Davers

I just moved from a Tapwave Zodiac (Palm OS 5; 200MHz Motorola, 8MB 2D ATI chip), which had a freeware open source emulator called "Little John" which emulated just about anything under the sun before the N64/PS1 generation. It ran EVERYTHING AT FULL SPEED except on a few SNES and genesis games you'd have to disable transparency or put the frameskip on 2 or 3 to get full speed. THAT was on 200MHz, 480x320.

So now i get this Dell Axim x51v, with 624MHZ!!! and 16MB of video memory! But for some reason I can't even get Super Mario World to run with all the sound/frameskip? WTF. That's just stupid.

Does anyone have a list of emulators which run well on the x51v? It SHOULDNT be hard to port an emulator to run well on 624MHz when it runs fine on 200. I'm interested in:

Gameboy/GBC/GBA
Genesis
NES
SNES

Am I out of it or is there no easy way to accomplish this??

RRS

StyleTap Launcher will run many Palm programs on the Axim X51. I use it and have only had one or two Palm programs not work. My thought is that your emulator program may run better under StyleTap Launcher. I think you get a free 30 day trial for StyleTap so it will only cost you your time to try it.

Zippex

Originally Posted by RRS

StyleTap Launcher will run many Palm programs on the Axim X51. I use it and have only had one or two Palm programs not work. My thought is that your emulator program may run better under StyleTap Launcher. I think you get a free 30 day trial for StyleTap so it will only cost you your time to try it.

mmm... I think that he means another thing...

BTW if you emulate an emulator... that'll be a disaster!!!

Think this:

For example for GB emulation on a Palm Vs I remeber that having 8 times the resources the game ran @ 75% of original speed.

Snes on the axim with 3 frames of frame skip runs at probably 80% of the original speed.

Now porting a palm emulator on the axim... mmm... you have the % of the emulator slowdown plus the slowdown of the palm emulator!!!

Why you may be asking...

Simple, the set of instructions between a console procesor and a computer/pda procesor are quite different (Venus and Mars) and they may be reconstructed each time used... so they'll need quite more resources.

In adition of that remember that the Zodiac was designed for games...

Davers

The Zodiac was designed for games... YEARS AGO. There's not BIG SECRET, besides the controls. Stuntcar Extreme was originally designed for the zodiac and it gets about 15fps... I just don't understand why we can't harness this 624MHz better. The Zodiac even had a hard time playing full speed video.

Davers

Update: Just tried a bunch of emus... PocketGBA is great. Full speed. That's another reason why this is so crazy... the GBA is MUCH faster than the SNES and we can't emulate it at full speed?

Zippex

As I said, different architectures...

Victor516

Its all about optimization, if no one really tries to optimize it for the device it will never work at a good speed. Also ram may be a limiting factor also since the game rom is usually read into ram.

Mokubai

I'd have to go with Victor516, no one is really optimizing the emulators to run as fast as they can on the Axim processors, it's all written in C++ or *shudder* .NET CF and because of that there are overheads.

The emulators tend to be written on PCs with massively powerful processors and so the programming gets sloppy, then someone ports the sloppy code to the PPC without looking to optimize it for the device and wonders why it is so slow....

There probably are some good emulators out there, they're just difficult to find.

Daemon24

I tweaked PocketGBA v060273 to death and posted audio and video optimization tips for this emulator here for my Axim x51v.

I admit that my frame rates were not all that great at first, nor was the audio until I determined optimal settings. It really was the best GBA emulator that I've stress tested to date!

|oLo|

I vote crazy?