AndroidTV?

[dreamer_]

Hello

(Sorry for my english since it's not my language)


I have been reading about AndroidTV, and most versions are 32 bit. That means that Dolphin does not run on 32 bit. The new recent CPUs, seem to be powerful enough, at least the S922x of Amazon Fire TV Cube or Belking AndroidTV.

GoogleTV is there too (but not as powerful)

Since first Dolphin versions were working on 2011 Intel CPUs, I was wondering how hard is to compile a 32 bit Android version, , and even retroarch or flycast have those 32 bit version which seem to work perfectly (I understand the difference on CPU requirements, of course).

At least, it seems a pretty interesting experiment, since most AndroidTVs are going to be 32 bit for a while. I don't understand about the internals, but perhaps is not very hard to compile the 32 bit version so more devices, specially the new ones (which are really 64 bit but with a 32 bit OS), can have this support


(This is my first post, please forgive me if it has been explained before)

[JosJuice]

If you're fine with having a version without a JIT, then compiling a 32-bit version is easy. But be aware that the performance will be something like 1 FPS, if not even worse.

Alternatively, if you run one of the old versions of Dolphin from before the 32-bit JIT was removed (and you manage to get it to work somehow), then the performance will be higher than 1 FPS but still terrible. There is just no way to get full speed in non-trivial games on 32-bit devices.

[dreamer_]

(12-01-2020, 07:45 AM)JosJuice Wrote: If you're fine with having a version without a JIT, then compiling a 32-bit version is easy. But be aware that the performance will be something like 1 FPS, if not even worse.

Alternatively, if you run one of the old versions of Dolphin from before the 32-bit JIT was removed (and you manage to get it to work somehow), then the performance will be higher than 1 FPS but still terrible. There is just no way to get full speed in non-trivial games on 32-bit devices.

I understand. I was thinking from some benchmarks that latest AndroidTV devices were powerful enough perhaps (but for some reason, are being shipped with a 32 bit version OS, having really a  64 bit hardware).

Thanks a lot for the answer 

[mbc07]

It's up to the OEMs, there's not much we can do. NVIDIA Shield TV remains as the only device running 64-bit Android TV (excluding their most recent tube-shaped refresh), and that thing has been around since 2015. Newer devices like the Chromecast with Google TV and most Sony Smart TVs from 2018 and up have 64-bit capable SoCs but still ships with 32-bit Android TV, preventing official Dolphin builds from even being installed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯