implemation stuff like that.

[quzar]

J@F I'm talking about everything. For the Dreamcast most people put out the conception that GCC is just ridiculously horrible, but that is not the case. What happens is that in certain circumstances it will generate horrible code, but in most cases it gives the best possible.

CS: That's not true. The reason they are changing to C is because PCs nowadays do not need it to be fully in assembly anymore, and it would be much easier to modify things with it in C. asm is still very usefull.

[CannedSoup]

They are still keeping the main emulation ascept of it in ASM though so I dont see how that would effect speed at all. I think its gonna be a bad thing that parts of it are in C now because your gonna here "ZSNES USES C NOW SO WILL SOMEONE PORT IT!!!!"

[J@F]

you would think, since you tell the computer exactly what to do and humans are smarter, a knowledgable ( probably won't have to be a genius) asm programer could find a whole lot of optimizations, that the compiler, even with the output to asm, would'nt have figured out.

anyways, my first post in this thread I was just tring to make the case that the technology in bleemcast might not have been a "single game emu" sighting that because of a number of non-technical issues (lawsuits, small company, dying dreamcast, and finacial problems) plus the fact that they coded in assembly (which, like you said, is like 10x harder)

to me, It read like you were saying "I" thought writing in assembly was a good idea ( which I noted was one of bleemcast's problems), since I was the only one I saw metioning asm. (some one could have edited there post I guess, I haven't been online in a number of days, so I didn't see peoples original posts) from scratch coding is always perferred if you can pull it off, but asm wasn't the from scratch I meant neccessarily.

but anough about asm or C someones just put out a psx emu maybe by the holiday season it will work satifactory, and you can buy yourself a 2gig duo and be set.