Could the 3DS handle N64 games (emulation)?

[Tchay]

I already brought this up with Palmer; I've been wondering if the 3DS could handle N64 emulation, be it from Nintendo officially or from hackers. After looking online a bit, people seemed very confused about what the actual hardware specs for the nintendo 3DS really were.

Apparently IGN and a couple other sites had spread some bs about 200ishMHz and other junk.

According to wikipedia:
- 1GHz dual core ARM11 CPU chip
- Graphics - PICA200 by Digital Media Professionals (I guess there are many types of PICA200 and this is a custom made one)
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... -blog-post

So I'm pretty curious about how powerful the 3DS actually is, even if it can't handle N64 emulation.

 

[grossaffe]

I think it could probably pull it off. Probably important to write a well-optimized MIPS-to-ARM dynarec.

 

[Zero]

Yeah, it probably could. Nintendo would probably be able to do it without much trouble, but a homebrew one probably won't come until we know a lot more about the 3DS (that and get unsigned code running in the first place).

 

[Prog]

Let's just hope the homebrew scene on the 3DS ends up better on the PSP. They never even got SNES games past like 15 fps.

 

[Zero]

That's a really horrible way to rate an entire scene, especially considering the PSP was one of the most popular handhelds for homebrew.

 

[AfroLH]

Let's just hope the homebrew scene on the 3DS ends up better on the PSP. They never even got SNES games past like 15 fps.

You're an idiot. I was playing Chrono Trigger at 60FPS on my PSP. Don't know what you were smoking, but Low-Level Emulation on the PSP was *Can'tSayThisOnTV*ing fantastic.
They even got CPS1, CPS2, and Neo-Geo working at great framerates.

And the homebrew scene on the PSP was fantastic too.

 

[Kickback]

lol the PSP emulation scene is one of the best overall outside of consoles, SNES games worked fine unless they we're those Super FX games, and even then, those absolutely absymal super FX mode 7 games are so dated and horrible to play that i doubt anyone even cares.

(except for Yoshi's Island)

 

[Prog]

My PSP homebrew ran like flax. Don't know why.

 

[Tchay]

Anyways....

When I talked to Palmer about N64 emu on the 3DS he gave me a "very unlikely" answer. I'm curious why. Maybe he was going off of false specs.

I don't know much about emulators, but 1GHz seems like a good clock speed. The graphics chip is still a mystery though...

 

[Kickback]

My PSP homebrew ran like flax. Don't know why.

You might of been using old emulators.
the PSP-1000 also has less RAM than the later ones if you was using that one, not that it makes too much difference.

 

[vskid3]

I don't know much about emulators, but 1GHz seems like a good clock speed. The graphics chip is still a mystery though...

My Fascinate has a Cortex A8, which is about twice as fast per clock as the ARM11.

Compared to the ARM11 core, the Cortex-A8 is dual-issue superscalar, achieving roughly twice the instructions executed per clock cycle.

With my phone at 1GHz (roughly equal to a dual core ARM11 at the same speed), it'll run the usual N64 games at almost full speed (SM64, Mario Kart, SSB). But the 3DS has about a third of the RAM (the N64 emulator on the PSP didn't do too bad with just 32MB, though), and who knows how powerful the GPU is in comparison, if it is even used very heavily with N64oid.

Nintendo could easily do it, homebrew would at least get the usual games playing (when it gets going). Those are my guesstimates.