First impressions + screenshots

[lemmingzappa]

First of all i'd just like to say a BIG thankyou to the dev team, you're doing an excellent job with this program and I cant wait for it to advance even further. I have a question for you though:

I noticed in the FAQ you said that the reason the games are running slow is because current hardware setups are simply not capable of handling this kind of emulation, now are you saying that the only way that we will be able to use this emu at speed would be to wait years for new hardware to be developed, or are you guys able to code this emu to be able to run quickly on current hardware ?

I also took some screenshots for fun:

Windwaker

http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/5361/untitled3ld3.png
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/9797/untitled7is7.png
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/886/untitled9us0.png
http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/3315/untitled10vb9.png

I'd just like to let you know that I had a problem with Resident Evil, I couldnt get past the memory card format, the screen just went blank and the fps stood still.


:bouncy:

 

[BlueFalcon7]

Thank you for complimenting on this, rather than being just like all of the n00bs that come in and ask "OMG! WTF? its slow! Eventhough Im not a member of the team, I want to thank you for your compliments.

As for the hardware question, The Gamecube runs on a power PC processor like the Power Macs, and the old Macs. The standard PC runs on an x86 processor, and emulating a Power PC on an x86 is extremely time consuming. So if there was a version of the dolphin written for a Power PC based Mac, it would most likely run full speed. Why somebody hasnt written a GC emulator for a Mac, is beond me, but I suspect nobody whos really into coding owns a mac, and there arent that many people who do, so its pretty much useless. But Im all for it personally...

 

[Falcon4ever]

It's nice to see a user enjoying it , btw you can upload your shot to this board instead of uploading it to some external source.

 

[lemmingzappa]

btw you can upload your shot to this board instead of uploading it to some external source.

I can do that for you next time, but just out of interest why ?

Also how alive is this emu, I mean is it a case of the dev team just working on it now and again when they feel like it, or is there steady production ?

Thanks, lemming.

 

[Lightning]

I do not know about the development of Dolphin, however just to throw out some rough numbers. The Gamecube PowerPC chip runs at 485Mhz. Current PCs are in the range of 3Ghz. That is 6.3x faster than the PowerPC chip. This means that the PC can execute 6.3 instructions for every 1 instruction the Power PC executes.

Now, not counting the instructions required to play sound, render graphics, and get user input, the emulator, without getting into the little details of how to process faster, must read the original instruction, parse it up, then proceed to call to the emulated instruction which can read up to 3 values, do the appropriate math, and store the result. You are at 5 instructions without parsing up the PowerPC command. Note, the paired single commands of the PowerPC would end up doubling your work due to working on up to 6 values at once.

Memory access is very slow compared to register access, yet the register count and size differences between the chips does cause extra work and speed impacts.

Is it possible to perform better? Very likely using special optimization techniques. When will dolphin or any GC emu be out that will? Unknown. From the above, you are over the speed ratio between the chips just with the cpu emulation and have not addressed the graphics chip, the sound chip, dvd reading functionality, user input, and anything else that I failed to mention.

Yes, current PCs have a graphics processing unit, but someone has to process what the Gamecube data is and get it sent to the GPU.

I did keep this post simple and did not get into a DynaRec, etc. Anyone involved in emu creation knows how speed optimizations can be done. There are still bottlenecks that become difficult to work around.

 

[Sercio]

@ lemmingzappa....
Nice that you not an noobish new Member that ask every time why dolphin works slow!
Members from your sort are welcome
First i see your screenshots , i though that was a photoshop fake.. because the screens has no glitches and photoshop are run behind dolphin on your screenshots^^
But maybe im wrong cause i didnt test the new dolphin with Z:TWW ---> maybe in this version are the glitches be fixed (?)
all the same..
You are welcome!

 

[lemmingzappa]

Thanks for the info guys, appreciate it !

@sercio, no the images are not photoshopped, I was just using it to resize the images

 

[JKKDARK]

Great shots, man

 

[MooglyTwo]

As for the hardware question, The Gamecube runs on a power PC processor like the Power Macs, and the old Macs. The standard PC runs on an x86 processor, and emulating a Power PC on an x86 is extremely time consuming. So if there was a version of the dolphin written for a Power PC based Mac, it would most likely run full speed.

Actually, that is completely incorrect. Due to the fact that only the CPUs are relatively alike (in fact there are pretty major differences across generations of PPC processors), you would still have to emulate the processor itself, you couldn't run code natively, as if you were running the code natively, you would have no way of trapping calls to the GCN hardware and then emulating the appropriate pieces of hardware. Granted, using an appropriately optimized PPC -> PPC dynamic recompiler you could probably be a bit more efficient than a PPC -> IA32 dynamic recompiler, but overall the emulator would still be massively slow.

You know, after seeing all of the misconceptions on this board with regards to how emulators work, it's a small wonder why I rarely (if ever) see the actual developers themselves post on here. It's a lost cause. lain:

 

[BlueFalcon7]

Keep in mind that the time I wrote the Post, that the power Macs were dual (or quad) core 2.5 GHz PPC, and the GC is 485MHz. The Gekko was actually a "custom" processor, a modification of a G3 in fact. Last time I checked, G3 apps could be run on a G5. If you have used an Xbox emulator, you would know that sharing the same CPU arcetecture really helps.

And if you have used a "Macintel" and run an app with rosetta, it just doesnt run like it should. Thats because its "translating: the PPC code to run on an x86.