GameCube ripe of the picking

[Seta-San]

Gamecube ought to be a much easier to emulate than the ps2. The ps2 has 2 MIPS processors and "mystery" processor for the graphics. Gamecube on the other hand uses a well documented power pc processors and ati video cards. Emulating a gamecube on pc is like emulating an xbox on macintosh i think?

[Regulus]

Im not quite sure what your saying, btu its impossible to emulate a X-Box on a Mac (legally) because a Windows Kernel is neded. If you thinks it's easy, you try it.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by Seta-San

Gamecube ought to be a much easier to emulate than the ps2. The ps2 has 2 MIPS processors and "mystery" processor for the graphics. Gamecube on the other hand uses a well documented power pc processors and ati video cards. Emulating a gamecube on pc is like emulating an xbox on macintosh i think?

I don't know about any "mystery" processor with PS2, but I think at this point people have a pretty good understanding of how PS2 works internally. I think you're right in a sense though, GCN will be easier to emulate than PS2 (and maybe easier to emulate faster) because it has less components that need emulating... Of course ROMstein was also right, emulating XBox on Macintosh would be a real pain and much slower than the emulators we have right now will be.

- Exo

[chipsugar]

Xbox emulation on a mac would be legal if a program like Virtual PC is used to run Win2k/XP and Cxbx or Xeon. I can imagine it would be painfully slow though.

[Andrew Hruska]

i tihnk SetaSan wants to say, Macintosh PowerPC hardware *should* be able to natively emulate the gamecube, because it uses a well-documented PowerPC processor. For last sentence, he just got the two things switched around. " Emulating a Gamecube on a Mac is like emulating a XBX on a PC, right? " would be a good clarification. However, this may not be what Seta-San was thinking.

[Razor Blade]

nothing is "easy" to emulate. But it may have benifits. Like XBox on windows. Its easier than to try on a mac.

[Andrew Hruska]

yeah.

[Regulus]

well, there is easi(er)

[WinterHell]

Normally it is easier to emulate said machine when u have very well documented its parts,at 2nd place but not last to know your pc so u can optimize it.
One question-are xbox' P3 733MHz CPU & Geforce3 are different than the same components for pc?I know that Gf3 is advanced version of NV20 but dont have all things of Geforce4 ti(4 caches,tv out,better AA).
I mean if the Pc components supports all instructions that has said console there will be no slowing to emulate instructions(when playing).
So when u add win98's requirements-on theory in think it is possible to emulate at full speed xbox games on P3 1GHz,Gf4 ti 64ram.Or i'm wrong?

[Carmofin]

how should they start emulating GC-games if they havent even figured out a way to decrypt the games?

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by Carmofin

how should they start emulating GC-games if they havent even figured out a way to decrypt the games?

I think they have figured out a way to do this, and of course GC emulation has begun.

In theory the Gamecube might emulate well on Mac platforms, but not nearly as well as XBox on PC platforms, because:

- IBM's Gecko CPU is slightly different than G3-G5 (I don't know if the differences can be translated easily or not)
- MacOS X doesn't have an API available for it that is similar to one used for GC games. Unlike for XBox games, which uses XDK, which can be often times mapped to WinAPI or DirectX functions without too much trouble. I personally don't know if most of the GC games use the same libraries or not, to begin with.. or how many of them don't use any standard libraries at all... someone else would have to tell me how HLE'able it is.
- The video hardware.. but I don't know much about it personally. I don't think details for it will be readily available though. It could be difficult to emulate; I doubt it has low level compatability with any PC cards, even ones by ATi. But depending on the level of HLE employed, this may not be an issue (N64 emus got away with not emulating the RCP at all for a long time...)

- Exo

[Kane]

As far as the video hardware goes, the card wasn't developed by ATi anyway so similarities with PC graphics cards are likely to be even less

[Alias]

IIRC, wasn't the R300 designed by the ArtX (well, formerly known as ArtX, now known mostly as the ATi west coast team). I think I read that in a driver heaven ATi west coast tour.

The relevance being that artx also designed the flipper chip.

[DC_daNMan]

from the original post, I think seta-san got confused, I think he meant emulating GC on mac is going to be as easy as xbox on PC... and people have started emulating GC, look at dolwin and dolphin.

[T.O.F.K.A.Z]

Well we see Iso's and such on th net so that's a sign of decrypting is possible. And like DC_daNMan said emulators are in development and are progressing quite nicely.

[l3illyl3ob]

The ISOs aren't decrypted, not at all. They're direct raw binary snapshots of the mini-dvds, that are burnable, but not readable by a current pc due to the encryption.

[T.O.F.K.A.Z]

Oh but still they are in ISO format IIRC and that is a pc format right ? So they did rip the raw data and later on make an iso out of it I guess. Try WinIso or so to extract somethigns , that should work.

[Red__XIII]

Originally Posted by T.O.F.K.A.Z

Oh but still they are in ISO format IIRC and that is a pc format right ? So they did rip the raw data and later on make an iso out of it I guess. Try WinIso or so to extract somethigns , that should work.

Some of them were in .ISO format but most were .gcm, but just like with X-Box games which are .ISO they cannot be read with any standard ISO reading programs. Of course once again like with the X-Box images there is a program that is able to read the images and extract files from them.

[Ninjaa]

The video system is the biggest challenge at this point. It is integrated heavily into the console, and is very unlike anything on a PC. As far as I know, there isn't anybody out there short of the designers who fully understand the workings of Flipper.

Getting demos and commercial games running are two very different things. And for the sake of the GameCube, I hope that getting commercial games running is never possible. (and if it is, only be able to do it on a Macintosh PowerPC... hehe)

[T.O.F.K.A.Z]

Commercial as in Freeloader for instance ?
It isn't a demo but commercial IIRC.