I thought of this while shopping for parts to build a workstation for a friend after reading the emu book at PJ64.net: How would emulating an N64 on a workstation with an R4300 (such as an SGI Indigo2, Irix based) be different from emulating the N64 on an x86 machine? Would the emulator have to do less work?
Hypothetical Question: Emulating N64 on an R4300
- Thread starter -K7-
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The Khan Artist
Warrior for God
IIRC, the first N64 devkit was a SGI workstation running microcode emulation. So yes, it would be possible.
Tagrineth
Dragony thingy
-K7- said:
Well if the emulator was programmed to pass the r4300i asm directly to the processor, and say manage timings internally, then sure it would work, and it probably would be decent, but the problem is N64 isn't just an r4300i processor. There's also the Reality Coprocessor, video chip supplied by ArtX, and sound chip...
And not to mention that picking up a second hand N64 would save you some serious cash, if the primry goal with the project is to play N64 games...
And if I'm not mistaken you can't run code directly on the processor, i.e you'll never be able to play a XBOX game on a PIII 733Mhz... It will have to be re compiled and then executed...
EDIT: I'm sure there are better explanations, and if I'm wrong please do correct me...
And if I'm not mistaken you can't run code directly on the processor, i.e you'll never be able to play a XBOX game on a PIII 733Mhz... It will have to be re compiled and then executed...
EDIT: I'm sure there are better explanations, and if I'm wrong please do correct me...
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I suggest you to try vmware to have an idea on how a machine can be emulated on a similar machine. vmware emulates a pc on a pc by using a technic called virtualization, i think that it's some kind of dynarec but blocks of code doesn't need to be converted to asm code for another processor.
Of course for the n64 you have to emulate the rcp but it would still be far easier to get something fast than on a pc...
So yes it would be faster but no it's impossible to run directly a rom automagically on your sgi computer
Of course for the n64 you have to emulate the rcp but it would still be far easier to get something fast than on a pc...
So yes it would be faster but no it's impossible to run directly a rom automagically on your sgi computer
The Khan Artist
Warrior for God
jack said:
You wouldn't happen to be the jack that was an asshole and was banned from the zSNES board, would you?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Hypothetical Question: Emulating N64 on an R4300
As Slougi said, ArtX was founded by former SGI employes and helped to create the GC GPU aka Flipper, the company opened up it's door a couple of years after the N64 release so I don't think they had anything to do with it...
Tagrineth said:
As Slougi said, ArtX was founded by former SGI employes and helped to create the GC GPU aka Flipper, the company opened up it's door a couple of years after the N64 release so I don't think they had anything to do with it...