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About GC emulation

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new_profile

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Hi,
I'm wondering why there is some projects to emulate PS2 and XBOX and no GC emulator ?
I haven't any solid knowledge about the PowerPC microprocessor, but after downloading a datasheet for the IBM PowerPC 750 series, I believe that isn't so hard to emulate the core of this microprocessor.
May be the hardest part to emulate is the graphic but looking for the progress done in PS2 emulation it seems to be possible to emulate this part too.

Am I wrong ?
 

icepir8

Moderator
The problem is no one has dumped a Game Cube disk yet.

XBox and PS2 uses standard DVD disk. Where as Game Cube uses a custom format mini DVD.
 

Vchat20

New member
exactly.

P.S. if powerPC emulation is possible (even easy!), then why hasnt there been a Mac emulator that can run OSX? Cuz I would like to have that.
 

Remote

Active member
Moderator
Has someone dumped the GC BIOS yet? I would love to se the GC intro booting up at my PC... :blush:
 

GuestX

New member
icepir8 said:
The problem is no one has dumped a Game Cube disk yet.

XBox and PS2 uses standard DVD disk. Where as Game Cube uses a custom format mini DVD.

Yes :saint:
 
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new_profile

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Remote said:
Has someone dumped the GC BIOS yet? I would love to se the GC intro booting up at my PC... :blush:

Does the OS reside in the BIOS ?
If the BIOS reside in an EEPROM then it should be possible to dump the content of the Ic unless if Nintendo used a house-made EEPROM (the specifications are not available).
 

apexad

New member
Vchat20 said:
exactly.

P.S. if powerPC emulation is possible (even easy!), then why hasnt there been a Mac emulator that can run OSX? Cuz I would like to have that.

However, as easy as it is to make an xbox emulator for a windows pc, with some exception (since the gamecube kernel is not based off of freebsd, linux, darwin, or mac os x as far as I know) would it not be eay to make a gamecube emulator for an apple computer (or powerpc linux comp, or whatever...)

Gamecube's mini-dvd format is used in cameras now isn't it? or is it not exactly the same thing?
Anyway, mini-dvd aside, the gamecube uses a powerpc processor and an ATi video chip which is exactly the same hardware apple uses in there systems.

P.S.- when I say easy to make an xbox emulator or gc emulator, I don't mean horribly easy, but that the hard part of emulating a cpu is not there, the tough part is getting the software to use the cpu the way it does on the system (the kermel and environment emulation)
 
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Vchat20

New member
exactly! cuz from what I heard an xbox uses a variant of the win2K kernel, so it has to be using some sort of pentium proccessor. so emulating a CPU should be perfectly easy (shouldnt need to be done at all in my opinion). and for the GC, it runs off a powerpc, so for now mac's would be the only one's able to play it's games from emu's until someone can emulate the powerpc. and in the same way as xbox, the cpu would be very easy to emulate on the mac system.
 

Jaz

Ex-Mod
blizz said:
yeah emulation is possible, it's all just a matter of time and information

You forgot one thing. It's a matter of time, information, and people constantly asking when?! ;)
 

Vchat20

New member
I know that. but in the difficulty department. both arent that hard. it is the matter of time and ppl to do it.
 

decription

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AFAIK (that isn't much) I think the GC is actually similar to a Mac because of the Power PC chip and could be best emulated on it. To the original poster It is a complex system not anyone can emulate something this powerful you know. That's why I nominate Ice :D
 

conkerman

conkerman
just because the cpu's are the same doesnt mean that much i dont think. the graphics card would be most important (assuming we could get other things to work too and because people care more about games than hearing sounds/getting something running but not being able to see it) and it has an advanced ati card which seems pretty fast and intense, and the fact that dreamcast emulation is just starting is an example of the difficulty in emulating an advanced 3d chip, even if it's been around for a few years and similar chips exist (other powervr vid cards)...
and all other already-mentioned difficulties
conkerman
 

apexad

New member
well, nobody said anything about full speed, the fact of the matter is still that it is an ATi chip. XBox has a modified Geforce3, effectively what became Geforce4. I don't really know ATi numbers and have not read up on Gamecube, but my guess would be that a similar chip does exist, be it slower or faster, it exists.
 

zorbid

New member
ATI bought the company that designed the Game Cube GPU just before the GameCube came out. AFAIK, currently, there is no similar GPU in the market.
 

Tagrineth

Dragony thingy
OK. Here's the deal.

Vchart20: Xbox is using something halfway between a P3 and a Celeron. It's also using a modified nVidia GeForce3.

Others: GCN would be hard to emulate, almost entirely due to SOUND (which has to be done on the CPU, or it could be done HLE for MusyX-using games, in theory) and the video, which was developed entirely by ArtX, NOT ATi. The Flipper video chip uses a diferent, specialised method for register combiners called 'TEV' - the main difference between TEV and pixel shaders being that TEV can combine reads and ops, so emulating the TEV on a pixel shader would be VERY inefficient (severely multipass). Also Flipper can apply 8 textures in a single pass, which would have to be redone as multipass on anything pre-R300 (with the exception of Kyro and *I think* Savage2000).

Then of course there's the issue of emulating PowerPC on x86 processors. :) Even on MACs, the problem is the Gekko isn't just a 750, it's modified (new instructions for better game performance).

And finally the most obvious thing, GCN discs aren't quite DVD format, they're slightly different. :) So you'd have to find a way to hook a GCN up to a PC to rip the disc (a la DreamCast).
 

icepir8

Moderator
Tagrineth said:
OK. Here's the deal.

GCN would be hard to emulate, almost entirely due to SOUND (which has to be done on the CPU, or it could be done HLE for MusyX-using games, in theory) and the video, which was developed entirely by ArtX, NOT ATi. The Flipper video chip uses a diferent, specialised method for register combiners called 'TEV' - the main difference between TEV and pixel shaders being that TEV can combine reads and ops, so emulating the TEV on a pixel shader would be VERY inefficient (severely multipass). Also Flipper can apply 8 textures in a single pass, which would have to be redone as multipass on anything pre-R300 (with the exception of Kyro and *I think* Savage2000)..

Yes but each addtional TEV used slows down the rendering. ie. 2 TEVs render a 1/2 the speed 1TEV renders.

Tagrineth said:
Then of course there's the issue of emulating PowerPC on x86 processors. :) Even on MACs, the problem is the Gekko isn't just a 750, it's modified (new instructions for better game performance)..

Here is where Gerkko shines. It has paired floating point ops. These ops can do 2 float point operations in 1 command.

Tagrineth said:
And finally the most obvious thing, GCN discs aren't quite DVD format, they're slightly different. :) So you'd have to find a way to hook a GCN up to a PC to rip the disc (a la DreamCast).

Yes this is true. It seems the the GCN drive uses an IDE interface so it may be posible to conect the drive directly to the PC with some special drivers needed. This would be great but even that won't be easy.
 

Tagrineth

Dragony thingy
Not necessarily, if you have a string of TEV instructions they won't slow the chip down to a crawl or something :p

And the longer the TEV programme the slower it'd be in a normal fragment shader, especially if there are a lot of reads mixed into the programming.
 
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