I know a lot of you are exited about all the emus and ports you guys are going to be making/playing, but what about games written/coded/whatever for the GP2x specifically? This has probably already been discussed, but how graphically impressive could games made for it be vs. stuff you emulate where a good portion of hardware resources are just going to making an emulated environment for a rom to run in? Of course none of you really know for certain seeing as the thing ain't even out yet. I'm just a guy that likes to ask complected questions.

Also, And related, could a 3d engine be written for the 2x that could render the equivalent of say descent or descent2? (you know old 3d spacey shoot up DOS game, yea you know) And again NOT a emu or port, but an engine for the gp2x

Did i spell descent right?

Heres a SS just for the hell of it

decent.

I think it would be possible for homebrew.

that would be awsome to have that kind of graphics!

Did no one bother checking yeti3d at 133mhz?

Actually it would be pretty sad if it didn't get better than that. The GBA can do graphics like that.

not everyone has a gp32

for non-gp32-owners: yeti3d at 133mhz looked as good as quake2

I did, and I was very impressed by the graphics and the performace at a mere 133Mhz!

Yeah, if written properly the graphics could easily pass those of Descent 2.

I see no reason why we can't reach PSX-level 3D graphics with native games.

I did, and I'm still wondering if there's an English site for it. The only site I've found is the angel software site and that's in French. The other link to http://www.theteahouse.com.au/gba/index.html always gives me a 404 error.

I'm actually porting Descent; it should run fine

jeff

Is there anything you aren't porting?

I think you exagerate. The GBA can't do that. They can't even do Doom properly. Doom on the GBA is pixel doubled on the already low res GBA and is running at 120 x 160. Doom is simpler than descent.

Do you usally port a lot of things at once? You are really starting to seem like superman to me but you know if front of a computer!

The GBA is capable of unbelievably good graphics considering how "weak" it is. Just look at Asterix and Obelix XXL and Gunstar super heroes (which as well as amazing sprite scaling and rotation has numerous 3D effects). Makes me wonder what we can expect from the DS in 2-3 years time...

GBA has a very good capability when it comes to stuffs that is supposed to handle. Doom may be too much, but I have seen Wolfenstein3D at full 30fps with full multiplayer support (not the one that was released years ago), although that involves heavy ARM assembly programming and efficient use of every ounce of the hardware power. Don't let low CPU clock speed fool you, it's the whole system that counts.

Wolf3D had been running pretty good on the PC AT@16MHz. At higher resolution too and with an 16 bit cpu (the 80286).

GBA has a 16MHz processor with 32KB main memory and 96KB Video RAM (37.5KB of it being framebuffer leaving around 58KB). If I remember correctly, a typical 286 PC had 640KB or 1MB memory; if you have programmed a game, you would know that 32KB vs 640KB will make a world of difference. Was that Wolf3D running in 16 color mode? Anyway, I'm not trying to argue what GBA can do against x86, but, rather, I was trying to make a point that unlike what Sony and Intel love to do, reading some numbers off spec sheet doesn't give you the whole picture of how the system is going to perform in real life. So, you have to understand how efficiently the entire system works instead of picking off some numbers out of released specifications.

1MB (640KB and somewhat less than 384KB for an extended memory) plus 256KB of video ram of VGA.



Not 16 but 256 colours actually as this was fastest way to program the VGA anyway (and the best looking).



Yep but I was talking about the "80286". This cpu isn't even pipelined and has only 16 bit accumulator, no cache and complicated memory addressing. Yet it has the MMU so it was actually somewhat weird.

One thing you have to remember about the gba is that it does not need alot of ram because it has very fast cartidges, which are practically as fast as the ram.

That is another proof that commonly known specs won't give you the whole picture most of times because until you work on GBA, you won't know that's the case because majority of consoles have the system that requires bitmaps to be loaded in RAM first. BTW even with fast rom and 256k WRAM, 32KB main memory is a pain making you often hunting for a few bytes in main RAM. The ROM and WRAM are fast, but not AS fast as the main ram, and it matters sometimes.

Was not Wolfenstein3d programmed for 386SX processors ?
there is a huge gap of performance between 286 and 386

Doom ran on 386DX theoritaclly, but was really at ease on 486
(just like Quake 1 did run on my 486dx2 , but was REALLY choppy)
Q1 needed a Pentium90 to be fine

Edit :

I was wrong , here are the official requirements for Wolf3d taken from 3drealms site

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

* 286 Computer (386+ Strongly Recommended)
* 528k of conventional memory (2Mb total memory recommended)
* 3 meg of Hard Drive Space (for shareware)
* 8 meg of Hard Drive Space (for registered)

This is the same way like it was with original Gameboy (very small memory, most data being directly accessed from rom).

The best hardware like this has the Atari 2600. It doesn't have even a framebuffer.

Having no double buffering would shock many today's PC game programmers, too.

i'd say TRIPLE

Un, no. I don't think you understand, there's no frame buffer. Period. You generate an image by tweaking the electron beam in real time as it scans the CRT. You do this at the same time as you're doing the logic of the game itself.

DoomGBA is old. Present day GBA graphics are pretty close to the above screenshot. Check out Payback and Need for Speed Underground 2 / Most Wanted. Or Pocketeers' 3rd person GTA style videos which are pretty insane.




Videos here: http://media.gameboy.ign.com/media/487/487087/vids_1.html

For comparison:

Payback:

Holy fuck those GBA games look good. I want to get Payback after seeing that shit but it's pretty expensive. Still, that' s impressive stuff! I had no idea the GBA could do that sort of thing.

look at golden sun...an old game that looked great (imo the gba is great but it cant handel descent2 unless it was like re done because i doubt the gp32 could even handel descent2)