A few questions about Dolphin developpement

alterego · (This post was last modified: 10-07-2009, 03:49 AM by alterego.)

This is my first post on the forum and first I wanted to thank the dev-team for the great job they do on dolphin ! Smile

Here is a little video of Zelda Twilight Princess (Wii version) on dolphin :
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xapskc_...videogames

core2quad Q6600
Windows 7 pro 64bit
4go ram
Geforce GTX275
OpenGL plugin

Now for the questions :

1- Do you plan on using new technologies such as OpenCL on dolphin ? Is it a good thing or even possible for an emulator to use the sleeping power of high-end GPUs or sleeping CPU cores ?

2- At what percentage do you think you are in term of game compatibility ?

3- Are you planning on optimising the code for quad-core CPUs like you did for dual-core ?

Thanks a lot again for your work !!! Sorry for the messy english, I'm french Big Grin

**KHRZ** · 10-07-2009, 06:56 AM #2

What I've picked up...
1.OpenCL is already being worked on, not usable yet, but can only be used for a few things, so probably not so very much faster.
2.Of the games I have, (30+) about 80% are fully playable. (Just minor bugs)
3.In dual core, emulation is split with game logic's being calculated by one core, and most graphic stuff by the other. These can't be split further for quad, says the devs. There's the HLE sound plugin that can use a 3rd core, but it uses very little CPU anyway. The slower LLE sound plugin would benefit greatly from it. (IDK if it can actually utilizes a 3rd core as of now)

ssbbtriforce · 10-07-2009, 07:08 AM #3

(10-07-2009, 06:56 AM)KHRZ Wrote: 3.In dual core, emulation is split with game logic's being calculated by one core, and most graphic stuff by the other. These can't be split further for quad, says the devs. There's the HLE sound plugin that can use a 3rd core, but it uses very little CPU anyway. The slower LLE sound plugin would benefit greatly from it. (IDK if it can actually utilizes a 3rd core as of now)

I think that some devs ( not dolphins devs ) created some kind of code??? to quad core. They use the fisrt one for OS attachment, the second for the main problems, the third for gfx and th last one too. But i think this sh*t is very buggy for all devs that try to use it because there's no processor to coordinate who's processing who.

I don't know if this is right, i've heard or read this somewhere. I guess dual core is good advance stage for a simple emulator like this.

FloW3184 · 10-07-2009, 07:31 AM #4

the thing openCL will be used for is decoding the ucodes afair.

**ector** · 10-07-2009, 07:48 AM #5

I'm not entirely sure why people added OpenCL since the only thing it might be useful for is texture decoding and XFB framebuffer conversion. It can't run DSP ucodes, for sure.

alterego · 10-07-2009, 08:46 AM #6

I got still much to learn, I'm a developper and I found the emulator world really interesting. I have tons of questions about dolphin and emulators in generals. I'm glad to see that people are very nice here Smile

!

I'm following dolphin since the svn build r3089 (not very long) and I've already seen tons of progress (sound and gfx mostly).

1 - Are you people optimising the code as well as working on compatibility issues ? Or optimisation for lower end pc will be a second step ? How much room there is for optimisation ?

2 - Is there a topic or a website where I can found technical details about dolphin ? I've already tried to get the source on the SVN and look at the code but it's hard to catch up on a project you don't entierly understand...

3 - What is the main difficulty about emulating a wii or a game cube ? I suppose that the GFX and the sound must be the toughest subject but I'm maybe wrong ...