Dolphin Technical Stuff

[Maxx77]

Hello everyone, and of course, congratulations for the great emulator.

I have some questions about the Dolphin emu:

1) Does it use Opcodes as a Nintendo64?
2) What method it uses, Hle or Lle?
3) Why the autors decided to release this great teaser? For example in Icarus the autors decided to develop more the project and only then release the emu.

I wish the best for the autors of Dolphin.

Maxx77.

 

[[vEX]]

I know I'm not one of the authors, but here goes a crazy guess

1) Is there any CPU without opcodes?
2) As far as I know it uses HLE, might be some LLE stuff, don't know really, can't recall ector saying anything about that.
3) I think they felt it was a good time for a release and simply released it to the crowd to feast on

Off course I can be wrong at any point so don't quote me on that

 

[Maxx77]

Hello vEX, about your answer:

1) You are right about the opcodes, I wonder if there will be special ones, used only in a few games, for example the ones used in N64's emulation like Zelda and Perfect Dark.
2) Perhaps there will be a mix of them (Hle=graphics-Lle=sound)?
3) You are absolutely right It's a great sample of the quality of the emu and the experience and high level of its authors.

Maxx77.

 

[slicky]

dude an opcode consists out of a bit-wise instruction that can have a variable length, but in most cases is to the power of 2.
Common opcodes would be for instance mul or add sub and that stuff, which are of course not litterally passes as ASCII codes or so, but rather assembled by the bitwise expression withhin the asssebler.
The CPU(memory accesses by bus) or micoprocessor then decodes the instruction consisting out of the opcode as well as certain parameters. Such instructions can have one opcodes and one or two or even more parameters (VLIW, 64bit).
The CPU runs kinda programm itself called the interpreter, and fetches the new instruction once all other cycles are processed, looks the bits=opcode up in a LUT (look up table) and can either process the instruction in software (very cheap microprocessors do so for instance for mul) or make use of appropriate logical gates = hardware.

Sorry for the gibberish, its mostly intended to pass you over the most significant keywords once interest is raised enough.

I wrote a paper to that kinda stuff up to next gen processing units such as quantum computing and DNA computers.

 

[Maxx77]

Very interesting Slicky, you know a lot about it.

Perhaps you can share your knowledge and ideas to the Dolphin emu's authors.

Maxx77.

 

[bohdy]

Very interesting Slicky, you know a lot about it.

Perhaps you can share your knowledge and ideas to the Dolphin emu's authors.

Maxx77.

Lol, no offence to slicky, but I'm pretty sure that the Dolphin authors would have a pretty reasonable understanding of all this

 

[slicky]

No offense taken I never claimed that i could impart them any knowledge of mine or even help them. I'm rather in chip-design and compiler-building than in emulation. Meaning the guts or better said the nuts and bolts of electronic-devices.

Actually i never looked into high level emulation (which i consider such projects like PSX,GC,..., so to speak a mixture of emulation and simulation) myself, except the theory coz of lacking interest and time.

I really just wanted to clear things up, initiated by the question "Does it use Opcodes as a Nintendo64?"

So i fully agree with bohdy.

BTW: i really adore the dolphin team

All papers, projects i did are open source and will be shared once i got my site up and runnning.