Video: DC all up in your Pandora
September 29, 2009
Here’s a little something: NullDC, the Dreamcast emulator, running on Pandora hardware at last! The last glimpse we got of this project was back in March, and was followed by an extended period of radio silence from the NullDC devs (Drk||Raziel and ZeZu). But you know what they say about silence… sometimes, it’s golden. MWeston’s Youtube description is essential reading:
This was sent to me by Drk||Raziel to try. He even added support for the Pandora game controls but most games (of the bunch I tried) want analog controls so the dpad didn’t move me around at all. The CPU is clocked at 800MHz here and it still suffers from the weak FPU problem that hasn’t been addressed with NEON yet. Also, so many texture/blending modes are not supported. I’m told that only two of the 150+ required ones are in here (so that’s why that guy’s head is missing!).
King of Fighters just really doesn’t work well but I thought it was funny to show it because it looks like an Atari 2600!
I’m blown away by how beautiful it looks on the 4.3″ screen being rendered at the native resolution. It’s very much a work in progress still but what a nice point to show where it is at today and then compare it in a few months to where it will be.
atomicthumbs
BackAssward
Butterman
gruso
tom
What's this?
WOW! Now this was something I didn’t expect!
Looking awsome!
Gimme, gimme ;o)
Wow things are coming along, I was shocked how far it’s come. Imagine when all the devs have a pandora. Thanks for the preview mweston and all involved!
Christ, that runs pretty fast already. V.nice work to the devs. I didn’t expect this one either
P.s King of Fighters still looks like fun, even minus the graphics.
Slow and ugly !
What’s the point to that hype ?
I thought it would be better than this a pandora.
Wonder if I will wait until the end.
You have no idea the work involved. Every program you use took effort to get to the point where you can use it, or deride it.
Perhaps you need slightly more realistic expectations.
Yeah, too right he does. 128bit Dreamcast emulation on a 600mhz processor. What ?!!? You’d need at least a couple of Gigs on a pc m8 and even then, it’s not perfect. We’re lucky the emulation’s got this far. Drinks all round to all involved. Shame they’ll have to pay for them themselves or take the money from the dev fund. They certainly deserve it.
The Dreamcast used a 32-bit processor… the graphic processor I think was 128-bit…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast
Anyway, comparing the Pandora with a PC is just not possible… Especially if that poor PC’s cycles are beign eaten away by a Microsoft OS.
So it is very possible to have this emulator running very close to playable speeds and maybe to full speed on some games.
Congratulations for the developers!
Sorry, you’re right. The cpu was 32 bit with and on die 128 bit gpu. That’s what I get for listening to my m8. Anywhere near playable speed wil still be a massive achievement for the Pandora, though.
Seriously banksystem it’s ungrateful people like you that make developers not want to bother anymore. This is such an incredible amount of progress already. When you write a program as difficult and time consuming as this you can talk.
Troll!
OMG!!!! That’s amazing progress – really well deserved congratulations to those involved. It looks so close to being playable that it’s almost unbelievable…
Best update for a long time! Seriously, it’s nice to see SNES emulation, but if the Pandora couldn’t pull SNES off at full speed then I’d sell it as soon as I got it.
This has fully recharged my interest in the little magical box now – someone have a word with the Chinese government and get them to cancel their national holiday – I want my Pandora now!
In fact – China should declare a national holiday when the Pandora is released.
Now this isn’t meant to be a sniping question so please don’t take it that way..
Do you think that the Pandora hardware is actually capable of ever running this at 100% speed for say Shenmue or Powerstone – or will it always just be an interesting experiment.
I mean I appreciate all the effort that’s gone into it – but unless I could use the emulator to play and enjoy some actual Dreamcast games then it’d just be a curio for me.
drk||Raziel has just posted in the forums, and it sounds promising:
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49750-new-video-from-mweston/page__view__findpost__p__758725
I’m pessimistic on this. I think the best scenerio is it will run similar to PSX on GP2X. It’s a shame SEGA never did any handheld based on Dreamcast hardware.
There’s always Pandora 2
tart!
Just getting the Dreamcast Emu running on a Pandora is an amazing feat. I’m very interested in seeing how this works out.
I reckon that’s playable already, excellent work, the fps reminds me of playing perfect dark on the n64, which was still more than enough.
And at the very least we will have chu chu rocket, quite clearly the best multiplayer game of all time!
Amazing video ! I didn’t expect it to run this nicely.
Sure the FPS are a bit low and there are some graphical problem but that’s really to be expect at this point.
With some more optimization I am sure it will be even better
I remember arguing with people in the gp32x.com that this was not possible to even get running in the first place. hahaha. it may not be perfect but if I had placed a bet I’d of won.
What was that Kung fu tetris stuff at the end?
Seriously good work. Make it go faster!
Heh, that was King of Fighters failing to display its character sprites. Not sure if that’s KoF 99 Evo or a later conversion, since 99 isn’t reported as working at 640×480 at all.
Apart from that, that’s seriosly good-looking progress. Clever use of the A8’s FP circuits and perhaps a frameskip option looks like it’ll make most games playable, and looking great too!
First, this is awsome. There are some really nice dc games I would like to play.
Second, this means we might run unreal tournament and half-life (dc version) on pandora! (we already had arm-quake3)
Already it’s in such better shape than the previous demo we saw. I’m really encouraged by the progress and excited to test it out. Perfecting Dreamcast emulation on the Pandora would put an even bigger smile on my face – I think everyone has to say a big thank-you to the developers of this, thanks!
Superb progress, thanks guys some amazing work being done here, just been reading the forum on this and hopefully they can get another 50%+ speed increase on this meaning playable games for the first time and then minor improvements from there….keep it up, some money winging your way when the first playable build is upon us!
“Also, so many texture/blending modes are not supported. I’m told that only two of the 150+ required ones are in here (so that’s why that guy’s head is missing!).”
I’m not an expert in this field, but wouldn’t this (the texture/blending modes) be something the DSP would be good for? I mean if you want to maximise the running speed on Pandora it seems to make sense to use all three cores (Cortex-A8, Neon, DSP). If not maybe the DSP could be applied for sound processing.
Mindblowing, I didn’t expect this performance so early on the life of the Pandora (not even released lol ). I have lots of doubts about DC emu on the Pandora but this gives me a new perspective, amazing. I hope SFIII3S works, even though FBA supports cps3, I prefer the DC version for the training options, good work, I will donate for this no doubt