Cyclone M68k/ Drz80 Asm Cpu Based Emus For Z

[danboid]

I must say how disappointed I am with the emulation scene on the Z- its seems strangely neglected as there must be a high ratio of (retro)gamers amongst Z owners- it goes hand in hand with being a techy normally. I thought that the arrival of the GP2X, a Linux/ARM based portable console pretty much tailored for emulation, was going to change all this but sadly it hasn't.

My main question is this- is it not be possible to use the cyclone 68000 and Drz80 ARM asm cpu emu cores on the Zaurus? If it is possible then why have GP2XMAME and DrMDx (a megadrive emu) not been ported or these two cores not been integrated into xmame, UAE, dgen or generator? Thanks to these assembly cpu emulators you can run NeoGeo games full speed with sound on a 266Mhz GP2X. DrMDx emulates a megadrive full speed with sound @ 200Mhz. The only 16-bit system I've seen the Z emulate at a decent rate is the Atari ST through hatari but I have failed to get that working full-screen under an SDL console.

GP2X MAME on the Zaurus would single-handedly revolutionise the platform in the minds of old-skool gamers like me!

[Mole]

Emu's from the gp2x can certainly be ported, but I don't think many will run directly as the hardware is very different. Some don't use SDL either, which making porting more difficult.

[danboid]

"...the hardware is very different"

I would presume you're talking about the MagicEye's co-pro here. I realise the Zaurus doesn't have such a chip but I wouldn't have thought GP2XMAME would've made extensive use of this chips features if it uses it at all; maybe it uses it to scale the screen a bit or something but I doubt this co-pro does a whole lot in the case of MAME because MAME was wrote with portability in mind and pre-dates the ARM920t chipset by years. What really makes a big difference and what I'm hoping will work on armv5tel chips is the cyclone m68k emu. I've discovered the source of said cpu emu (http://www.finalburn.com/index.html) so I'm e-mailing the author to see what he has to say on this.

[Jon_J]

I don't know much tech stuff about hardware, but Cresho's emulator already has "NeoGeo" I've played a couple NeoGeo games with it.

[danboid]

Hi Jon_J!

What is Cresho using for neogeo emulation- gngeo? I tried gngeo under cacko and it was very slow, even when overclocked. Besides, I've dropped Cacko for pdaXii13 now anyway (I presuming Cresho's packages were for Sharp/Cacko ROM right?)

I got gngeo to compile under pdaX but didn't get anything working with it, complained about 'unknown title' or something like that. I also couldn't see any ARM specific configure options to enable, although I know it supports GP2X now.

[Mole]

Things like MAME probably have all the GP2X specific code (64MB ram hacks maybe, MMSP2 support, data locations, hardware hacks for speedups, etc) in separate files, so could easily be ported to the Z (and probably quite easily), but certainly not run straight on it.  

The cyclone support shouldn't be a problem, as the processors are almost identical in instruction set.

[Jon_J]

Hi Jon_J!

What is Cresho using for neogeo emulation- gngeo? I tried gngeo under cacko and it was very slow, even when overclocked. Besides, I've dropped Cacko for pdaXii13 now anyway (I presuming Cresho's packages were for Sharp/Cacko ROM right?)

I got gngeo to compile under pdaX but didn't get anything working with it, complained about 'unknown title' or something like that. I also couldn't see any ARM specific configure options to enable, although I know it supports GP2X now.
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Yes, it's gngeo. I've played three different games. "Top Golf" and "Turfmaster Golf" and "Nam-1975"
Turfmaster golf is 9.6mb. I have to launch this rom several times to get it to work. Sometimes, after it's already been launched and played, it will launch to the correct screen the first time.
I use Cacko Lite.
Some games for neogeo don't work at all.

[relapse808]

Hi Jon_J!

What is Cresho using for neogeo emulation- gngeo? I tried gngeo under cacko and it was very slow, even when overclocked. Besides, I've dropped Cacko for pdaXii13 now anyway (I presuming Cresho's packages were for Sharp/Cacko ROM right?)

I got gngeo to compile under pdaX but didn't get anything working with it, complained about 'unknown title' or something like that. I also couldn't see any ARM specific configure options to enable, although I know it supports GP2X now.
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Yes, it's gngeo. I've played three different games. "Top Golf" and "Turfmaster Golf" and "Nam-1975"
Turfmaster golf is 9.6mb. I have to launch this rom several times to get it to work. Sometimes, after it's already been launched and played, it will launch to the correct screen the first time.
I use Cacko Lite.
Some games for neogeo don't work at all.
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I would also like to see more emulators for the Zaurus.  I know the hardware and linux makes it at least somewhat possible.  I would like to see a great amiga EMU, a better NEOGEO emulator as well as any other devices we could emulate.  I am currently under the same version of PDAXROM.  I did find a hatari(atarti st) emulator and while it works at a good speed it just doesnt really work that well as far as functionality goes so I just gave up.

Please make more Emulators!!!

[Da_Blitz]

perhaps what we need is a generlaised graphical and general operation acceleration libray, that way you get an API to accelerated functions without having to write them yourself and it would work on diffrent cpus

i have seen a libary like this but cant think of the name, but its anoying that people dont use these things and rather reinvent the wheel, and only for x86 at that

[danboid]

Da_Blitz:

I'm not sure I get what you mean there. How does what you are thinking of differ from bvdd accelerated SDL?

I'll tell the worst worst part of my Z emu shame- I used to have a SE p800 phone a couple of years ago upon which I could run an emu called picodrive (by the same guy, Dave, who wrote cyclone) which allowed me to play megadive/genesis games at full speed and this was on a 150Mhz ARM cpu! This shows you how much better MAME, NeoGeo, Megadrive and Amiga emus would be for the Z if cyclone support was added as I struggled to get 10fps under dgen/cacko at 624Mhz!

If enough people were interested in this then maybe we could band together some funding to try and convince ZodTTD to add cyclone and DrZ80 support to xmame although I'm sure he's already busy with multiple other emu projects (and his job) and I don't know if he's got any interest in seeing MAME/NeoGeo running well on the Z.

Whadya think ZodTTD?

[zodttd]

I'm in the process of porting PSP's MVS/CPS1/CPS2 (e.g. Neogeo and Capcom arcade) to the GP2X in a manner that would make it a simple port to the Zaurus. gpSP (GBA) emulator should also run fullspeed in it's current state on the Zaurus, though it would be an unofficial port of Exophase's work unless he approved it like he did with our GP2X port.

[danboid]

Yes!!!!

I love you ZodTTD!  

[matthis]

Woohoo!!! I'm really really looking forward to GBA emulation!! Thank you so much

[Antikx]

Woohoo!!! I'm really really looking forward to GBA emulation!! Thank you so much
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Ditto!

[Da_Blitz]

bvdd only accelerates the display, normally by doing yuv to RGB conversion in hardware (thats why mplayer works so well

what i am talking about is a vectorisation libary that abstarts the sse/mmx/iwmmxt and gives you vectorisation primitves taht are platform independent and are tunned for each platform

so basically you get a addarray(A,  that uses the fastetest code on the platform and hides the details

they do exsist but i think that the new gcc features means its less apealing and not many people apart from the super computing guys know about it