drkohler said:
That was the old age of emulation. It worked like "Grab a line of original code, figure out what it does, execute it on your cpu with your instruction set" (dynamic binary translation). That worked for years - as long as your cpu is at least 10-20 times more powerful than the cpu you are trying to emulate, because figuring out things takes time. Those times are long gone. Again a simple example, the old "switch two values" function. It goes like c :=a; a :=b; b:=c; and you have succefully exchanged the values in variables a and b. These are very simple commands on both the ppc and Jaguar. However, the ppc does it with 3.2GHz in the x360, the Jaguar in the X1 does it with 1.75GHz only - so you are actually slower on the "higher end" system doing exactly the same thing. If you added to that the time of "figuring out" in a dynamic binary translation system, your speed would be absolutely, hopelessly slow. Hence the need to "convert everything before the start" - you'll probably still lose a little time here and there, but the speed of the X1 gpu makes up for it more than enough to get a "better game". |
Thanks for going even further... I remember the need for some brute force and that for example PS1 and PS2 emulation took some more powerfull HW to run it, but I didn't remember this much difference.
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