Hacking Dreamcast on Wii

[Jacobeian]

two things:

1/ emulators on the Wii are ALL (without exception) port of existing emulators on the PC. Also, ALL of them (excepted Wii64 and maybe PCSX) are direct C software-based and not necessarely optimized ports, the Wii hardware being only used for video blitter and audio rendering

-> you will have to find an open-source, C/C++ coded Dreamcast emulator first or someone with enough knowledge in both DC/Wii to do the port


2/ how fast your CPU/Graphic Card need to be in order to run current DC emulators on PC (Chankast ? is there any others ?) I doubt they will run on a 800MHz Celeron (which the Wii CPU could be "compared" to in term of horse-power) with a 32MB opengl-only featured card ?



You can speak/dream/theorize all that you want, this thread will still lead you to nothing, the Dreamcast is just TOO powerful for being simply emulated by the Wii, so are all consoles from the same generation (PS2 included): no matter how similar both GPU or CPUs are (and they aren't), Wii power is still not enough for software emulation, that's all

Regarding the Saturn, it's even more complex tahn a dreamcast in its architecture, so even, if it is a less powerful console, it's more complicate to emulate, and require much more CPU power for software emualtion: Yabause is a no-go, it barely run games on current PC, SSF is teh only choice but is highly optimized for PC cpus and would need to be COMPLETELY rewritten for the Wii, and it's not even sure the Wii could handle it....

Sorry, where did I ever say I expected it to be full speed? On the contrary, I explicitly stated I never expected it to be completely full speed. But on the technical aspect of being able to get the hardware emulated even to the order of maybe 3fps optimistically,

sorry but then, what's the point ?
theorically, ANY system could be emulated through software when the sytem hardware is enough documented and known
emulators all work the same way and all emulated system hardware share the same "von Neumann" architecture

this is only a matter of writing the software: ANY portable emulator could be compiled with devkitpro to run on the Wii, and ANY assembler code could be rewritten to C to be portable, that's not the problem: the problem is how fast this would run on the target system ? I bet you could not even call a Proof of Concept something that requires 30 minutes to simply show a spinning BIOS logo


More, generally, this kind of useless "Proof of Concept" only lead to one thing: mass people thinking this could be improved one day since it's only the first version ... which never happen, and there is generally no other versions lol

 

[richiefs]

2/ how fast your CPU/Graphic Card need to be in order to run current DC emulators on PC (Chankast ? is there any others ?) I doubt they will run on a 800MHz Celeron (which the Wii CPU could be "compared" to in term of horse-power) with a 32MB opengl-only featured card ?

There are also Demul, NullDC and Makaron. I haven't tried all of them but they are known to be very good

 

[Jacobeian]

who cares about how good they are on a 2Ghz Pentium 4, we are speaking about a Wii running a 800mhz powerPC

 

[Dookieman]

two things:

1/ emulators on the Wii are ALL (without exception) port of existing emulators on the PC. Also, ALL of them (excepted Wii64 and maybe PCSX) are direct C software-based and not necessarely optimized ports, the Wii hardware being only used for video blitter and audio rendering

-> you will have to find an open-source, C/C++ coded Dreamcast emulator first or someone with enough knowledge in both DC/Wii to do the port


2/ how fast your CPU/Graphic Card need to be in order to run current DC emulators on PC (Chankast ? is there any others ?) I doubt they will run on a 800MHz Celeron (which the Wii CPU could be "compared" to in term of horse-power) with a 32MB opengl-only featured card ?



You can speak/dream/theorize all that you want, this thread will still lead you to nothing, the Dreamcast is just TOO powerful for being simply emulated by the Wii, so are all consoles from the same generation (PS2 included): no matter how similar both GPU or CPUs are (and they aren't), Wii power is still not enough for software emulation, that's all

Regarding the Saturn, it's even more complex tahn a dreamcast in its architecture, so even, if it is a less powerful console, it's more complicate to emulate, and require much more CPU power for software emualtion: Yabause is a no-go, it barely run games on current PC, SSF is teh only choice but is highly optimized for PC cpus and would need to be COMPLETELY rewritten for the Wii, and it's not even sure the Wii could handle it....

Sorry, where did I ever say I expected it to be full speed? On the contrary, I explicitly stated I never expected it to be completely full speed. But on the technical aspect of being able to get the hardware emulated even to the order of maybe 3fps optimistically,

sorry but then, what's the point ?
theorically, ANY system could be emulated through software when the sytem hardware is enough documented and known
emulators all work the same way and all emulated system hardware share the same "von Neumann" architecture

this is only a matter of writing the software: ANY portable emulator could be compiled with devkitpro to run on the Wii, and ANY assembler code could be rewritten to C to be portable, that's not the problem: the problem is how fast this would run on the target system ? I bet you could not even call a Proof of Concept something that requires 30 minutes to simply show a spinning BIOS logo


More, generally, this kind of useless "Proof of Concept" only lead to one thing: mass people thinking this could be improved one day since it's only the first version ... which never happen, and there is generally no other versions lol

Thank you, someone else who understands! You are right, you can emulate the Wii on the PS1 if you want to, but is it worth the time and effort to get .01FPS? No. Your whole proof of concept thing is was I was getting at too. If one release is made, simply as a tech demo, then it would lead the "optimistic" people in this exact thread on believing they will be able to achieve fullspeed if someone else continues the work. Which never will be, the Dreamcast is just to powerful.

I'm all for pushing the limits to see how far things will go, but if the understanding is that it will never reach fullspeed, it is a waste of time.