PC emulators for PPC?

[FieldDoc]

This is a weird question, but there was a reply to one of my threads about SCUUMV which seems to play certain types of PC game on the PPC. Are there any emulators that can play older PC games on the PPC? I have loads of games for my early pentium (P90 sort of specs).

[guinness]

There's Pocket DOS, that way you could run some old DOS games, maybe some apps too.

[FieldDoc]

With so many emulators for consoles out, i'm surprised some clever chap hasn't made an emulator for an early pentium or something - you know, like a P90. That way one could play quite a few old games on the PPC. Is this just way to hard to do?

[wocket]

I think a pocketpc port of Bochs is comming. Bochs is the open source x86 emulator. http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

[Janak Parekh]

Perhaps, but don't expect it to perform remotely well. Emulating slower and simpler devices is easy. Emulating faster/more complex devices? Good luck. Even a P90 is way too complex for an ARM, IMHO.

--janak

[FieldDoc]

really? I have no idea as i can barely program a video recorder let alone C++

Shame really as I would have thought that if the PPC is capable of playing games such as age of empires (admittedly it has been created for the PPC) that it is an ideal platform for many of the early windows games.

How long do you reckon it will be until PPC games are being regulalry churned out?

[Janak Parekh]

Shame really as I would have thought that if the PPC is capable of playing games such as age of empires (admittedly it has been created for the PPC) that it is an ideal platform for many of the early windows games.
It's a great platform for ports of those games. :)

Having said that, you could, in theory, probably get old DOS games that need a 386/16MHz running OK on an ARM, or maybe a 486/25, but I wouldn't bet too much more than that running smoothly.

How long do you reckon it will be until PPC games are being regulalry churned out?
They're already being churned out. ZioSoft (www.ziosoft.com) is one manufacturer who specializes in ports of desktop games. They have some great titles, like SimCity 2000.

--janak

[rave]

Shame really as I would have thought that if the PPC is capable of playing games such as age of empires (admittedly it has been created for the PPC) that it is an ideal platform for many of the early windows games.
Emulation is different. There is a huge processor overhead for translating/recompiling the instructions that were meant for another processor into something that the native processor can understand. After the translation, the actual execution also requires some CPU time.

Hehehe, now I suddenly remember the most common argument in an emulation board I frequent: "This and that emulator s_cks. Quake 3 can play smoothly on my PC, but the emulator can't even handle a simple PSX game..." :wink:

[Hyperluminal]

I don't know how true this is, but they say the processor doing the emulation, should have about 20x the processing power as the processor it's emulating... :)

[LorryDriver71]

Nah, I heard its not about needing more power, its just that bottle necks develop somewhere/somehow. So even if you had the fastest processor in the world it would make much difference. Which I think, in turn, means that it is all down to how well the emulator was developed...



...but i'm probably wrong. :?

[Janak Parekh]

Nah, I heard its not about needing more power, its just that bottle necks develop somewhere/somehow. So even if you had the fastest processor in the world it would make much difference. Which I think, in turn, means that it is all down to how well the emulator was developed...
Actually, it's all about the computation power ;) Emulation requires a bunch of CPU instructions on the target processor to simulate just one instruction on the original processor. Ergo, it's got to be much faster, unless the two are the same type of processor -- then, emulation's not needed, just "translation".

There are optimizations that can be done, but they're pretty limited.

--janak