why android?

[Seta-San]

i'm sort of confused about why the android version? are cell phones and tablets powerful enough to run this? is touch screen sufficient to have a good experience?

[MayImilae]

Honestly, the android version started because SonicAdvance1 was bored. :3 He wanted to work on a JIT and doing an ARMJIT sounded fun so he did! And even though nothing was strong enough to run Dolphin well (which is kind of still true) the work was done, and Dolphin on Android was a thing! And lots of other people have worked on it since of course! And it's helped desktop Dolphin a lot too, such as proper OpenGL support and some JIT improvements coming from the ARMJIT work!

[Helios]

Finally somebody asks

[Guilherme]

Because it's challenging, I would do it too.

[Nintonito]

Honestly it never surprised me. Even with the shoddy drivers android has had a long history of popularity among the emulator scene, due to the initial openness making emu’s completely feasible. It provides a portable emu experience like almost nothing else. GameCube/Wii is a high bar but it’s no surprise eventually the challenge will entice entrants.

[rclong]

ShieldTV runs very many games quite well, also.

[Grey1213]

The phones are almost powerful enough, but maybe not quite there for a reliable experience for most gamecube games or anything like that. The touchscreen can be used perfectly fine, but it's obviously far from optimal for any emulator really (main problem is you have to use your index finger to press L/R like with PPSSPP, which I got used to but still).

In regards to development there aren't many contributors and there's GPU driver issues that can't easily be worked around, so the current experience isn't good with barely any games being properly playable on just a few newer flagship devices.

[buffsee]

(10-29-2017, 01:24 PM)Grey1213 Wrote: The phones are almost powerful enough, but maybe not quite there for a reliable experience for most gamecube games or anything like that. The touchscreen can be used perfectly fine, but it's obviously far from optimal for any emulator really (main problem is you have to use your index finger to press L/R like with PPSSPP, which I got used to but still).

In regards to development there aren't many contributors and there's GPU driver issues that can't easily be worked around, so the current experience isn't good with barely any games being properly playable on just a few newer flagship devices.

speed doesn't seem *terrible* right now. I haven't come across a gamecube game I can't run at fullspeed atleast 80% of the time, its mainly just that some games have massive problems and some are unplayable. For example goop physics don't work on mario sunshine with any settings (Except maybe software renderer. ). Mario Kart DD and just a ton of others don't work at all due to some blending function not working on most android drivers or something like that.

If you run with performance governors on a thermally stable SD835 device, (Or overclock in the case of my OP5. It doesn't thermal throttle even with an OC.) then it seems like performance isn't the biggest issue. Driver bugs seem much more problematic

[antarusch]

I´m playing xenoblade chronicles on a leeco le pro 3 (snapdragon 821) running with a custom kernel overclocked to 2.4 ghz, a modified thermal conf file so the phone only throttles down to 2.1 ghz and with performance governors, I´m in the valak mountain area (about 50% of the game) and I haven´t experienced any crash or graphical glitches until now, the performance of the game is about 20 - 30 fps in cutscenes and 15 - 25 fps gameplay (this is a 30 fps capped game).

With a 0.4 overclock the sound is almost perfect and altough the gameplay is not perfect it is very very playable and enjoyable, this game looks gorgeous on a phone, maybe it is because the blurry textures doesn´t notice too much on a small screen.

So, yes, phones are very near of playing wii and gamecube games in the future.

[degasus]

(10-31-2017, 01:25 AM)antarusch Wrote: I´m playing xenoblade chronicles

A hint for xenoblade: There is a not detected idle loop. Just start it on the desktop and set the overclock parameter to eg 400%. You'll notice *one* block being very high in any profiler (eg perf top on linux). Dolphin supports to increase the emulated time in such blocks, and by spending eg 1000 CPU ticks on each iteration, you'll get about 10% faster emulation. This works better than just underclocking everything to 40%.

https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Core/Core/PowerPC/JitArm64/Jit.cpp#L660