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Nulldc for Android

Caetano

New member
There is a long time since the last alpha version. I would like to know, what's wrong with the Nulldc developers which stopped indefinitely with the project for android. Today there are a lot of android phones and even tablets with capacity for Dreamcast an Naomi emulation at full speed. I don't understand the reason of be sicks of develop for android already that is an easy platform for to develop.
 

PsyMan

Just Another Wacko ;)
There is a long time since the last alpha version. I would like to know, what's wrong with the Nulldc developers which stopped indefinitely with the project for android. Today there are a lot of android phones and even tablets with capacity for Dreamcast an Naomi emulation at full speed. I don't understand the reason of be sicks of develop for android already that is an easy platform for to develop.

Android is not an easy platform for to develop fast and stable software. It lacks proper debugging tools. It adds lots of overhead to the code (about 40% slower speed than vanilla Linux on the same hardware). Lots of devices either under-clock when stretched or kill the battery in about 20 to 40 minutes (tablets have bigger batteries thus they last longer). The GPU drivers on those platforms are mostly full of bugs and limitations. Memory throughput is crippled. The audio back-end is also a slow piece of crap. Did I mention that different Android versions suffer from different issues?

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There are Playstation and Nintendo 64 emulators for PC that run fine on a single core Pentium 3 processor @ 450Mhz. Similar emulators require something close to a 1.5GHz dual core processor to run adequately on android.

Current Dreamcast emulators for PC require something close to a dual core processor @ 2Ghz with more than 2 cores not making a difference cause they can't be used (the slowest part of the emulator can only use one core while you can fit everything else on a second core, with more cores not affecting speed at all).

Now if you take the "rest" emulators in account and do the math then a Dreamcast emulator would need a processor clocked about 3 times faster than the one required for the PC version in order to run on android. That's something close to 6Ghz.

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Now can you please explain where exactly is the easy part? Cause if there's some sort or valid reasoning behind that statement of yours I totally missed it. There are some serious optimizations, workarounds and decreases in quality for gfx/audio/etc currently on the WIP pre-alpha builds and there are still many kinds of issues. It's not even funny.

If you have a few 6GHz Android devices I'd like some. You could also give the PCSX2 and Dolphin guys a few of those for them to do more android ports. :p
 
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F

Fanatic 64

Guest
And I have to add that this is not the ideal place to attack the developers of NullDC for Android, because we have nothing to do with them :p
 

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