Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello, i am new here, and i have some questions about dolphin, and it's requirements.

first thing, the only computer i have that is capable of running dolphin is a sh*tty 1.5 ghz dual core laptop, with... an intel graphics chip (which is like a CGA card compared to dolphin, or the gamecube chip).
i really want to play metroid prime, but my laptop gets 6 fps from dolphin.

but, i have an idea. it could be possible to use a queue manager like they use in render farms to distribute the load across multiple computers to increase the FPS. now, i only have a 900 mhz pc, a 1.8 ghz pc, and two 400 mhz imac g3s. i wonder if i could network them together, and create a promitive supercomputer, to do the recompilation.


or, wait. maybe you could store recompiled code on the hard drive, so, you could recompile the game, but instead of displaying it in realtime, you could practically make a "pseudo PC version, using dolphin as something like a control center or something. that way, the game would not have to be dynamically recompiled every time it is started, but instead, only the first time, and the rest of the time, the game would run alot faster (it would gain a considerable speed increase).

now, i am not a programmer, but i know the basics about how emulation works. I think it would be wise to take my second theory into consideration. i know i am unknown to the forum, but i have been thinking about this method since 2007. think about it. games could be running full speed on 1 ghz PCs, instead of only 5 ghz PCs.

(09-04-2009, 11:42 AM)kargaroc586 Wrote: [ -> ]Hello, i am new here, and i have some questions about dolphin, and it's requirements.

first thing, the only computer i have that is capable of running dolphin is a sh*tty 1.5 ghz dual core laptop, with... an intel graphics chip (which is like a CGA card compared to dolphin, or the gamecube chip).
i really want to play metroid prime, but my laptop gets 6 fps from dolphin.

but, i have an idea. it could be possible to use a queue manager like they use in render farms to distribute the load across multiple computers to increase the FPS. now, i only have a 900 mhz pc, a 1.8 ghz pc, and two 400 mhz imac g3s. i wonder if i could network them together, and create a promitive supercomputer, to do the recompilation.

Sounds kinda impossible to me, And If your laptop isn't to powerfull The most you will get is 10-15FPS, Its Mostly the Intel Video card that kills it lol

It would not benefit, because dolphin does not scale past two cores.

(09-04-2009, 11:42 AM)kargaroc586 Wrote: [ -> ]but, i have an idea. it could be possible to use a queue manager like they use in render farms to distribute the load across multiple computers to increase the FPS. now, i only have a 900 mhz pc, a 1.8 ghz pc, and two 400 mhz imac g3s. i wonder if i could network them together, and create a promitive supercomputer, to do the recompilation.

Distributed computing is useful for big batch computations, not realtime processes like Dolphin. You'd have to ship way too much state back and forth over the network every frame, and the code complexity of doing it ... *shudder*. Not gonna happen.

(09-04-2009, 11:42 AM)kargaroc586 Wrote: [ -> ]or, wait. maybe you could store recompiled code on the hard drive, so, you could recompile the game, but instead of displaying it in realtime, you could practically make a "pseudo PC version, using dolphin as something like a control center or something. that way, the game would not have to be dynamically recompiled every time it is started, but instead, only the first time, and the rest of the time, the game would run alot faster (it would gain a considerable speed increase).

This is somewhat more realistic but the compilation takes less than 1% of the time already, so you'd be looking at a 1% speedup, at most.

(09-04-2009, 06:32 PM)ector Wrote: [ -> ]This is somewhat more realistic but the compilation takes less than 1% of the time already, so you'd be looking at a 1% speedup, at most.

no, i am talking about everything. not just the code.

(09-04-2009, 08:21 PM)kargaroc586 Wrote: [ -> ]

(09-04-2009, 06:32 PM)ector Wrote: [ -> ]This is somewhat more realistic but the compilation takes less than 1% of the time already, so you'd be looking at a 1% speedup, at most.

no, i am talking about everything. not just the code.

That's even a more unlikely process even for a chip8 emulator. Dumping ALL resulting code would most likely result in several TB's of storage being used per minute. Also you would need a storage that's faster than your current memory.

well, i guess i will have to wait for the 80 cores

the 80 cores would tear dolphin a new a**

(09-04-2009, 09:36 PM)kargaroc586 Wrote: [ -> ]well, i guess i will have to wait for the 80 cores

the 80 cores would tear dolphin a new a**

Dolphin uses 2?

dolphin only uses two cores at max

(09-04-2009, 11:49 PM)cmccmc Wrote: [ -> ]dolphin only uses two cores at max

it will take some porting to make dolphin run on the 80 cores at all anyway.
it isn't x86, it's 80 FPU cores.