Posted By: wraggster
The PSP and what can be emulated on it is a topic of discussion thats always being debated around the PSP Homebrew Community.
Last weeks release of a DS Emulator for the PSP brought out a lot of strong comments from people on all sides, some that say a DS Emulator will never be at a decent speed and unplayable etc etc.
I myself agree that a DS Emulator will most likely never be playable but then i thought lets look at specs and in particular specs for the Nintendo 64 which is being emulated on the PSP
Firstly heres the N64 Specs:
Co-Processor:
Custom 64-bit MIPS RISC "Reality Immersion" RCP (62.5 MHz)
Built-in Audio/Video Vector Processor (RSP)
RCP Benchmarks
Over half a billion (500,000,000) operations/sec
Memory:
4 Megabytes (36 megabits) total RAM
Rambus DRAM subsystem
Transfers up to 562.5 MBytes/sec
Custom 9-bit Rambus Bus (to the DRAM)
Runs at 500 MHz max
Internal data bus to the RCP is 128-bit
Now heres the Nintendo DS Specs:
Main CPU: ARM 9, 67 MHz
Secondary CPU: ARM 7, 33 MHz
Memory: 4 MB main RAM, 656 kB VRAM
Sound: ARM 7, 33 MHz
16 simultaneous channels
stereo sound
Graphical prestations/effects:
ARM 9
dual 256x192 screen resolution
solid 60fps
120,000 polygons per second with all hardware effects @ 60 fps (expect game benchmarks to be a little less.)
262,144 colors
4 million vertices/second
30 million pixels/second fillrate
Cel-shading
Hardware fog
no bilinear filtering This really sucks...
When you look at the systems there doesnt seem to be a mass of difference between them, now with N64 Emulation on PSP at a playable or nearly playable state then will we see DS games at a much more playable condition than the 4FPS releases at the moment, of course any such emulator needs to be written for that console.
So is a decent DS Emulator a possibility or not, my answer would be no but in the world of emulation we are always amazed by the breakthroughs that happen. Im sure the coders who know the N64 and DS Hardware will be able to dissect the difference in specs in a way i cant but its nice to dream eh ?