cj
Saturn Player
Joined: March 2009
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Post by cj on Nov 17, 2014 2:07:40 GMT
Just been thinking about a bit of nostalgia in terms of the underrated Amiga 600/1200 which roughly came out at the same time as the SS. I think it would of made sense in a funny kind of way considering commodore was in financial strife to give or sell the rights to Sega for the use of Amiga Workbench on the Saturn since technically the specs would have been more than sufficient. Also the Saturn would have an immediate advantage of a massive game back catalogue and a cheap PC for the time. For example Amiga 1200 = 14mhz / 2mb ram VS Sega Saturn = 28mhz / 6mb ram(with cart). Wishful thinking and that but if Workbench could be compiled for the SH2 architecture etc, would WB be able to work???
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Post by buckoa51 on Nov 17, 2014 10:19:12 GMT
The Amigas operating system was written in optimised assembler code for the 68k CPUs and tied quite heavily to the systems custom chipset so no, you can't just recompile it for other architectures. It was quite some time before it was successfully ported to PowerPC. There was also no multithred support in the OS at the time either, so no way of taking advantage of multiple CPUs.
Of course given unlimited time and money you could get it working, would there have been any point to it? Probably not.
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Post by MIK on Nov 17, 2014 13:04:03 GMT
Your jumping the gun way too soon on the time line cj. A600/A1200 are early 1992 and were released back in the middle of the Megadrive/SNES era. Back in 1999 a Pentium II PC running Windows98 on average was just about fast enough to run an A500 faithfully minus the odd sound issues, depending what it was you were running. That same PC could emulate an N64 perfectly with it's eyes shut... That should give you an idea what your looking at in terms of speed required. If you think a Saturn can emulate an N64 perfectly then there is every chance Workbench 2.5 will run.
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Post by buckoa51 on Nov 17, 2014 13:21:38 GMT
He's not talking emulation though he's talking a port, as in the code running natively on the SH2's. Possible? Definitely! Practical? No. You'd be looking by and large at a complete re-write I would have thought.
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lordmaximus
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Post by lordmaximus on Nov 17, 2014 16:07:05 GMT
Your jumping the gun way too soon on the time line cj. A600/A1200 are early 1992 and were released back in the middle of the Megadrive/SNES era. Back in 1999 a Pentium II PC running Windows98 on average was just about fast enough to run an A500 faithfully minus the odd sound issues, depending what it was you were running. That same PC could emulate an N64 perfectly with it's eyes shut... That should give you an idea what your looking at in terms of speed required. If you think a Saturn can emulate an N64 perfectly then there is every chance Workbench 2.5 will run. Since when has N64 emulation ever been decent, even on a PC?? The best example of N64 emulation has been the Virtual Console on the Wii, but they were official so had a huge advantage! I remember my Pentium 3 1Ghz laptop struggled to emulate the A1200 sound. Think it was perfect on the A500 though.
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Post by buckoa51 on Nov 17, 2014 16:10:45 GMT
It's pretty decent for some games, just not for others, unless your definition of "decent" is "accurate". Visually the PC N64 emulators blow away the Virtual Console.
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Post by MIK on Nov 18, 2014 11:56:43 GMT
He's not talking emulation though he's talking a port, as in the code running natively on the SH2's. Possible? Definitely! Practical? No. You'd be looking by and large at a complete re-write I would have thought. Yeah I understood that, just added it for good measure in a sense of what it would take to emulate.
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lordmaximus
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Post by lordmaximus on Nov 18, 2014 15:41:02 GMT
It's pretty decent for some games, just not for others, unless your definition of "decent" is "accurate". Visually the PC N64 emulators blow away the Virtual Console. Granted - they do run at higher resolution and therefore look "better", but I don't mind that much about visual upgrades and look more for trying to accurately "emulate" the original hardware. The Virtual Console for N64 is not brilliant, as they only managed to do it for about 20 N64 games, but I've found those 20 games to work much more reliably, and with less glitching than running on a PC N64 emulator. The N64 is not that easy to emulate accurately, hence why the Everdrive 64 is popular. I just prefer to play N64 games on that, as its obviously natively running the games perfectly. The Virtual Console visual upgrades (480p) is a nice touch, and not too over-the-top high resolution.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 2, 2014 22:08:49 GMT
The VC version of Mario 64 is quite nice as it seems to have been updated for widescreen which is a bonus. I usually force my TV in 4:3 when playing VG games but you don't have to do it with Mario 64.
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