Port possible?

[Timmy]

Hey, Bart! Might be early going, but has there been any thought, or is it even possibe, that Supermodel could end up on the original Xbox? I realize of course that it's not the most amazing hardware in the world, but being able to run MAME as well as other arcade emulators suggests that technically such a port should be possible. Any thoughts on this?

[SupremeTextures]

Hey, Bart! Might be early going, but has there been any thought, or is it even possibe, that Supermodel could end up on the original Xbox? I realize of course that it's not the most amazing hardware in the world, but being able to run MAME as well as other arcade emulators suggests that technically such a port should be possible. Any thoughts on this?

It would run it at 10fps, its CPU is 700mhz and it has a
'G-force 3' video card.

He wouldn't even bother

[SuperSZ]

Hey, Bart! Might be early going, but has there been any thought, or is it even possibe, that Supermodel could end up on the original Xbox? I realize of course that it's not the most amazing hardware in the world, but being able to run MAME as well as other arcade emulators suggests that technically such a port should be possible. Any thoughts on this?

It would run it at 10fps, its CPU is 700mhz and it has a
'G-force 3' video card.

He wouldn't even bother

Exactly. I have a pc with a core 2 duo overclocked at 3.5Ghz, a 8800GS and it can't even run Daytona USA 2 at full speed (60 fps)

[Timmy]

Ah, interesting, but are you guys are basing that performance on where the emulator is at right now? My understanding was that his eventual goal was to get the code and compiler optimized to the point where Supermodel will run on an average laptop. At that point, I mean, the hardware was of about the same vintage as what's under the hood of an Xbox, no? We're still early days it seems on real Model3 emulation and I've got to wonder if speed lies ahead.

[Bart]

I'm not going to be doing any console ports but that does not mean it cannot be done. If someone would like to try, they are more than welcome to. Supermodel is open source, after all. As for whether or not it would run on the XBox, that's hard to say. With a really good dynamic recompiler, it may be within the realm of possibility, but optimizing the graphics engine would be quite difficult. I'm also not sure if the XBox has sufficient RAM to hold all the ROMs and memory buffers. XBox is vastly more powerful than either the Model 3 or Dreamcast, so ports of games would be easy, but a straight-up emulator would likely not ever be able to achieve 60 FPS.

An interesting project would be to try to convert Supermodel into a semi-automated code translator that heavily preprocesses the PowerPC code, meshes, and texture maps each time it is run, producing executable data that can then be run more quickly on lower-spec hardware. I'm never going to have the time to do this, however.

[GambitRogue777]

Well, there's a couple of related questions I wanted to ask about this.

1. Can Supermodel run on any of PS3's Linux software?
2. If the coming-soon PS Vita is hackable for emulation, can it run Model 3 in full speed, since it has 4 cores and PS3 graphics?

[Bart]

1. Can Supermodel run on any of PS3's Linux software?

I don't know much about PS3 but I highly doubt it has an adequate OpenGL implementation, so the answer is 'no' unless proven otherwise. Supermodel also assumes it is running on a little endian system to speed some things up, but this would be easy to fix. I also highly doubt that the PS3's weak CPU could run the PowerPC interpreter at full speed.

Model 3 emulators for PS3 and XBox 360 are definitely possible, but they would have to be pretty heavily tailored to each system.

2. If the coming-soon PS Vita is hackable for emulation, can it run Model 3 in full speed, since it has 4 cores and PS3 graphics?

I would guess so but not with Supermodel.

[SupremeTextures]

2. If the coming-soon PS Vita is hackable for emulation, can it run Model 3 in full speed, since it has 4 cores and PS3 graphics?

It could depend on how good the video is aswell, my mothers pc has a duo core, 2.50ghz each but has a poor graphics card, onboard graphics card i think it is, and it is slow as hell on her computer. i got a duo-core 3.16GHZ each, and a NVidia GT240 Video Card, and it runs at full speed with a lot of CPU left. Since it has 2006 hardware, i doubt very much that the video card would be good enough.

I read that the XBOX720 will be compatible with Windows 8. That will be able to run it at full speed for sure, it will be a beast no doubt.

[Arbee]

To clarify a few things:

XBox is vastly more powerful than either the Model 3 or Dreamcast

On paper, yes. In real life, you have the GPU, the Pentium, IDE DMA, audio DMA, and USB DMA all fighting over DDR-200 RAM that was rejected by the manufacturer because it binned out too slow for PC use (I am not making this up). In fact, the RAM performance varied by each Xbox out there - the BIOS tries increasingly aggressive timings until the RAM fails and then locks it there. So games can run different framerates on apparently identical Xboxes.

And the shaders are Shader Model 1.0 and limited to like 32 instructions total. SuperModel would not be a happy camper.

GameCube actually had the most overall CPU and GPU power of that generation (although no shaders at all there), but almost no games actually tapped into it aside from Resident Evil 4.

Can Supermodel run on any of PS3's Linux software?

PS3 Linux doesn't have good quality OpenGL drivers, as was hinted at earlier. And with that out of the way, the PS3 GPU is roughly equivalent to a GeForce 7600 (yes, 7600), which is kinda questionable for Supermodel. And, as Bart said, SM doesn't like big-endian. I compiled it successfully on my 2 GHz PowerMac dual-G5 (which for the record has double the available CPU performance of the PS3/X360 due to their crippled strict-in-order CPUs) and it even started up, but it immediately fell over

If the coming-soon PS Vita is hackable for emulation, can it run Model 3 in full speed, since it has 4 cores and PS3 graphics?

Vita has 4 ARM cores, any of which individually don't have enough power to handle SuperModel's PowerPC interpreter. A DRC might work if there's enough RAM, though. The graphics are the same GPU as the new iPhone 4S, so if you saw the Infinity Blade 2 demo that Epic did on it recently you have some idea what the real power is.

What, nobody asking about the 3DS?

[Timmy]

Thanks for some really excellent clarification! Like I said, to me the hardware and generlly directx-y nature of the xbox made it seem like a reasonably straight forward proposition. Wasn't clear on the ram and other issues which sound like if even workable it would look more like an entirely different project. Ah well, I'll keep enjoying the work!