Are we allowed to be excited about NullDC?

[S.SubZero]

I was just glancing over the article on the front page and the screenshots and I was very intrigued. Are we permitted to discuss this emulator at all or are we not allowed to do that?

[refraction]

discussion is fine, as long as it doesnt involve release dates and requests for betas :)

[Hard core Rikki]

NullDC wasnt that mediatized, that's why.

Discussion is fine, as long as it doesnt include worship of humans, and love declarations. :bow::bow: :evil:

[refraction]

well it has its own forum now, so enjoy it there :P

[hushypushy]

Discussion is fine, as long as it doesnt include worship of humans, and love declarations. :bow::bow: :evil:

yeah like the freakin' PCSX2 forum, man that is so weird. oh yeah, i'll move this thread into the new forum ;)

[Yeloazndevil]

about time a forum was made for nulldc :p

[General Plot]

Man, this one rocks. I got a chance to play around with an early beta a while back, and NullDC is running things that even Chankast could for me. I'm glad to see a forum for it.:)

[Coolsvilleman]

Man, this one rocks. I got a chance to play around with an early beta a while back, and NullDC is running things that even Chankast could for me. I'm glad to see a forum for it.:)

do you mean could or couldn't? Looks like a very promising emulator. Ready to bust out my ol' DC games and run them in high res glory. Skies of arcadia looked awesome on chankast, maybe even better on nullDc.

[S.T.@.R.S]

what a pity Chankast is not coming back. who knows maybe some day he'll be back again to finish his project. his Emu was fantastic and kept us busy for a long time but...

[General Plot]

do you mean could or couldn't? Looks like a very promising emulator. Ready to bust out my ol' DC games and run them in high res glory. Skies of arcadia looked awesome on chankast, maybe even better on nullDc.
Sorry, I meant that Chankast couldn't run.:p And a note: Skies of Arcadia absolutely ROCKS on NullDC.;)

[chane2k1]

I cant wait for this emu. has anyone mentioned if it would support dual core, certain processor extensions or 64bit systems and if it does support dual core are the graphics loaded on to one core and the cpu loaded onto another much like pcsx2?

[S.SubZero]

I'll be happy with "it can run games."

Just happy to see new life being breathed into DC emulation. I shall keep my fingers crossed for this one.

[flowrent]

Is it possible they will optimise speed after the compatibility is satisfactory ?
A 3 ghz and a 6600 seems kinda high .

[drkIIRaziel]

Speed is around chankast levels atm , some games run faster , some games run slower . It realy depends on the game and plugins used :)


note : an amd 3200+ runs at 2 ghz , not 3 :).

[PsyMan]

As Razi already said, speed depends on the game and the plugins used.

The type of the CPU is also very important. Older Pentium 4 CPUs tend to perform quite bad even if they have a high clock rate. Newer Pentium 4 CPUs, Athlon XP, Athlon 64 and Pentium M CPUs perform way better most of the time.

For example,
Soul Calibur normally runs at 60 FPS
On a dual core Athlon 64 3200 (at 2GHz) it runs at 70+ FPS.
On an Athlon XP 3200 (at 2.2GHz) it gets around 60 to 65 FPS.
On an Pentium M 740 (at 1.73GHz) it runs at about 45 to 55 FPS.
On an "old" Pentium 4 (at 2.53GHz) it hardly reaches 40 FPS.
On a "new" Pentium 4 (at 2.4GHz) it should reach about 50 FPS (since most games perform better than on "old" Pentium 4 CPUs)

As you can see the results vary. Note that NullDC does not take advantage of dual core CPUs (yet).

[El_Diablos]

can't understand: nullDC is ready and i can download it or it's on the WIP stages? ^^

[JKKDARK]

It is not ready for us..

[General Plot]

As Razi already said, speed depends on the game and the plugins used.

The type of the CPU is also very important. Older Pentium 4 CPUs tend to perform quite bad even if they have a high clock rate. Newer Pentium 4 CPUs, Athlon XP, Athlon 64 and Pentium M CPUs perform way better most of the time.

For example,
Soul Calibur normally runs at 60 FPS
On a dual core Athlon 64 3200 (at 2GHz) it runs at 70+ FPS.
On an Athlon XP 3200 (at 2.2GHz) it gets around 60 to 65 FPS.
On an Pentium M 740 (at 1.73GHz) it runs at about 45 to 55 FPS.
On an "old" Pentium 4 (at 2.53GHz) it hardly reaches 40 FPS.
On a "new" Pentium 4 (at 2.4GHz) it should reach about 50 FPS (since most games perform better than on "old" Pentium 4 CPUs)

As you can see the results vary. Note that NullDC does not take advantage of dual core CPUs (yet).
Just to clarify on what PsyMan has said, by older P4's, he is refferring to the A and B class (400 and 533 FSB versions, eg: Williamette), and by newer P4's, he's referring to any P4 C class or higher (Northwood and Prescott), with the newest among them (Prescott) obviously performing the best.;)

[chris-007]

Let's wait and see, if it supports the MMU for Windows CE.

[drkIIRaziel]

mmu is emulated (when using interpreter) , but WinCE games dont work.
Linux/Netbsd boot , but crash before the command line.

I plan to emulate mmu , but its not realy a priority for now :)

[Cid Highwind]

Just to clarify on what PsyMan has said, by older P4's, he is refferring to the A and B class (400 and 533 FSB versions, eg: Williamette), and by newer P4's, he's referring to any P4 C class or higher (Northwood and Prescott), with the newest among them (Prescott) obviously performing the best.;)

I once read some reviews about Prescott vs Northwood where they did benchmarks and the Northwood got better results for gaming. Also, isn't it the better one for overclocking because of it generating less heat? (just informing)

I like the fact it's using plugins, can someone convince Pete to move on to DC emulation? :D

[S.SubZero]

The Prescott architecture is pretty lousy. They had to mangle Netburst and make the CPU woefully inefficient just to get the clock speed up. The Northwood was the last "good" P4 they made. My 3.0 Northwood still keeps it real! 8)

My next rig is gonna be a Core 2 Duo 2.4 or 2.6. Any NullDC benchmarks available for those?

[drkIIRaziel]

I'd expect it to get fullspeed easyly on all core2's.All of em are more powerfull that my current pc :p

[Shin_Gouki]

are we allowed to ask for reason to keep source closed?
wbr Shin Gouki

[Cid Highwind]

The Prescott architecture is pretty lousy. They had to mangle Netburst and make the CPU woefully inefficient just to get the clock speed up. The Northwood was the last "good" P4 they made. My 3.0 Northwood still keeps it real! 8)

My next rig is gonna be a Core 2 Duo 2.4 or 2.6. Any NullDC benchmarks available for those?

Well seeing how Plot just pointed out P4 A and B were pretty lousy as well, it seems the Northwood is the only good one from the bunch :p We've got exactly the same processor btw.

[General Plot]

I once read some reviews about Prescott vs Northwood where they did benchmarks and the Northwood got better results for gaming. Also, isn't it the better one for overclocking because of it generating less heat? (just informing)

I like the fact it's using plugins, can someone convince Pete to move on to DC emulation? :D
Well, given that Prescotts do have a very long pipeline (which results in alot of cache misses), it is less efficient than a Northwood on instructions per clock. But being that the Prescott has 1 MB L2 cache, and Northwoods only came with half that, combined with Prescotts higher clock, makes the Prescott still outperform most Northwoods. However, the performance boost is not as large as it should have been.;)
But NullDC doesn't seem to need a very high end PC, as I ran Grandia 2, Soul Calibur, and a couple other games at full speed on early version betas, and not all the optimizations have been added yet.;)

[HI-TECH]

With the latest news that games like DOA LE runs with good speed will this emulator most likely surpass Chankast in terms of speed and in-game compatibility?

[JKKDARK]

With the latest news that games like DOA LE runs with good speed will this emulator most likely surpass Chankast in terms of speed and in-game compatibility?
Why the people like this game on chankast or any DC emulator? There are better games..

[hushypushy]

one word, my friend: boobs.

[deamonhunter]

one word, my friend: boobs.


Amen to that

and it is somehow fun to play if it is fast of course not the stupid 23 fps i got on chankast i hope this one performs better on my northwood

[Cid Highwind]

Why the people like this game on chankast or any DC emulator? There are better games..

Because it's the cheapest way of finally getting to play a quality 3d fighting game on a platform that has none?

[Quake3k]

Finally One Decent Dreamcast Emu..It Got Me To Register Here:) hopefully will it have more compitability than chankast since my dreamcast are dead but i have alot of games for it.think dreamcast is the best console ever made to be honest:) and Cid Highwind you have a good point there;)

[chane2k1]

This question is for drkIIRaziel and ZeZu. If the Xbox360 scene starts to get bigger in size and modchips are released allowing for homebrew, would consider porting NullDC over to the Xbox360? The reason i ask is because the system seems that it would be powerful enough and that the controllers are somewhat similar to the Dreamcast's.

[HI-TECH]

Why the people like this game on chankast or any DC emulator? There are better games..

I'm not just talking about DOA LE but all games in general. I said DOA LE because of the fact that it could barely run on the Chankast at full speeds and you would have to configure the emu and its bin files just to run the game to play very slowly. Also it would be a breath of fresh air to play games like Sonic Adventure 2 somewhat glitch free and more games with more compatibility with greater speeds.

[forthehorde]

This is what I'm talking about. Better compat and higher speed. Nice job .

[PersianBoy]

where is official site ?

[JKKDARK]

There isn't an official site at the moment..

[Unusual_Rex]

I don't mean to be a newb by asking this, but will your PC require SSE to use this emulator? Or has this information not yet been released? Will it have compatibility with lower speed processors (like 1GHz)?

[drkIIRaziel]

It will require SSE.I dont know about speed on older cpu's , it realy depend on the cpu type.

[Unusual_Rex]

Okay, it stink because I don't have SSE lol thanks for reply though.

[General Plot]

To be honest, if you don't have at least SSE1, then you won't stand a chance at running this emulator very well, even if it worked without it.;)

[Silenus]

I don't know what are they running without SSE1, at least get a sempron socket A or a Pentium 4 or Celeron.

[scythe000]

Wow, I can't wait to see the NullDC emu. I'm dying for one to work with GameEx. Does anyone know if it will support non-selfboot games?
Also, will it support disk images?

Thanks!

[JKKDARK]

Wow, I can't wait to see the NullDC emu. I'm dying for one to work with GameEx. Does anyone know if it will support non-selfboot games?
Also, will it support disk images?

Thanks!

Only images, I think