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?

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[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.

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[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.

[Centric]

Originally Posted by 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.

However you can look at this, emulation is illegal after all.
I think the console-developers don't like seeing their 'engine' being reverse engineered (f.e. if I remember correctly, Sony sued the creators of Bleem for making a prog that emulated their 'beast' ).
Perhaps what I wrote here is discussible: you could say emulation isn't illegal as far as people play original games and have the console theirselves (f.e. I own a PSX myself and some games, so would it be legal to play those games on my PC? Honestly, I think not ).
The only legal thing would be emulating a console only to play and develop homebrew games on the proggie.
Look at it this way: if emulation was declared legal, console-developers wouldn't spend their time and money in investing ways to make emulation of their product impossible.

Anyways, don't mind me, guys, I think emulation rocks.
The only thing I hope, is that people don't abuse it by only playing copied stuff ...

[ector]

Centric, since when does console manufacturers "spend their time and money in investing ways to make emulation of their product impossible" ? That's pure bull****. Console manufacturers invest time and money to prevent piracy in at least the first few years of a console's lifetime, since that's where the money is. Of course this has had the side effect that it's not possible to just pop GC or DC discs in your PC and read them, but the main reason that modern consoles are so hard to emulate is that they simply consist of very advanced hardware which is very different from a PC.

[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.

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[Andrew Hruska]

yeah.

[Regulus]

well, there is easi(er)

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[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?

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Last edited by WinterHell; August 31st, 2003 at 09:20..

[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

[lardo4life]

Originally Posted by 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.

there is no encryption on gamecube dvds, the data is just burned from the ooutside in. there are some programs that let you extract the files from the isos. i played around with one of these once, and with some isos, you can get files that are transferred to gba with the gba linker thingy.

[ector]

Originally Posted by lardo4life

there is no encryption on gamecube dvds, the data is just burned from the ooutside in.

That's just misinformation. The data is encrypted, and the original discs are not readable on the PC, not even in a raw form for some reason. But the data is NOT written inside out and the discs are not spinning backwards. But still, the only known way of dumping the discs is by uploading a small program through the PSO hack and stream the decrypted information from the discs to a PC and build .gcm iso images. These could be burned, but a gamecube won't read them since they lack the necessary encryption and lack the security "barcode" (look closely at a real gc disc). An emulator can read these images just fine though.

The ideal computer for emulating the GC is as somebody above said a PowerMac with a fast graphics card. Would still be very difficult to do, since the flipper is very unlike any ATI or NVidia graphics card, but at least speed would be a lot faster than for example Dolphin's powerpc emulation on x86 is.