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Geek Culture / Sega Dreamcast Emulation

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DMXtra
22
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Joined: 28th Aug 2002
Location: United States
Posted: 13th Jun 2004 12:54
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A really neat program called Chanka just came out awhile ago.

It emulates a full on Sega Dreamcast at between 30 and 60 frames
per second on a decent PC with a nice video card.

It uses Direct X 9.0b only and Windows XP or Windows 2003 only
and only works on Athlon XP's or Pentium 4 processors with SSE.

Its pretty impressive. The games I have tried seem to work
really well. Alpha .002a just came out today and works really nice.

It uses LLE (Low Level Emulation) and not tricks like HLE (high level emulation) and it uses Dynamic Recompilation (Dynarec) emulation engine. So the speed is nice.

Anyone ever heard of this emulator?

http://www.chanka.org/

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OSX Using Happy Dude
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Joined: 21st Aug 2003
Location: At home
Posted: 13th Jun 2004 12:59
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No


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Zenincanin 14
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Joined: 14th Apr 2004
Location: In The Cat Lair at Peter Criss\'s House.
Posted: 15th Jun 2004 05:27
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Isn't emulation illegal! Well, don't mine me that system and sega basically ran outta buisness. I have a Dreamcast.

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DMXtra
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Joined: 28th Aug 2002
Location: United States
Posted: 15th Jun 2004 07:51
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No emulation itself is not illegal.

If you don't own games that you are using thats illegal,
but if you do thats fine.

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Van B
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Joined: 8th Oct 2002
Location: Sunnyvale
Posted: 15th Jun 2004 12:36
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It's funny, the Dreamcast is actually one of the best systems for home-grown development, like making your own games and apps for it - so it's got tons of emulators for it. I've never thought to try a DC emulator, don't really see the point of emulating when you don't have to (I mean DC's are hardly expensive or hard to come by).


Van-B


The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!.
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TKF15H
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Joined: 20th Jul 2003
Location: Rio de Janeiro
Posted: 15th Jun 2004 16:03
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I'll take a look at this emulator. It may become very important for me, as I intend to start developing for the DC. I don't have a serial cable, so every version of the game I wanted to test would have to be burnt. That's not a very efficient way of doing things. Instead, I could test everything on the computer, and just burn the final for the DC! Thanks for the link, DMXtra.

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Shadow Robert
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Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 15th Jun 2004 16:41
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If it uses LLE over HLE, then why does it need a Processor around 4x more powerful just to run?
The DC's CPU is only 233MHz X86 based, which made it easy to develop for; because it used basically PC hardware and unlike Microsoft all Sega did was create proprioty disc formats (which then became a standard PC format, quite ironic really)

So really it shouldn't need anything more than a Pentium2 233MHz to emulate it + a relatively decent 3D card like Geforce2, KryoII or Radeon 7-Series.

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Van B
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Posted: 15th Jun 2004 18:31
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Well no, because a P233 with a GF2 runs like treacle uphill . The DC is quite a fast beast, more on par with the PS2 - so it would need a reasonable PC to run on. You know that there's no way a 233Mhz PC could emulate anything at 233Mhz right?. I suppose it's a bit like the X-Box, I mean what sort of PC would you need to emulate an X-Box? - a damn powerful one!.


Van-B


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BatVink
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Location: Gods own County, UK
Posted: 15th Jun 2004 19:06
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Surely if the reference system is X86-based, you simply boot from a different operating system. The basic architecture is driven by the processor, the operating system will enable/disbale the relevant interrupts and hardware, jobs a goodun.

Or am I oversimplifying things?

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Van B
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Posted: 15th Jun 2004 19:14 Edited at: 15th Jun 2004 19:30
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Yup, you really have to code the emulator as a full system - sound, graphics, umpteen IO systems, plus all the internal chip handling would have to be emulated - which takes a lot of processor power to run at playable rates. PC's are quite neat platforms for writing emu's, hell you could write an emulator in Java - but they're more like interpreters for the machine specific code of the emulated device.

One thing, the DC uses a Hitachi SH4 processor at 200mhz, and has quite awkward architecture, even the sound processor has 2mb of it's own memory - so I'm quite impressed that someone managed it at a good rate. The CD rom problem would also make life difficult - it is certainly not a standard, known as GD-ROM, it stores 1.2gb.


Van-B


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