Search

[Hi]

to Hi: You would never get to play the game.  You would have to load the start screen first no one wants to play slow mo start screen.  This thread really should be closed.  Say what you want about not being ported, then just get project64 and emulate it on the computer its NO EVER going to be done on the ds, its not like you can just add ram to it to make it go faster.

So, are you really tring to say that the emu would be so slow it would take an hour to get threw the star screen? Sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe.
_____________________________________________________________

Well, I've been thinking about this all day instead of consintrating on my school work... well, might as well share it.

Not that this would help that much, but I DO think people are forgetting that there are things we can do to speed stuff up. like...

1. take away sound
2. take away color (black and white is cool anyway...)
3. generally lower graphic quality
4. use speed hacks

Now, here are some more little tricks I thought of...

What if we used multiple ds's. You know, through wifi. That would give us double the prossesing power... even if we would need to take turns playing the game.

Now this is a longshot, but say somebody realised some accesory that went into the bottom slot. Is the bottom slot big enouph for a fair sized proseser? Or even better, could we put some "things" in the bottom slot to bring the nds closer in hardware to that of the n64?

And, am I correct that everyone once said that it would be impossible to emulate snes on the gba?

[Perseid]

to Hi: You would never get to play the game.  You would have to load the start screen first no one wants to play slow mo start screen.  This thread really should be closed.  Say what you want about not being ported, then just get project64 and emulate it on the computer its NO EVER going to be done on the ds, its not like you can just add ram to it to make it go faster.

So, are you really tring to say that the emu would be so slow it would take an hour to get threw the star screen? Sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe.
_____________________________________________________________

Well, I've been thinking about this all day instead of consintrating on my school work... well, might as well share it.

Not that this would help that much, but I DO think people are forgetting that there are things we can do to speed stuff up. like...

1. take away sound
2. take away color (black and white is cool anyway...)
3. generally lower graphic quality
4. use speed hacks

Now, here are some more little tricks I thought of...

What if we used multiple ds's. You know, through wifi. That would give us double the prossesing power... even if we would need to take turns playing the game.

Now this is a longshot, but say somebody realised some accesory that went into the bottom slot. Is the bottom slot big enouph for a fair sized proseser? Or even better, could we put some "things" in the bottom slot to bring the nds closer in hardware to that of the n64?

And, am I correct that everyone once said that it would be impossible to emulate snes on the gba?

Wikipedia:
N64 CPU - 93.75Mhz
N64 GPU - 62.5Mhz

NDS CPUs - 67Mhz and 33Mhz

The N64 is actually faster than the NDS.

1) Taking away sounds may help a tiny bit, but emulating sound is no longer the thing that bogs an emulator down. It's the CPU/GPU.
2) Taking away color will do 0. It would probably even make it slower because it would have to translate what is naturally in color into grayscale.
3 and 4) Lowering resolution and using speed hacks can help if you're coding an emulator that is almost fast enough but not quite. Not in this situation.

CPU sharing through Wi-Fi - while that would be damned cool to see I don't think WiFi would be fast enough to handle that much data and there would be a lot of overhead getting the calculated data back and forth.

And lastly, the idea of a piece of hardware in the GBA slot. That might work. But is the slot 2 cart bus fast enough to handle that much data? I don't know. Probably not. And since I doubt anyone is going to build that the point is moot. Then again if someone did manage to get that to work I'd buy it.

Sorry, man.

[NT]

to Hi: You would never get to play the game.  You would have to load the start screen first no one wants to play slow mo start screen.  This thread really should be closed.  Say what you want about not being ported, then just get project64 and emulate it on the computer its NO EVER going to be done on the ds, its not like you can just add ram to it to make it go faster.

The thread should stay open purely to educate those who are still learning about how emulation works.   :wink:

[dantheman]

SNES on the GBA was thought improbable, not impossible.  The GBA is about 7-8 times faster than the SNES, not quite enough for fullspeed emulation yet fast enough to make it possible.  Also, the hardware architectures were very similar, so the GBA's fast 2D hardware could be used to manipulate the graphics rather than rendering each scanline individually like a PC emulator would.  The N64 has a very different hardware architecture, so no such shortcuts could be used.

Speedhacks only speed up the game to a certain amount, and I'm not sure how feasible it would be for the N64.  The way SNES speedhacks are made is actually quite simple.  As the SNES runs at a fixed fps count, when all the work is done in a frame, there exists an idle loop that goes back and forth between two instructions until it's time for the next frame to come along.  Speedhacking simply skips that idle loop to get back to the parts where the SNES is actually doing work.  By skipping a little bit of each frame, the 30 or 60 fps (forgot which one) can get done in less time.  Some games can't be speedhacked because the loop is too complicated.  Some games can be speedhacked, but so much work gets done per frame that the speed increase is minimal.  In any case though, I'm not sure if the same is true for the N64.

[sonicwind]

SNES right now is at a playable point and not all of the games work.  Just think about that, if SNES isn't all that great how could N64 be any good.  And at Hi I didn't say it would take 1 hour to load the start screen just that loading credits would be WAY longer than normal.  I doubt anyone wants to show off a start screen for more than the psps start screen.

[Koji]

Dan: 60fps for SNES games.

As for n64, you wouldn't be able to do speed hacks in the same manner because N64 games aren't fixed frame rate. A good example of this is mario kart. Play most levels and the framerate seems pretty steady, but try playing 2 player on DK's level and you'll notice a dramatic drop in frame rate. That means there is no idle loop.

As for it taking an hour to get through a start screen... Yeah that may be a little long... probably closer to 30-45minutes emulating an N64 on the DS.

If anyone is wondering how the DS is able to perform effects the same and often times greater then the N64 at higher frame rates, it's that technologies have gotten better. The lower power DS ARM CPUs are much more "top of the line". Also take into consideration the DS's lower resolution, lack of texture filtering, lower "viewing" distance, etc... and it all adds up to quite a lot less that needs to be rendered.

[Hi]

To bad... but I'm not out of ideas yet!

I realise that by itself the nds doesn't have The prosesing power, but there must be some way one could "give the nds more hardware" if it can't be threw slot-2, what about slot-1? or maybe something else. there must be a way. (and if a way was made, I for one would buy it. I'm sure others would as well. (Did you here that roman? I SAID I WOULD BUY IT AND I'M SURE OTHERS WOULD AS WELL.) :wink:

[Cyprien Walker]

why dont we stay with porting our lovely DOS games and so on.
eulate takes alot i think porting takes alot to but then:

1. when you port you can only do 1 at a time
2. when you emulate you can try more at a time ( might not work )
3. ports are mostly on perfect speed ( depents if the hardware can take it)

4. example the Game Outlaws For Dos as an old 3d game like hexen and heretic it says here on the back that it needs a 220MHZ pentium.
since the ds is able of a port for hexen and heretic lets say that games that can rum on 220MHZ Pentium can be ported to the ds.
this is in the time with People that did and didnt had any graphic cards.

1995 Back of the box

[Gleasonator]

OK... wouldn't it just be easier to run an application on your PC, mount your N64 ROM on that, connect to your computer with WiFi and play like that? I suppose that it takes away portability except from in your own house, but it's a start.

I do agree with Hi, though. There's always a way. Where is the DS's CPU anyways? I bet someone could make a mod for a faster one.... OR... we can just wait 'till the next DS handheld witch'll probably be around GC speed. And I'll bet anything that it'll have TWO touch screens.

[Koji]

You can't mod the DS to have a faster processor. There are limits on the main board, and changing the type of processor would make it completely incompatible with DS software (homebrew and original). If you want to attempt such a hardcore mod, may I instead advise you to pick up a PDA instead? They come with pretty high clockrates anymore, and I know my old 400mhz (OCed to 530) Axim could emulate PS1 games beautifully. I'm sure there is someone who is either making, or porting, or already has made/ported an N64 emu for them.

As for your idea about running it via the computer... Not possible. You're taking about full emulation of the N64, plus full speed capturing of the video, plus real time encoding of the frames (as they'll need to be compressed to fit in the limited stream NDS wifi can handle), plus a very good wireless connection to your DS, plus the encoded video would have to be fairly simple to allow the NDS to decode it in real time and manage a way to send the the input from the DS to the PC.

All of those things need to happen on the NDS and the PC in realtime. That means instant, as in less then .05 from the start of each frame, to the next... Else you'll suffer horrible controller lag which will render most games unplayable.

The best suggestion you've had is to wait it out for the DS2 which will, more likely then not, be announced sometime before the end of the year, but it probably won't be released till late 2008 earliest, and more likely mid to late 2009.

[Perseid]

OK... wouldn't it just be easier to run an application on your PC, mount your N64 ROM on that, connect to your computer with WiFi and play like that? I suppose that it takes away portability except from in your own house, but it's a start.

I do agree with Hi, though. There's always a way. Where is the DS's CPU anyways? I bet someone could make a mod for a faster one.... OR... we can just wait 'till the next DS handheld witch'll probably be around GC speed. And I'll bet anything that it'll have TWO touch screens.

If you were to replace the DS processor with a new one you would blast compatibility with all the hardware and all the software. You'd basically have to design your own all-new handheld.

[sonicwind]

O YEA!!!! lets go buy a quad core and put it in the ds.  Then put in some nice ram to o'c it. O wait........ then its a computer.  Didn't i state this earlier? it is NOT going to happen. Nothing you say about adding ram through the 2nd or first slot is going to change that.  As of right now the PSP has a hard time emulating the N64.  If the PSP has way more power then how can the ds possibly emulate it?

[Gleasonator]

I've thought about using a Pocket PC actually... just no emulators yet. That's what I think the homebrew developers should move to. Just get a controller for it and run your stuff like that. From what I've heard it's not terribly difficult to port applications to pocket PC format, so why not?

[AnalogMan]

HOW has this thread gone on so long? You cannot get a satisfiable N64 Emu on the DS, not enough power, case closed. Short of Remote Viewing a computer that IS running the emu, you're boned. Threads can be locked and still viewed by others who want to ask the same question and are to lazy to search.

[Koji]

I've thought about using a Pocket PC actually... just no emulators yet. That's what I think the homebrew developers should move to. Just get a controller for it and run your stuff like that. From what I've heard it's not terribly difficult to port applications to pocket PC format, so why not?

The DS community is potentially larger then the PDA market for one, at least in the sense that it will be used for gaming. Secondly, PDA are generally much more expensive then the DS. Thirdly, developers would need the hardware to develope on and they'd have to either have many devices to test on, or have lots of volunteers with different systems to test to make sure it all works. With the DS the hardware is unified and thus, what works on one SHOULD work on all (the few exceptions being caused by different firmwares)