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DS emulator for palm? looks possible

RocMat1

New member
From wikipedia it says that the DS has "CPUs: Two ARM processors, an ARM946E-S main CPU and ARM7TDMI co-processor at clock speeds of 67 MHz and 33 MHz respectively, with 4 MB of main memory which requires 1.65 volts." ..my palm TX has a 312mhz pocessor, and I also have an overclocker program that allows me to go almost double that, and I have a program called UMDH which lets me have unlimited dynamic memory, depending on my SD card I have in, which I have a gigabyte.. is any one working on such a project? I know the DS has two screens, but it could perhaps be split screen on the palm.. and I know the lifedrive has a speaker so... why cant I find anything on google? I'd pay for one.
 

Flash

Technomage
Main problem is floating point performance. 300-600MHz CPU in PDAs is almost six times slower than K6-2 333 in floating point calculations.
That's why Genesis emulators can run at full speed only on high-end 600+ MHz PPCs and GBA emulators are slow on all available PDAs (except UMPCs with laptop processors)
DS emulator requires two times more "horsepower" than GBA emulator, so "pocket" DS emulator will be slide show player :D

That's about speed, now about memory - DS emulation requires at least 256 megs of RAM, but there's no Palm with such amounts of memory, and all that UDMH can do is to extend dynamic memory heap and it can't be bigger than unused RAM space, UDMH can't do any swapping, you can have 4Gb of free space on your SD card but it won't add even a single byte of RAM :)

You can run DS emulators on Windows or Linux UMPC (tablet PC, small enough to fit in your pocket) but that's a different story (and different price :D) so best thing is to buy DS, if you want to use :pirate: ROMs or homebrew, you can always buy a flash cart or SD adapter :D
 
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Cyberman

Moderator
Moderator
DS and Disney emulation logic

I'm sorry but this is sheer fantasy.
There are several important factors.
Not the least of which is hardware emulation. Remember it's not just running the source code that is needed, it's the hardware. The DS relys on heavily on hardware for it's speed. The 2d and 3d engine handle the majority of the drawing. The Palm uses a Intel PXA255 has 8M low power SDRAM 32M flash. That's the base platform. From the Z22 to the LifeDrive they are pretty much the same.
The problems arrive from the fact that the platform has no graphics acceleration or specialized hardware for it. It does not include the vector computation coprocessor that the DS has built in as well. In simple terms you just have a raw ARM unit, you can't run the code 'natively' from the NDS because of the coprocessor that's missing (custom opcodes were added as well). So.. you have the same amount of RAM as the DS and you intend to emulate the DS on a system that lacks any hardware to speed up graphics processing. A very small DS program might work like a demo, but that's likely all.
You can run playstation games however on a Palm. :D

The Palm OS is not particular well suited for this type of application, it is an event driven system. Currently the best method is to use a bigger machine (much bigger) :D

Cyb
 

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