questions about n64 on dreamcast

[Kornondakob024]

in the other thread i was told that there isnt a good N64 emulator on the dreamcast or that it doesnt run games. I was just curius as to why. I'm thinking that the dreamcast is far superior to the N64 and that it should be able to play the games but apparently not. Im not ragging on any programers for not having a good one but just curious as to why there isnt one that works.

[XxCrashxX]

no one has even attempted to port an N64 emu to dreamcast, you see the n64 emus that exist on pc require a 900mhz processor to emulate MOST games at decent frame rate, and a nice vid card to boot, the dc only has a 200mhz processor. the overhead from translating the n64s code into code that the dc can use requires more processing power than the dc has. So in summation, it hasnt happened, and it never will. Or if it does, it will never be playable at decent speeds, heck the snes isnt even emulated at full speed yet

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[Kornondakob024]

Thanks for explaining that to me, but then that makes me question what kind of processor or whatever is in an N64

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I'm good at doing things on the comp but im not good with technical terms so please forgive me if i seem stupid when it comes to these things.

[Chrono Archangel]

N64 has a 64-bit R4300i RISC (93.75MHz) CPU with a 64-bit RISC (62.5MHz) co-processor

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[Cid Highwind]

Another major problem is the size of N64 roms. Those need to be loaded in RAM to play the game, direct streaming from cds has not been made possible afaik. The DC has only 16mb of RAM, by far not enough for the bigger games.

Of course there might be a way to let games like Mario 64 run. If any of you guys still remember Corn. This was the fastest N64 emulator ever to be released. It could run Mario 64 and Mario Kart on a P200. I've been playing Mario on my K6 333mHz with TNT2 and at time I noticed how there wasn't a frame limit and I got about 100fps I think

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[Kornondakob024]

so why cant we stream cd's yet

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I'm good at doing things on the comp but im not good with technical terms so please forgive me if i seem stupid when it comes to these things.

[XxCrashxX]

hmm well I belive that has to do with the fact the native win9x emulators load the roms into memory, and if someone wants to allow streaming from a cd drive, not only would they have to port an already existing emu to dc languace but also rewrite a majority of the emulator to incorporate dynamic recompiling from the cd

please correct me if Im wrong

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[Kornondakob024]

im guessing that would be a lot of work and no one is up to it. But it is possible if someone got around to it right?

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I'm good at doing things on the comp but im not good with technical terms so please forgive me if i seem stupid when it comes to these things.

[Cid Highwind]

Technically it might be possible, practically I highly doubt it.

I did some research on this topic, here are some interesting posts by DC devvers or plain guys who know more about DC emulation than I do (posts are from dcemulation, so don't bother looking up the members here at emuforums )

Originally Posted by BlueCrab

To make a N64 emulator for the dreamcast, first you'd want to learn how to program. Both fluently in C and SuperH Assembler. Then, you'd have to have hours and hours of time to put forth into the emulator, while dealing with people constantly harping you on its progress.

In short, you'd need an awful lot of time. Just answering your question there.

Is a well-working N64 emulator gonna come to the dreamcast? Probably not. Most of us simply don't have the time, nor motivation to work on it. The thing would have to probably be written from the ground up in SuperH assembler, something that very few people would have the technical know-how to do.

Also, Corn could barely run on a Pentium 2 processor at 400 Mhz, not a Pentium. (I know, I used it back in the day). Corn was also probably written in optimized x86 assembler, hence why it ran so well on lower-spec machines. However, this came at a price, as corn wasn't exactly an accurate emulator (High level emulation probably came into play here, also boosting the speed), and could play very few games.

Originally Posted by EX-Cyber

Leaving aside the RAM issue (which I still suspect is not the obstacle that most people make it out to be), you'd still be trying to emulate N64's 90MHz, 64-bit GPR CPU plus graphics on a 200MHz 32-bit GPR processor. The only N64 emulator to approach this goal in the PC world (without sound emulation, mind you) uses some rather compatibility-impairing techniques: static recompilation, cutting corners on the graphics emulation in ways that happen to work for SM64, et. al.

Originally Posted by Quzar

Ram isnt really an issue (except certain emulators use a lot more ram than the should just because its not an issue) the issues IS what ex-cyber says. not only that but you are also emulating the n64's graphics proc which is 50mhz or so and other stuff.
(...)
as has been said before. just plain hard. most of the people writing stuff for the DC are not experts in emulation. That i know of there have only been 1 REAL ground up emulator for the DC (that have been released, and i dont count ones written directly from tutorials or bleemDc).
(...)
there are two of us already who have ported smaller useless n64 emus, but the only very portable one out there that could be useful in any way is mupen and both gpf and i have discussed it on emutalk before.

This might be an interesting topic for you to read.

Found another must read

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Last edited by Cid Highwind; November 3rd, 2005 at 12:27..

[Oalboukharey]

are u lot talking about dcnin64?

how do u get that to play on the DC? it has project64 in it...is that suppose to be in there?

[Cid Highwind]

How many times do I have to tell you that there is no such thing as 'playing' n64 on DC?

Let me post an example of how far N64 emulation has progressed:



Image taken from http://www.gpf.dcemu.co.uk/dcnin64.shtml

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[Kornondakob024]

thanks

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I'm good at doing things on the comp but im not good with technical terms so please forgive me if i seem stupid when it comes to these things.