Dreamcast on PSP, speaks the author of nullDC
He has recently opened one of the most burning debates in the emulation scene and now drkIIRaziel, maker of the awarded Sega Dreamcast emulator nullDC, steps in to establish some steady points for his last adventure, namely the conversion of the above said software originally developed on PC, for the Sony PlayStation Portable console.
A conversion that brings to debate, under the fact that drkIIRaziel is trying to emulate a console with considerable graphics capabilities on a device, the PlayStation Portable, which represents the first successful attempt to bring on the handhelds a videogaming experience similar to the one available on sixth generation consoles, just as Dreamcast or PlayStation 2 are. An experience similar but non yet comparable, characterized by hardware features not particularly evolved in regard of the nowadays available machines.
The coder, which for the occasion has opened his own blog, has clarified or, to say better, strengthened what are his aims with the nullDC conversion on PSP: the software will be first of all solely intended for the second revision PSP, that Slim&Lite also known as PSP-2000 released by Sony on September of 2007 which doubled the RAM memory (from 32 MBs to 64 MBs) of the console. “The old (’fat’) psp just doesn’t have the ram space needed” to make nullDC run, states drkIIRaziel.
Presently the code of the conversion has no optimisations, being it in essence an almost direct decant of the PC counterpart excluding the 3D rendering management. Therefore it will be necessary a period of time unknown but supposedly long to make the software usable says drkIIRaziel, an observation that lets foresee the lasting unavailability of the binaries and the source code for still a lot of time.
Another interesting standing is that regarding the speed that would be possible to reach with Dreamcast games on PSP: “While I think it is possible to get fullspeed on psp it is quite likely that I will be proven wrong” says the developer, who makes no promises rather than the one of “trying” to make the emulator run faster than its actual speed.
For now, as further demonstrated by the clip of Dead or Alive 2 running on the last revision of the code, nullDC on the PSP continues to be a show at slow motion by one frame per second.
At last DrkIIRaziel strengthens his own plans of porting the code on an unknown number of consoles and devices, including PlayStation 3 and the interesting Linux-powered handheld Pandora. In the first case is necessary to find a way to enable access to the 3D hardware (based on a custom version of series 7 GeForce), presently unaccessible if not through the official Sony development libraries.
Will nullDC succeed to repeat the deeds of Sonic and the bosomy protagonists of Soul Calibur also on PSP or a system different from a well off PC? “If you somehow think this project is wasted time, then don’t waste any more commenting/thinking about it. My time is… mine, I can do whatever I want with it” concludes DrkIIRaziel.
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5 Responses to “Dreamcast on PSP, speaks the author of nullDC”
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That’s amazing, it renders all the textures perfectly!
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Yep, so it seems. Here the problem, for me, is speed. No doubt drkIIRaziel is a talented coder, but I think that the Sony handheld’s hardware is really too much overwhelmed by the task of emulating the Sega Dreamcast…
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As far as I know, the psp and the dreamcast both use PowerVR developed GPUs. If drk||Raziel can find any major similarities between the GPUs, he has an oppurtunity to implement some high-level code that would really give the emulation speed a boost.
Just so you all know though, even if he manages to get fullspeed emulation working, the PSP’s battery life will only be able to handle the strain for about half an hour I think. Maybe in hour. Better keep those AC chargers handy
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Well, according to this article the PSP has a GPU-like chip built by LSI Corporation, and even if the chip had been manufactured by PowerVR I can’t possibly think that the timeframe between the two ICs (Dreamcast is a pre-2000 console, PSP is five years beyond) would make possible to find any similarity….
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Play Shenmue or Sonic Adventures on PSP would be amazing!
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