Porting project 64?

Porting a program to a console would require a LOT of work. That's like telling somebody to design a game for the PS2, then 2 weeks before it's launch, tell them it was supposed to be for the Xbox.

I seriously doubt the PS2, PSP, Dreamcast or Xbox are powerful enough anyways. My 2GHz machine with 1.5GB of RAM and a nVidia 6200 still lags in some points in games, how likely is it that PS2's 300MHz emotion engine will be able to handle?

It would take an incredible amount of work to port. I don't have much emulation programming experience, but I'd venture a guess that it would probably be more practical to just rewrite it from scratch for the target console, rather than try to port all the existing code. As far as power goes, you're right for the most part, maximius, but there are some optimizations that could be made with emulation on certain consoles that would not be possible on PCs.

For example, the PS2's CPU uses the MIPS architecture, as does the N64. This has the potential to make code translation much quicker. In English, both processors speak a similar language, so not as much work is required to convert N64 code to PS2 code. Another advantage that consoles have over PCs is that their hardware is designed for high graphical performance. To that end, most consoles have much faster RAM-VRAM communication than PCs do. This could help with things that PCs really have trouble with, such as frame-buffer effects.

On the other end of the spectrum, consoles are typically not as well documented as PCs, so writing an emulator for a console requires not only emulating a poorly documented console, but also writing software for another poorly documented console. This makes development much slower and more difficult to debug. Testing out code on a console is also a lot more time-consuming than on a PC, and some special equipment is often required (modchips, special cables). I'd really love to see an N64 emulator for the PS2, but given the (unpaid) work involved, I doubt we'll see one any time soon.

well i kinda agree with maximius on that issue i really doubt as well a ps2/dreamcast would be able to emulate a n64 even if you could optimize the code and even the machine had some of the same architectures there would still be alot of work becouse i doubt the gfx/sound area are even close to each other and futhermore the mainboard as well ...

afcouse it could be done but i doubt you could sqeeze the full FPS out on them emulation are alot more consuming that people thinks ..

and another thing i never got why are so many are up for porting if the team should port to all devices there are there would never be a update availiable all thier time would go to porting...

kinda double egded sword people uses a pc but they wants it for consules if it was the other way around people would for sure wanted it for the PC..

You all know the story,there's already a port on Xbox ,based on the old 1.4 source code who was released by the team to the public .So it was not ported BY the Pj64 team.If they release a newer code to the public,which they wont do for now, then someone will eventually make a better port.

Toasty said:

For example, the PS2's CPU uses the MIPS architecture, as does the N64. This has the potential to make code translation much quicker. In English, both processors speak a similar language, so not as much work is required to convert N64 code to PS2 code. Another advantage that consoles have over PCs is that their hardware is designed for high graphical performance. To that end, most consoles have much faster RAM-VRAM communication than PCs do. This could help with things that PCs really have trouble with, such as frame-buffer effects.

Click to expand...

That, and the whole "SISD vs. SIMD" thing, Consoles are killer at One-Thread-at-a-Time business.