DaedalusDC released - N64 Emulator for the Dreamcast (2 Versions)

January 6th, 2008, 18:30 Posted By: wraggster

A coder by the name of Simpson474 has ported the Nintendo64 Emulator to the Dreamcast, he has infact released 2 versions of the Emulator, heres the info in full:



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Daedalus for Dreamcast
I have ported two versions of Daedalus to the Dreamcast, mainly to see how the performance would be. Both versions only use the interpreter core of emulator and neither version has support for sound or saving. Both speed and graphics are far from being playable, and I can’t imagine that a N64 emulator can ever run at 25+ FPS on the Dreamcast. This emulator is not completely without optimization, the graphics plug-in for example uses the TA directly to get the maximum speed. However, the CPU core is completely free of optimizations and there is no DynaRec available. It would be a lot of work to implement a working DynaRec core for the Dreamcast and there would be only little RAM left to be used for the DynaRec.

Compiling the emulator
I used gcc 3.4.6 and KOS 1.3.0 for compiling the emulator. The Non-PSP-Version has a makefile made by me (which is not very good) and for the PSP-Version a modified version of the original makefile is used. There are no project files for an IDE included.

Using the emulator
Both emulators are available as scrambled 1st_read.bin and DaedalusDC.elf file. The scrambled file is intended to be burned to a disc (not tested) and the DaedalusDC.elf file can be used with dc-tool and a serial programmer cable. There is no real user interface; the emulator only scans the root directory of the inserted disc. The ROM filenames should have no spaces in them and I recommend using short filenames for the ROMs.

Non-PSP-Version
This is the faster of both versions, but has more limitations. This version only supports ROMs that match into the RAM of the Dreamcast. There are 16 MB RAM available on the Dreamcast. 4 MB are used for storing the N64 RAM. Up to 8 MB are used to store the N64 ROM and the remaining RAM is used for the emulator. The only game that goes ingame with this version seems to be Super Mario 64.

PSP-Version R8
This version gets rid of the 8 MB ROM limitation, but therefore it is even slower than the older version. There are some games that go ingame (Mariokart, Zelda – Ocarina of Time, Rugrats in Paris – The Movie), but there are a lot of graphic glitches. In Zelda – Ocarina of Time for example you only see parts of the GUI ingame after ages of loading.

Further Development
Because I’m sure that this emulator will never run playable, I won’t continue the development. This was just a test for me to see, how the SH4 would perform emulating the N64. I ported the emulator nearly one year ago (as you can see from the PSP-Version R8, currently there is PSP-Version R13 out) and since then I have not worked on this port. Some days ago I found my video that I have captured after the development and thought I could upload it on Youtube. I did not think that someone would be interested in perhaps the slowest emulator on earth.

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