The willingness to deal with the complexity and sheer ballsiness of the underground emulator scene is something to be in awe of .. really amazing what the guys get up to in this scene, just because they want to see it happen so the only way to do it is: do it. Whether its hard, or not.
Notaz, in particular, has proven to be a veritable force in getting these old machines running on the Pandora hardware, and I'm constantly in awe of what can be done by a few motivated individuals, whose principle purpose seems not to be commercial success, necessarily, but rather: wow factor, and more in particular: what 'wow' can be brought to the community. I've come to the conclusion that if this were a commercial activity (which it is, in limited ways) instead of the community-oriented effort (which it is, in huge ways), then there wouldn't be as much progress .. but I think guys like notaz really make the headway they make because the community itself is so approachable, so willing to communicate, and so accessible to the elite individuals doing the hard work to make the community viable. Its hard to imagine something like Dolphin happening without the underworld community that supports it - and I raise my beer to the folks in this scene who work tirelessly to bring the community wonderful new products that push the limits of the hardware we've invested in, in spite of it not being mainstream.
(BTW, if you want a clear and concise insight into this scene, you need only look at notaz' own posts on various subjects - the man is a powerhouse of emulation productivity: http://boards.openpandora.org/user/76-notaz/)
Notaz recently made it possible to use the DSP of the Pandora in his PS1 emulator, giving another 10-20% boost in most games, by letting the DSP handle the audio part of the emulation.
Notaz did also handle the Starcraft port for the Open Pandora, without sources (binary translation : http://pandoralive.info/?p=3089). Impressive stuff.
Yes - in case its not clear, I want to explain what he did.
He decompiled the Starcraft binary from x86 .. to C, using his own self-built decompiler.
He then built the decompiled C sources for ARM. To make it work on Aengstrom Linux (the OpenPandora's OS) he also stubbed out all the Windows functions, and replaced them with Linux equivalents.
Without any help from anyone. :) And now we have a native Starcraft executable to run on the Open Pandora device.
Really an amazing individual. I'd give him all my monies if I had any. (Hi notaz!)
> To make it work on Aengstrom Linux (the OpenPandora's OS) he also stubbed out all the Windows functions, and replaced them with Linux equivalents.
To be fair he used Wine to convert Windows calls into X calls on Linux. So "all by himself" is a little stretching it here, WINE was of a huge help to make the port possible as well :)
Ah, didn't think it used Wine in the final executable - I understand he used it during development to properly shim out the calls (Wine identified them for him) - and then he rewrote equivalents. Either way he is a mad genius and I have nothing but respect for him!
I'm also one to sing the praises of emu developers, especially the ones who continue to push for accuracy even when all the games "seem to work." It's a truly challenging task to reverse it, recreate it to run speedily, and then make it presentable to the end-users, who don't care as long as it plays their favorite game.
I've never seen OpenPandora before. Thanks for linking. This made me think back on the time I had my R4DS (2007). The R4 wasn't a subnotebook but a storage device with quite a library of homebrew apps like MoonShell, SNEmulDS (I remember using this to play Earthbound), etc.
Yeah .. the Open Pandora is a bit of an underground classic at this point. The guys behind keeping it alive have started a new project - the Pyra - which will probably hit the scene this year .. keep your eye on the Pandora sites if you're interested in this sort of thing, its truly an under-the-radar innovative hardware project.
I have 2 Pandoras and it's amazing the number of stuff you can do with them. Either use them as gaming machines (mainly for emulation but not only), but also for a lot of more serious stuff (LibreOffice and R!) and coding on the go. It's awesome, while it's clearly not for everyone.
My personal experience has been watching notaz, of the OpenPandora scene, get various emulators running on the Open Pandora hardware (http://openpandora.org/) .. with just a little bit of support from the hardware vendor (EvilDragon, of http://dragonbox.de/) we've seen a plethora of emulators of various systems released for the platform: http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=all&subcat=Emulator&s=new
Notaz, in particular, has proven to be a veritable force in getting these old machines running on the Pandora hardware, and I'm constantly in awe of what can be done by a few motivated individuals, whose principle purpose seems not to be commercial success, necessarily, but rather: wow factor, and more in particular: what 'wow' can be brought to the community. I've come to the conclusion that if this were a commercial activity (which it is, in limited ways) instead of the community-oriented effort (which it is, in huge ways), then there wouldn't be as much progress .. but I think guys like notaz really make the headway they make because the community itself is so approachable, so willing to communicate, and so accessible to the elite individuals doing the hard work to make the community viable. Its hard to imagine something like Dolphin happening without the underworld community that supports it - and I raise my beer to the folks in this scene who work tirelessly to bring the community wonderful new products that push the limits of the hardware we've invested in, in spite of it not being mainstream.
(BTW, if you want a clear and concise insight into this scene, you need only look at notaz' own posts on various subjects - the man is a powerhouse of emulation productivity: http://boards.openpandora.org/user/76-notaz/)