The brilliant work done on those emulators renders some games playable.

'Oh, they should make they run faster', besides being freaking obvious, isn't really an idea.ĭon't go to a medical forum and say 'Hey guys, I'm annoyed that there's no cure for cancer. We are retro gaming enthusiasts, but can only hope to give technical insights on how to better emulate the 'detailed texture mapping with perspective correction, anti-aliasing, Z-buffering, trilinear filtering, Gouraud shading, and 256 level alpha blending' of the N64. No great sparkle will come from this, specially from people who know fuck all like you and me and the rest of the users. Think about it, you're not the first to have this idea, nor are the first wishing those emulators were running butter smooth. Common sense dictates we already have hundreds of brilliant and talented guys from all around the world working on them as you read this, and for free. What can we do to improve those emulators - ideas here - is the silliest thing ever. A Pi 5 certainly won't run Saturn as it is today unless better coded emulators come around. Maybe a Pi 4 won't be any better at emulating those systems. Unless you gonna go for brute force (dumb/unoptimized code running on extremely powerful HW to compensate), sometimes better specs don't help. Some systems are so esoteric that we can barely get them to run at all, such as the Saturn and its 8 processor units.Īny emulation will take up more resources in the host HW than it needed in the original one. So it's like having a Russian guy conversing with a Chinese having a Hungarian mediating (and they barely know each other's languages). The foundation of all those emulators is the 8086 architecture, which is basically the same for all Intel based desktop CPUs.

The Raspberry Pi is esoteric itself, based on ARM, which is low voltage and made for mobile. Those system are notoriously difficult to emulate even in beefier systems due to their 'esoteric' architectures. There's something called 'architecture' when it comes to hardware (type of internal instructions, the way those instructions are addressed, how the CPU reach out for the RAM, etc.). Stock Pi 3 has 1.2Ghz CPU and 1GB of ram, plus a nice integrated GPU. The Dreamcast, the most powerful of the 3, has got a 200Mhz CPU and 16MB of ram. The Raspberry Pi isn't just 'nearly better' than those systems. Just a few loose facts (I'll let you connect the dots)

Retroarch ppsspp core writeops