Hello,
I currently own an Open Pandora (
http://openpandora.org/ ) on which Playstation, NintendoDS, Nintendo64 and some PSP games run smoothly.
The same community intends to create a new console called "Pyra". The technical specifications can be found there :
http://pyra-handheld.com/specs.html
Sadly the OMAP5 does not support OpenGL ES 3.0.
What do you think ? Is there a way GameCube games could run on the Pyra ? Or is there another alternative than Dolphin that could work (Dolwin, Gekko) ?
Without support for OpenGL ES 3.0, you won't get very far in Dolphin with respect to ARM CPUs. Dolphin will use the Software Renderer, which is quite slow. You can certainly run Dolphin, just not more than a handful of FPS. It won't be enjoyable.
No other emulator is as advanced as Dolphin as it concerns GC emulation (note: I briefly worked on Gekko). Gekko doesn't even have a Software Renderer iirc, so it won't even run on anything that doesn't support OpenGL 3.0 (not ES) or something. Dolwin doesn't even compare to Dolphin in terms of compatibility.
Thank you for your answer. Is there any known possible workaround ?
That would be so disappointing not to be able to run any more emulators on the Pyra than the Pandora mostly for software issues (you can already run 3 PSX games simultaneously on KDE4 at a playable frame rate).
Unfortunately, emulating GC games is orders beyond PSX emulation. In terms of necessary power, most any hardware nowadays will do everything up to the N64 and PSX without problem, and for handhelds DS and PSP emulation is relatively easy too. But PS2 and GC emulation (basically Dolphin and PCSX2) are heavy on hardware requirements.
Dolphin's software renderer is exceptionally slow (to be fair, it's also really accurate) but it's in no way playable, even on a beefy overclocked i5-4690K (one of the best CPUs for Dolphin atm). Without OpenGL ES 3.0 support, Dolphin can't use a hardware backend to render the graphics, thus GC emulation is going to be a novelty at best, not really functional. The only way to get around that would be to either improve the software renderer's code (it can be done, I'm sure) and/or find some way to make Dolphin support lower versions of OpenGL ES.
The only mobile devices that can run GC/Wii games are the most high end devices. The best right now is the Nvidia K1, but it still can't reach fullspeed on anything past light games.
However, once the Nvidia K1 Dual core version comes out, it may be able to run medium games at full speed due to faster cores, which dolphin relies on