Just a thought

[joel_029]

I was thinking about how the N64 is built on a 64bit processor. (correct?) Well, AMD is now working on their 64bit processor, first of it's type. Would that help out N64 emulation. Not sure of any specifics here, but I was just thinking aloud.

 

[Tagrineth]

I was thinking about how the N64 is built on a 64bit processor. (correct?) Well, AMD is now working on their 64bit processor, first of it's type. Would that help out N64 emulation. Not sure of any specifics here, but I was just thinking aloud.

Probably not much.

Code would still have to be recompiled from MIPS assembly to x86-64 ASM.

And besides, most N64 emulators probably use SSE at this point, which supports 128-bit FP, to an extent.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Well, it would help in that for the most part, you no longer have to wrap 64-bit data into 32-bit registers, which would save on quite a bit of processing time.

EDIT: BTW though, this doesn't necessarily mean that you can just run an already existing emulator on an athlon 64 and expect it to go faster in that respect. IIRC, most emulators are written in assembly, which means that its already coded to only fill up 32 bits of the registers. An emulator written in assembler would need some significant re-coding just to take advantage of the larger register size, its not like C where you can just tell the compiler to use 64 bits instead of 32.