We've all seen that the Dreamcast can be quite the clever piece of kit when it comes to emulation. The fact that it can run Playstation 1 games at more or less full speed via Bleem is impressive enough, but now it looks as if someone has found a way to run Nintendo 64 games on it! Even more surprisingly, it has apparently been done by simply porting a PSP version of the emulator over with almost zero extra work, and at least for Super Mario 64, it runs with almost all the graphics intact! There is no sound and it runs at 10fps at the fastest, but this is still an incredible feat! Here's a video that the programmer named Simpson474 put together:
It really does seem too good to be true, doesn't it? Dcemu.co.uk has all the technical details:
Daedalus for Dreamcast I have ported two versions of Daedalus to the Dreamcast, mainly to see how the performance would be. Both versions only use the interpreter core of emulator and neither version has support for sound or saving. Both speed and graphics are far from being playable, and I can’t imagine that a N64 emulator can ever run at 25+ FPS on the Dreamcast. This emulator is not completely without optimization, the graphics plug-in for example uses the TA directly to get the maximum speed. However, the CPU core is completely free of optimizations and there is no DynaRec available. It would be a lot of work to implement a working DynaRec core for the Dreamcast and there would be only little RAM left to be used for the DynaRec.
Compiling the emulator I used gcc 3.4.6 and KOS 1.3.0 for compiling the emulator. The Non-PSP-Version has a makefile made by me (which is not very good) and for the PSP-Version a modified version of the original makefile is used. There are no project files for an IDE included.
Using the emulator Both emulators are available as scrambled 1st_read.bin and DaedalusDC.elf file. The scrambled file is intended to be burned to a disc (not tested) and the DaedalusDC.elf file can be used with dc-tool and a serial programmer cable. There is no real user interface; the emulator only scans the root directory of the inserted disc. The ROM filenames should have no spaces in them and I recommend using short filenames for the ROMs.
Non-PSP-Version This is the faster of both versions, but has more limitations. This version only supports ROMs that match into the RAM of the Dreamcast. There are 16 MB RAM available on the Dreamcast. 4 MB are used for storing the N64 RAM. Up to 8 MB are used to store the N64 ROM and the remaining RAM is used for the emulator. The only game that goes ingame with this version seems to be Super Mario 64.
PSP-Version R8 This version gets rid of the 8 MB ROM limitation, but therefore it is even slower than the older version. There are some games that go ingame (Mariokart, Zelda – Ocarina of Time, Rugrats in Paris – The Movie), but there are a lot of graphic glitches. In Zelda – Ocarina of Time for example you only see parts of the GUI ingame after ages of loading.
Further Development Because I’m sure that this emulator will never run playable, I won’t continue the development. This was just a test for me to see, how the SH4 would perform emulating the N64. I ported the emulator nearly one year ago (as you can see from the PSP-Version R8, currently there is PSP-Version R13 out) and since then I have not worked on this port. Some days ago I found my video that I have captured after the development and thought I could upload it on Youtube. I did not think that someone would be interested in perhaps the slowest emulator on earth.
Did you catch any of that? Nope, me neither! It's still pretty darn impressive, and who knows, maybe someone out there with the knowhow could get this running even better! Very exciting times, indeed, my friends.
"Because I’m sure that this emulator will never run playable, I won’t continue the development. This was just a test for me to see, how the SH4 would perform emulating the N64."
thx to share us your development work, we see at least somebody tryed to do something nice... I hope that all of this didn't put you down .. remember a SegaDC is for Sonic not mario ;)
This isn't really a 'I want to play mario 64 on m Dreamcast' thing so much as another piece of evidence of just how much fans with programming skills have been able to push the Dreamcast to it's limits. Six years ago it was considered a technical marvel that the Dreamcast could emulate the SNES, and while they could just program emulators for more powerful consoles, they keep coming back to the Dreamcast.
A brilliant discovery Gagaman(n) and again testament to the development potential of our beloved little white box... If someone has the ability to take N64 emulation this far, you can garantee that someone else will tweak it further in the future...
(oh! and BTW Gagaman(n)theres something that might make you smile over at the SJY regarding Seaman...)
I like how Mario has a Mr. T thing going on. This is way impressive considering the only other n64 can only show the title screen of wave race 64.
ReplyDelete"Because I’m sure that this emulator will never run playable, I won’t continue the development. This was just a test for me to see, how the SH4 would perform emulating the N64."
ReplyDeletethx to share us your development work, we see at least somebody tryed to do something nice...
I hope that all of this didn't put you down .. remember a SegaDC is for Sonic not mario ;)
a big thx to all your work
you know he isn't part of this site right?
ReplyDeleteHmm.
ReplyDeleteI got a ton of N64 stuff since people my area seem to have alot of it for sale.
There really isn't any N64 games I would really desire on the Dreamcast.
I guess it would be kinda cool to play Zelda OoT but I already have the original plus both Gamecube remakes.
Very very impressive! Thank you Gagaman...
ReplyDeleteThis isn't really a 'I want to play mario 64 on m Dreamcast' thing so much as another piece of evidence of just how much fans with programming skills have been able to push the Dreamcast to it's limits. Six years ago it was considered a technical marvel that the Dreamcast could emulate the SNES, and while they could just program emulators for more powerful consoles, they keep coming back to the Dreamcast.
ReplyDeleteA brilliant discovery Gagaman(n) and again testament to the development potential of our beloved little white box... If someone has the ability to take N64 emulation this far, you can garantee that someone else will tweak it further in the future...
ReplyDelete(oh! and BTW Gagaman(n)theres something that might make you smile over at the SJY regarding Seaman...)
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