Isn't PSP roughly the capabilities of the PSX? Even if it's considerably better, the fact is, DOSBox takes some SERIOUS power to emulate a system. As in, my Barton is struggling to keep many of the more complex games running smoothly. Even if the PSP is as powerful as a PS2, I'd expect little out of it. I have a PS2, and I see it's capabilities. Trust me, my PC is considerably more powerful, even excluding the fact that the video capabilities alone blow it out of the water (god, when will consoles invent FSAA, I haven't had to see such jagged edges since I had a geforce 2 -- the fact is, older consoles with their low resolutions look less annoying because they let the TV interpolate away those ugly edges. I was really dissapointed to learn that even the X-Box with it's uberized Geforce 3 and better memory access didn't have FSAA...)

Even excluding the matter of raw processing power needed, there's the fact that DOSBox is designed to emulate a PC on a PC. It's not designed for the more specialized processing hardware of a game console, which is more suited to graphics, sound, etc (read up on the Cell processor to be used in the PS3 and you'll really see what I mean about why a console doesn't make a good PC.) Simply put, consoles are good at parallel tasks and that sort of thing such as you get in graphics and etc, but, PCs have a LOT of more single tasks and don't parallel well as they usually end up having to just stop and wait even when they do try to split it up better. DOS games are obviously going to be even worse since there was no real multiprocessing back then, and, for that matter, not even multitasking.

What they meant about portability is probably primarily operating systems. As in, there is a DOSBox for Windows as well as being very linux friendly on many distros. There may even be a Mac version, I'm not sure as I never looked (what with not having one or even knowing anyone who does have one...)

Nazo wrote:

Isn't PSP roughly the capabilities of the PSX? Even if it's considerably better, the fact is, DOSBox takes some SERIOUS power to emulate a system.

Closer to the PS2. But yeah, the PS2 and PSP doesn't have enough power to emulate many games thru DOSBox. Games from '94 and later would be very unplayable. Games from the 80s probably runs fine, tho.

Hmm, how does the PSP compare to the DreamCast? I remember playing with Genesis and NES emulators on it. Genesis was almost unplayable as it had to skip too much, but, NES emulation was ALMOST ok with only moderate skipping. This puts the DC at being roughly like a Pentium 1-133 or so (rough estimate based on some old systems I have) when it comes to emulation. (And if this number sounds low to you, remember that consoles are VERY specially designed, but, then again, the fact that a Pentium 2-266 emulates SNES with it's 14MHz processor just BARELY properly should kind of give you a good hint of the kind of specialization going on here.) Unfortunately, while I agree that the games from early to mid 80s should be about right as far as how much power is needed, should is the operative there. I still think even a PS2 would be enough because that hardware made for gaming ONLY just doesn't do PC stuff that well. There's a lot of work to emulating an actual system. It doesn't just process the game itself, it's doing things like watching the virtual interrupts and emulating the appropriate response. Basically every peice of hardware in the virtual system exists purely in software (yes we have OpenGL/D3D, but, the only use we get out of our hardware accelerators is processing of things like scaling, not the actual virtual system.)

For comparison, I have NES emulation ALMOST tolerable on my ancient P1-70 laptop, and SNES is just barely playable on my P2-233@266 with all the basics (in other words, not using things like 8-bit color because the SNES emulation needs more than that to work right. No extras like interpolation, resampling, or any of that stuff.) My current setup is maybe somewhere in the 486 area, but, lower 486. Games past 1993 or so start to get pretty choppy and some of those skip a bit. (Seems like roughly 20000 cycles is where I can set it to run at.) Definitely at least a 386, I was able to play some stuff like Zone66 (which got amazing things out of a 386) as smoothly as it gets (internally it skips frames, so even playing on my real P2 system in real dos it plays about the exact same as it does on this system -- I say this because I must admit it makes it just a tad harder to tell if it does actually skip any it shouldn't, but, as far as I could tell it was running as smoothly as it did on the real PC.)

BTW, bear in mind that I report my processor speed as 200x11.5 for a reason. Stock a barton isn't supposed to run on a 200 FSB, so it's not just running at 2.2GHz, but, on a 200 FSB. In other words, it's better than your average barton, so don't completely discredit it's abilities. Benchmarking implies it would be roughly a 3300+ if there were such a thing (don't confuse barton with the a64 with the nearness of the ratings. Assuming DOSBox takes advantage of A64 features such as SSE2 -- and with the Venice, SSE3 --it could potentially run better on an A64 3200+ than a Barton 3200+.) Don't know how much things such as the HyperTransport come into play. This may not be a high end system, but, I consider it a fairly decent judge of the necessary raw power needed for a thing like PC emulation.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong mind you, I'm not exactly an expert on DOSBox's inner workings, but, from what little I do know about the nature of such a thing in general, I think the outlook doesn't look good.

That said, maybe a system like the X-Box and, I presume, the upcoming X-Box 360 (don't know much about it since I refuse to ever get any x-box -- don't get me started on that) would make somewhat decent candidates for console porting. Mind you, a Celeron 733 is a bit low end, so we are talking some pretty old games and probably still with frameskipping and such.

I wonder if it might be made more modular somehow? For example, have the ability to actually REMOVE all support for, say, an FPU in the virtual system and basically just about anything else imaginable. In other words, the ability to create a completely specialized emulator basically for one specific game by removing everything the game doesn't actually need. Obviously this is useless in the normal DOSBox as it really does need to be able to support all those types of hardware properly in a general purpose setup.

I have a NES emulator that runs perfectly on a old 40mhz Amiga computer. There's a NES emulator for PS1 that runs perfectly too. But granted, both of those are written in assembler and not in portable C/C++ code.

Well, from what I understand of the Amiga, it's pretty amazing hardware compared to standard PC. Coupled with code written specifically for it, I'm not at all surprised.

I think I tried the PSX one before. I never got it working so I'm not 100% certain. However, bear in mind that my original point was to show a general scale. The point being to demonstrate the amount of power needed for each of those, with actual PC emulation at the very top taking enormous power to have a chance at. I did a little looking around, and there is indeed a SNES emulator for the PS2. Apparently it can actually run pretty close to full speed a lot of times, but, some games are capable of bringing it down to 20 FPS. On that scale, with SNES being so far below ~486, (maybe more like 386 on this system, hard to pinpoint it exactly) emulation, I don't think it looks good. I could be wrong mind you, since I don't have much to extrapolate the lower 086 or so range that we're talking here, but, I have a feeling it'd be lucky to pull of anything that isn't text only.

This is excluding those fundamental architectural differences that I believe make the whole business of attempting to emulate a PC even harder for such a system. Mind you, from what I understood, the PSX was originally trying to be somewhat more PC-like than most consoles (excluding the PC-Engine I suppose) and I will admit that VGS worked pretty darned well on my old P2-350 system way back when (albiet looking pretty ugly.) Since the PS2 is so backwards compatible, it might be made somewhat similarly, but, I still don't think there's much chance of it being powerful enough.

Don't know where the similarities of PSP and PS2 or PSX are exactly. I suspect the PSP is probably a lot more specialized to get such abilities out of such a device without them costing an arm, a leg, and possibly a kidney.

I'm sorry, I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade or anything, I'm just saying that if I were you, I wouldn't get my hopes up. With such fundamentally different hardware designed for gaming not general computing, I really think there's very little chance of getting any games involving actual movement to work worth the trouble someone would have to go to to do this when they could be spending it on finding ways to make DOSBox better on PCs instead of consoles. (Darn I can't wait for the day that we can emulate a full system with all the power of a pentium. Mind you, that will probably be years from now when we have much more powerful processors to be honest. I'm willing to bet that DOSBox isn't so much going to get more efficient as it's just going to emulate better. It's probably as efficient as it gets -- roughly, may go up or down 1% several times, but, never much I bet.)

EDIT: Just did a little more reading (actually, I was looking for something else and happened upon this part.) Apparently the SNES processor was actually running at a variable frequency of up to 3.58 MHz. Never ceases to amaze me how much you can get if you specialize the living daylights out of something like that. SNES was comparable to a good 386 or so in most things -- in some even a 486 (like those nice transparency effects.)

Believe what you will, but, considering how hard THAT is to emulate, I don't really think there's a decent chance unless it were completely redesigned and rewritten in assembly specifically for that system, and, even then I wouldn't expect much. What's more, it would have to be specifically packaged for each game with special configurations to do key mappings and such for that particular game because, unless I'm mistaken, there are no keyboard addons for PSP. (Does it have USB maybe? I don't have a PSP to look at. Either way, it kind of defeats the point of having a hand-held tied down to a huge keyboard. And don't think PDA keyboard, because those are designed specifically for PDAs as far as I've ever been able to find.)

All I can say is, I just don't see it happening, no matter what. Who's going to consider that worth the time and trouble when they could be working on getting it on an Xbox or something instead.

it depends on which games you want to play
there are at least 4 pda versions of dosbox floating on the internet. That one is probably even slower then a psp.

And quite some users are happy with it.

Just in case anyone is curious, the NES emulator for PSX is called IMBNES (homepage is http://imbnes.gamebase.ca/ I think). It's supposedly still being developed (by one guy) but hasn't had a new release in quite a while. It is indeed written mostly (if not entirely) in assembly, but it runs quite well if you can get it to work (which can be tricky). Compatability is good but it doesn't run everything and of course there are some quirks.

just to clearify, there is already snes emus for the psp thats running pretty much full speed, there attempting to get the gpu working aswell which would most definatly make it run full speed. Here is a list of all the current emus (most running full speed with no skip)

# Amiga 500
# Chip8
# Gameboy Color
# GBA
# Genesis/Megadrive
# MAME
# MSX
# Neo Geo
# NES
# PC Engine
# PC-9801
# Playstation (3 - 5 fps without gpu)
# SCUMM
# Sega Master System
# SNES
# Wonderswan

The Gamepark GP32 is getting a sequel called GPX2 with a dual core ARM CPU. The GP32 was apparently especially geared towards homebrewn games and was emulator heaven. This new product is apparently the same, but with added movie and music playback support. You apparently get Linux/Cygwin developer tools with the purchase.

http://www.gpx2.com/

I know I'm going to get one (I'm not really interested in the PSP).

That looks pretty sweet, i seriously considered a gp32 before i got my psp ^^