I agree with the emulators being at a very early stage. But I don't think that " computers aren't fast enough nowadays ". I know perhaps this is a lame perception I have, and i should have to agree with you just because the fact you have been involved in the emulation scene more than i will ever be. But n64 could be emulated almost glitchless and at constant full speed in UltraHLE with a Pentium II processor, and a Voodoo moster II.
So I made this comparisson betwenn what hardware was necessary for a pc to have in order to emulate a N64, and what i guess based on that a pc that is capable of emulating a NGC should have:
N64 specs vs. PC specs needed to emulate it ( UltraHLE / 1964-PJ64 )
N64 clock: 93.75 MHz
UHLE: PII 400 mhz / PJ64-1964: PIII/ Athlon-Duron 800 mhz aprox.
N64 Co-processor/Video: 64-bit RISC processor running at 62.5 MHz RCP SP (Sound and Graphics Processor) and DP ( Pixel Drawing Processor)
UHLE: Voodoo II / PJ64 - 1964 : a GForce 2 MX is way more than enough.
As a side note co-processors have been integrated in PC microprocessors long time ago, so no need to compare that.
N64 memory: Rambus D-RAM 36 Mbits
UHLE: 64 mb SDRAM is fine / PJ64 - 1964 : never tried using less than 128 mb SDRAM, with wich the emulator works great.
N64 audio: Stereo 16-bit/64 PCM channels sampled at 44.1 kHz
UltraHLE: standard Sound blaster 16 performed excellent / Pj64-1964: not really sure, but i never had trouble using integrated sound.
I made this difference because we all know about ultra hle compatibility issues, so we could give it a more realistic aproach.
And finally,let's move on to Gamecube specs:
ATI Flipper
• 162 MHz
• 4 pixel pipelines
• 4 texels per clock cycle (4 pixels with 1 texel per pixel)
• Maximum of 8 texture layers per rendering pass (done in 8 clock cycles)
• Bump Mapping
• 33 million polygons per second (peak)
• Subpixel Anti-Aliasing
• 33 million polygons per second (peak)
• 6 million to 12 million polygons per second
IBM Gekko CPU
• 485 MHz
• 32-bit integer
• 64-bit floating-point
• 64KB L1 cache (32KB instruction + 32KB data)
• 256KB L2 cache
• 1125 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS
• 1.94 GFLOPS
Well, for the processor part, it is more than obvious that any pc in the market at least cuadruples the speed and power of the NGC's cpu. In fact, gekko has a pretty big and respectable L2 cache and floating point, for a console.
I have to recognize that Flipper GPU is really powerfull for a console system. In any case, this part would be the painfull one talking about pc hardware required to emulate a NGC. Powerfull cores such as R350 ( Radeon 9800's one ) are still nearly duplicating that speed, with around 400 mhz clocked GPUs, double amount of pipelines ( x800 are cuadrupling that amount, with 16 pipelines :O ) and delivering around 412 M triangles/s.
So i think that having a Radeon 9600 and an athlon XP 2000+ should suffice any hardware demand from a gamecube emulator.