Quote:ARM's website says at 772MHZ (RPi is 700MHZ) it gets 965 MIPS and 1605 Coremarks. A P3 866MHZ gets 1945 Coremarks and a P3 600MHZ gets about a 1000 MIPS.
Useless synthetics. MIPS are used to express maximum
theoretical performance under perfect circumstances and rarely coincide with actual performance.
Also the second link gives me a SQL query error.
Quote:A Broadcom employee says its GPU is 2x as fast as iPhone4s but the closed source drivers make using that power difficult.
Oh an employee said it, how reliable. Even if you're right that is a terrible source of information to use.
The biggest problem I have with the raspberry pi's cpu is simply the fact that its ISA is arm v6 not v7, which makes it incompatible with a lot of stuff regardless of performance.
There have been some positive developments on my end today. I finally got Mednafen to use the framebuffer, and the performance increased as I thought it would. For some reason NES, SNES, Genesis games fail to boot at all on the framebuffer while Game Gear, Game Boy, and Wonderswan games play just fine. The audio no longer drops or causes crashing either, and there's no need for frameskipping (yet). Wonderswan games are now at fullspeed, though the background music is choppy (nothing can help the RPi's sound drivers now, unfortunately), but it's pretty fun to play. Bonus: my own games made in SDL work just fine too. Never played Mass Blaster on my TV before.
I'm going to try other SDL based emulators and see if they'll have better luck with the framebuffer than Mednafen. I'm sure DGen and FCEUX should be able to handle Genesis and NES games respectively. Hopefully I won't have to spend the whole day compiling (maybe the OC will help). I'm excited that it at least plays all my old 8-bit handhelds on the TV, and there's the possibility that it might do even more. More hacking ahead, gonna find some materials to make a case (hint: I'm looking at cardboard :p)
EDIT: Aw man, DGen uses Assembly (x86)...
Yo, more updates. Was kinda put off by my first attempts at turning my RPi into an emu-console, but things are looking quite better now.
Mednafen can run GB, GBC, and Game Gear games no problem, probably Neo Geo Pocket games too, but I haven tested that yet. With no screen stretching, Wonderswan games run fullspeed with perfect audio.
What's more, turns out DGen doesn't need x86 assembly (though it's optional), so it compiled just fine. To my surprise, this emulator runs crazy fast; totally blew Mednafen away in Sonic The Hedgehog. Genesis games are up and running fullspeed with perfect audio. Compiled a stripped down version of SNES9x (1.39) and after some work it's working as well, fullspeed, no audio issues so far (only tested Super Metroid).
Gonna work on my custom game launcher later, but I'm finally turning this little device into something worthwhile for gaming. Just need to get NES emulation up to snuff, then it'll do just about as much as I think it can handle. GBA emulation's probably out of the question, not without some hard work on my part (no time for that).
Aren't there already ARM based GBA emulators? Even if they're written in objective C or Guava, they should exist.
There is.
There is even one written for Symbian OS.
(12-08-2012, 07:56 AM)AnyOldName3 Wrote: [ -> ]Aren't there already ARM based GBA emulators? Even if they're written in objective C or Guava, they should exist.
It's not really a question of getting an emulator running on Linux on ARM; Mednafen is straight up C++, no assembly of any sort or recompilers. It plays GBA games, but at like 25% speed. Ideally, I need an emulator that uses SDL since it can output directly to the console/framebuffer quite easily. I had to reinstall Slackware on my RPi, and it's completely headless (no GUI, no desktop). Mednafen uses code from VBA, but it might be worthwhile to check if VBA-M will run on RPi; not sure if it uses a dynarec.
Anyway it's not a problem; I'll stick to playing GBA games on my desktop since I like to use HQ upscaling. I'm going to try to compile FCEUX on the RPi and see if that fares any better than Mednafen's NES emulation (it's perfect in game speed, sound is slow though). Once that's done, I'll have gotten just about everything I'd hoped for; not bad for a $35 SoC with so-so specs.
Wait, you can upscale GBA games in emulators? I thought that there'd be some issue with it being all lo-res 2D sprites.
By upscaling, I mean it literally, scaling up the pixels. There are quite a handful of scaling or "magnification" algorithms you can use. The HQx and LQx family, Scale2x, 2xSaI, Super Eagle, etc. The best I've seen has been HQ2xS, implemented by Desmume. The RPi probably couldn't handle most of them, not with software rendering, so I'll stick to using my desktop for GBA emulation.
I want some Raspberry pie with vanilla sauce cream....mmmmm delicious
