Homebrew Fast explanasion why the DS can't emulate the N64.

Jakob95 · May 11, 2009

Can anyone tell me all the reasons why it can't emulate the Nintendo 64. I checked the stuff for both systems such as CPU and Ram and the DS has more. As the DS has 2 professors one 67.028 MHz and one 33.514 MHz which equals to 100.524 MHz and the N64 is 93.75 MHz or even better the DSi has 133MHz. Now lets talk about ram the DS lite has 36MB of ram with expansion pack and the N64 has 64MB of ram yeh its a alot but still you can still make one at a little speed.

redact · May 11, 2009

first of all, the ds has two processors, that does not equal one processor with the clock rates added together, secondly the gba expansion ram carts are slow as hell, thirdly the n64 has a dual core processor with two 32 bit processors (was advertised as a single 64 bit) and last but not least, you can't emulate a system with a handheld only slightly faster, it needs to have a similar architecture and a way faster processor (notice how 64 emu is still not perfected with wi64? because it's damn hard to emulate the 64

)

Jakob95 · May 11, 2009

Alright. Does the PSP 2000 emulate the N64 better than the PSP 1000?

xDlmaoxD · May 11, 2009

jakob95 said:
Alright. Does the PSP 2000 emulate the N64 better than the PSP 1000?

In theory yes, since it has more ram.
But don't wait for a working emulator any time soon.

raulpica · May 11, 2009

xDlmaoxD said:
jakob95 said:

Alright. Does the PSP 2000 emulate the N64 better than the PSP 1000?

Click to expand...

In theory yes, since it has more ram.
But don't wait for a working emulator any time soon.

It's not just a question of RAM.

A PSP runs at 333mhz, has a separate coprocessor which can be used for audio emulation/decryption/other (Media Engine) and a LOT more powerful 2D/3D hardware.

Jimen · May 16, 2009

Keep in mind that to emulate something, the hardware you're emulating on has to be significantly BETTER than the original, because it's not just a matter of numbers - even with equal clock speeds and amounts of RAM, the system architecture and onboard hardware are completely different. That doesn't really come up as much when you're emulating PCs because of compatibility and standardized hardware and such, but it's a big sticking point for game consoles and handhelds. Because their games tend to rely heavily on doing things in their specific hardware, meaning that to emulate them on any other system, you have to emulate all that hardware stuff in software (which is less efficient) since you don't have the actual hardware to work with. Emulating a console on another console is doubly difficult because not only do you have to simulate the hardware of the original system, but you have to do it within the constraints of the hardware you're emulating on, which won't be nearly as cooperative as a PC would be. There are some exceptions for fairly similar hardware, of course, but it's worth noting that even the companies who designed the hardware in the first place prefer not to rely on pure emulation like we do. Either they include enough of the old system's hardware that it barely qualifies as emulation (such as the backward compatibility on the DS and early PS3s) or they do it on a game-by-game basis, either by porting each individual game (a la the Wii's Virtual Console) or coding individual custom emulators for each game and putting them on the system (the 360's early backwards compatibility).

Just to bring some perspective to all this, I looked up the minimum specs for Project64, one of the leading N64 emulators for PC currently: at least an 800Mhz processor, at least 128MB of RAM, a DirectX 7 compatible video card. When you ask yourself "Can this system emulate the N64?", you should be comparing its specs to THOSE numbers, not to the original N64's specs, and that is why the DS can't emulate the N64. A quick glance in the PSP forum here indicates that there are working N64 emulators for the PSP, but that they do NOT run at full speed, and I doubt the hardware's quite capable of that.

Vague Rant · May 16, 2009

Jimen said:
Just to bring some perspective to all this, I looked up the minimum specs for Project64, one of the leading N64 emulators for PC currently: at least an 800Mhz processor, at least 128MB of RAM, a DirectX 7 compatible video card. When you ask yourself "Can this system emulate the N64?", you should be comparing its specs to THOSE numbers, not to the original N64's specs, and that is why the DS can't emulate the N64. A quick glance in the PSP forum here indicates that there are working N64 emulators for the PSP, but that they do NOT run at full speed, and I doubt the hardware's quite capable of that.

Not that I'm claiming an N64 emulator for the DS would be workable, but comparing emulators on consoles/handhelds to emulators on PCs is hugely misleading for a number of reasons. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that most game systems don't have an operating system running in the background and hogging resources; everything is geared towards making the game (emulator in this case) run. Second-of-ly, PC emulators almost exclusively use software emulation, which is again a massive resource hog. Software emulation on the DS is limited to the least powerful of systems like the Game Boy. SNES, Genesis, NeoGeo, etc. all use hardware emulation, which frees up a whole lot of resources, and as dan said, allows them to run full speed where Lameboy still has slowdown in system-intensive titles like Shantae. It's admirable that you're trying to explain the impossibility of an N64 emulator for the DS, but your explanation for why that is isn't a particularly good one.

EDIT: By the way, you're 100% wrong about the Virtual Console. Virtual Console games are emulated, not ported. It's possible to extract and/or inject ROMs in the case of Virtual Console WADs. The original game code is rarely modified, usually only in cases of licensing issues (eg. sports sims whose publishers no longer possess a license to use player/team names).

EDIT2: dan never even posted in this topic. If he had though, I bet he would have said that.

DanTheManMS · May 16, 2009

Vague Rant said:
EDIT2: dan never even posted in this topic. If he had though, I bet he would have said that.

You're thinking of my post in this topic in which I did say exactly that, heh.

Homebrew Fast explanasion why the DS can't emulate the N64.

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