RocketMan on 29/8/2009 at 23:34
Inline Image:
http://h1.ripway.com/RRRocketMan/system shock stuff/S6001293.JPG:D
This is my IPAQ 210. It has (to my knowledge) the most powerful XSCALE processor available for consumer handhelds, the Marvell PXA310 at 624 MHz (approximately 800 MIPS). I got SS1 running via a port of DosBox to the windows mobile platform. As you can see it does run....technically but it's completely unplayable since the framerate is more like seconds per frame instead of frames per second. Maybe further development of the software or more powerful handhelds could play it??? Just thought this would be a nice tidbit to share with you guys. For reference, a 486 at 33 MHz is around 27 MIPS so you can see how shitty emulation actually is and how much it bogs down the processor.
Now let's take a break for a minute:
Inline Image:
http://h1.ripway.com/RRRocketMan/system shock stuff/S6001236.JPGEnchantermon on 30/8/2009 at 03:18
Nice! I wouldn't worry about having to wait too long; I'm sure within the next few years there'll be a mobile processor capable of running it.
Trance on 30/8/2009 at 03:24
Never mind the framerate problem. Imagine how painful it would be to play SS1 with a control setup like that!
RocketMan on 30/8/2009 at 15:19
Bluetooth gamepad?
EDIT:
Actually I wonder if there is hope yet for this game...I just experimented with some really old really shitty games on the same emulator and they are also unplayable, which makes no sense to me. The sys requirement difference between Jill of the Jungle and System Shock must be quite large but Jill plays only a bit faster...still unplayable. I think it must be software related.
Kolya on 31/8/2009 at 07:24
I guess it's not so much the requirements of the emulated software than of DOSbox emulating a 368 PC with DOS running on it.
RocketMan on 31/8/2009 at 16:03
My thoughts exactly! But can emulating dos really consume more than 90% of the horsepower of the handheld? Anyone out there have any experience running dosbox on a PC with similar system specs?
Briareos H on 31/8/2009 at 16:44
Well emulating a full x86 instruction set is going to have a serious performance impact on RISC architectures. The MIPS value is of secondary importance here.
RocketMan on 31/8/2009 at 17:09
That's a good point. Dosbox has to emulate both real and protected mode, which is more complex than just emulating real mode IIRC.
Nameless Voice on 31/8/2009 at 19:46
Quote Posted by RocketMan
My thoughts exactly! But can emulating dos really consume more than 90% of the horsepower of the handheld? Anyone out there have any experience running dosbox on a PC with similar system specs?
Um, even my modern PC can barely run SS1 in DOSBox (at least, at 1024x768 - it can run it fine at 640x480).
RocketMan on 1/9/2009 at 05:20
Yeah I just did some reading on the x86 instruction set and there's a shitload of them and as the cores continued to evolve to the 486 level even more instructions were tacked on. When I give a little thought to trying to achieve the effects of those instructions with such a stripped down RISC instruction set, I guess it's no wonder the software chugs. Oh well...worth a try anyway.
