http://forums.ngemu.com/dolphin-discussion/107877-dolphin-svn-shots.html The recent update to Dolphin ( gcn emu ) looks to have wii emulation starting already. While nothing is playable due to the lack of emulation of the Wii remote, some games are booting and running intro videos and title screens. This came about sooner then I exspected. :shrug:
Wait what?!?!? Some games are already bootable to the Title Screens and/or Intro's?.... Well... that was alot faster than I expected aswell! Lets hope progress goes just as fast! :thumbsup:
Erm, thats more interfacing. I believe they still will need to figure out a lot to get input emulation going.
I already heard of that, it's impressive remembering that the Wii is only 2 years old... Anyway, I always thought that Wii emulation wouldn't be that hard starting from a GameCube emulator because of the similarities between them. Also the Wii architecture isn't that hard to emulate, and that helped to get more results in just one version while PS2 emulation has been working for years with less results. Probably one of the hardest parts of Wii emulation must be the Wiimote. The fact it's already emulated helps a lot, but making it work accurately in games can be a hard work...
Uhm, wait what? We are already jumping on the Wii when PS2 and Gamecube and Xbox emulation hasn't even been close to even being mastered yet? I think emulation is kind of pointless now concidering we can't even finish our last gen consoles before starting on the new.
slightly off topic... how far along is xbox emulation? Back on topic... I'm also not so surprised - as stated already - it's just 2 gamecubes mounted together. As the gc has been out for a fair old while it seems logical that it would be happening around now. Was there ever a gamecube emulator? (yeah, I'm lazy)
. First off, No system is ever going to be mastered. Thats a retarded notion to judge by. . Second, Ps2 is actualy pretty damn far off now. Sure you need a beefy system but thats exspected (you're never going to get it to run on low end pcs). . Third, This is running in a gcn emu which actualy has made some pretty impressive strides in gcn emulation. This recent update actualy improved gcn emulation and you probably would have seen that if you checked into the link. . Forth, Lets not kid our selfs. The Wii is nothing more then a GCN+. It's not like they went out of their way to start a new emu. They just did a few minor things that started to allow Wii games to boot. . Fifth, Nobody really gives a rats ass to emulate xbox which is the reason why we don't really have any xbox emus. GCN it self would probably be more advanced by now if there actualy was a demand for it. Wii's popularity is most likely to push GCN emulation more as a result (since to do a wii emu, you need a good gcn emu to start off with).
Thats a nice wall of rant and all but all I'm saying is, I want to actually be able to play my game and enjoy it on an emulator before saying "fuck it" and moving onto the next gen consoles. Thats great they got a team together working on next gen things but this is a basic lesson in life, you don't start on another project unless the first one is finished. I don't know what you mean by a emulator will never be mastered but I guess our definitions of mastered are different. NES, SNES, SEGA, PS1, N64 those are all consoles I considered mastered because I can run my rom/iso on them they actually run them at full speed, near flawless graphics, and sound as if I was playing it on my console. All I'm saying is you don't drop an unfinished product to move on to the next. Its only a forshadow for what will happen with the next gen consoles as well making the effort for emulation inevitably pointless.
I can agree to that, but for slightly different reasons. PC Emulation for systems created after the Dreamcast seems to be pointless IMO (GameCube, PS2, XBOX, etc). The way I see it, newer generation consoles are mostly software based (basically PCs), so why not just focus on emulating those older consoles on the newer systems instead of heavily upgrading a PC just to play them at a decent framerate? At the same time, I shouldn't forget that technology is still advancing + from a different standpoint, an emu dev may receive personal satisfaction from getting a next-gen PC emulator to partially run. Who knows, maybe in 10 years from now average PCs would be able to handle emulation of those consoles. My post may seem ignorant to how next-generation consoles actually operate, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
It depends on what you want emulation for. If you want it for running homebrew or piracy (not equating the two and not implying members' motives), then recent consoles are fair game. If you want emulation for preservation, then why deal with consoles that are still readily available?
I m a big fan of emulation even for commercial games. I own everything I want to own in originals anyway, but I find emulation both convenient and an exciting idea - I really admire the coders behind it
Make sure to read my post before going on your next rant. The team did not say fuck it to gcn and moved on to wii. They are working on gcn. Wii is not that much different then gcn. Its not like they went from gcn to doing a ps3 emulator. Wii is a GCN period. If you looked into the link, you would see they've made big strides for gcn emulation. Alot of visual issues where fixed and you can actualy play games like wind waker, Mario sunshine and etc. Wii games barely even play at all actualy. It's just they got a few things changed and Wii games start. Say the makers of chankast found how to start getting naomi 2 games running in their emulator (with out dropping work on getting dc games fixed), are they not allowed to start till they master naomi & dreamcast first? Even though naomi 2 is just an upgraded naomi much like the wii is to gcn? As for your definition of mastered then hell, ps2 more then fits the bill and this recent update of dolphin puts it pretty damn close. To me mastered never happens because there is still a lot of stuff not correct or done regarding older systems. Hell we still don't have N64 DD emulation, Some n64 roms still dont play properly. As for performance, thats an issue that never can be fixed. Video game consoles become more and more complex as time moves on. No mater how much "mastering" goes into pcsx2, it's never going to run at full speed on low end systems. You will always need a beefy compuer to run it.
Just a few videos for kicks PCSX2 (PS2 Emu) Persona 3 - http://youtube.com/watch?v=Om6bOBvQ14Y Silent Hill 4 - http://youtube.com/watch?v=piW-s2Dbp5w Dolphin (Gcn/Wii Emu) Twilight Princess (GCN) - http://youtube.com/watch?v=lcFUfENHvEY&feature=related Wind Waker - http://youtube.com/watch?v=eBQfazv8ACg&feature=related I think you get the point.
I don't totally agree with that, I remember people saying that PSX / Saturn emulation at full speed won't ever be achieved and now the emulation is really fast and accurate. If you're talking about PCSX2 running in actual lower-end systems at full speed, that's just not gonna happen. When you're developing an emulator like that (PS2 architecture is hard as hell to emulate) you have to know that it's gonna take years to make the emulation accurate and efficient, and for then computer standards will have changed and the emulator will have taken some advantage of the new capabilities (like happened with Saturn emus when multi-threading and dual-core processing appeared), so for the moment that this happens you probably won't need Teh-Kickass-Computer to put it to work... AFAIK all Xbox emulation projects have been abandonned. However there's a program around that instead of emulating the system turns Xbox executables into Windows executables (http://www.caustik.com/cxbx/), and since the Xbox has a Pentium processor most of the instrucions can be executed directly, but I haven't tried it yet so I'm not sure of how accurate is it.
I'm not one who tends to gloat on the side of things being "undoable" but in general from ps2 on, we are going to need more high end systems to get decent performance out of it. Yet, agreed, after a few years, what was once considered top of the line for PC tends to be the norm which ultimately equals things out. Most console emus are not like MAME where the goal is accuracy over speed. Will the GCN emu get faster? Most likely but even when it gets to being what most would find complete, you're most likely still going to need what is considered mid to high end for right now. My crapy Duron PC at work in no way will ever see GCN or PS2 at full speed (well i get full speed in simple 2d menus ). Now say lets take a lower end system like PSP. Sure you bet once that gets emulated it will be able to run on PC specs far less then what is required for ps2/gcn emulation. Personaly I feel if someone put the work into it, Ps3 could run a 30fps (or full speed) gcn or wii emulator due to simular instruction sets (as well as having all the cell cores which eat numbers for breakfast). Actualy thats another interesting factor to throw into the equasion (target platform's relation to the emulated platform).
Remember that emulation speed doesn't only depend of the capabilities of the computer and the to-be-emulated system, the main thing is the number of instructions needed to translate a single instruction. Most of emulators (saying it in an extremely simple way) include some ways to improve speed like try to recognize some process and instead of translate every single instruction to get it done it just replaces it with the equivalent of that process, or when some process repeats itself the emulator just translates it once, for example. Also remember that in game consoles there's not only a processor, most of the times there's a video processor, a sound processor or chip, some other chips controlling the devices and peripherals and other stuff like memory modules, an internal bios and stuff like that.
They look incredible... there was another link on the Persona clip to Devil May Cry 3. Apart from some garbled audio, it looks spot on. Very (very) impressive! Someone mentioned (what I suspected) xbox emulation being 'abandoned'. This surprises me given that a) it's actually been cracked to high heaven - and b) constant mention of how an xbox is just 'pc'. Surely it would be the easiest of the lot to emulate? Well... I'm no expert but thanks for the links and interesting discussion.
Trust me, I know all that. I'm a comercial programmer working on a PSP game. (actualy former psp hobbyist coder, and not one of thoes shitty lua guys either). I know a great deal about the PSP. :033: -- edit -- PSP is a mips r4000 stripped down (custom cop0, no tlb, 32bit only, single precission cop1 (f), a custom vector unit VFPU, a custom gpu (yet quite simple), and a second r4000 core that does side work (mp4 & at3 decoding). There actualy is a PSP emu out there that can run a few very simple 2D games (tales of eternia & the first puzzle bobble psp game). My major beef with it is HLE the kernal which is complicated since it changes easly with fw versions. It would be personaly better to LLE the whole damn thing specialy since the only complicated parts of the cpu are allegrex(cop0) & vfpu(cop2). -- edit 2 -- Actualy here are a few videos of the psp emu in action http://youtube.com/watch?v=MWzFz0aWtDs&feature=related http://youtube.com/watch?v=osqFxaWUeg0&feature=related http://youtube.com/watch?v=zqyIjPFHKsI
Modern consoles can be actually less difficult (computationally) to emulate because most components don't need to be fully synchronized like in old consoles, instruction cycle precision is never necessary, nor are memory bus handlers, and they don't use raster effects (so CPU can be run for an entire frame at a time), no programmable sound generators means ADPCM can be cheaply unpacked and dropped directly into the sound buffer and lastly console graphics API can now be translated into your PC's API, far less intensive than calculating the frame pixel by pixel as the best old console emulators do. So all the increased cache hits compared to old emulators + high level emulation let you emulate high frequency consoles on marginally more powerful hardware.
