T3K playable in NUON emulator

K3V · Post by **K3V** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 2:07 pm 0

Reports have it that the emulation is still quite slow, but the screenshots are quite impressive.

NUON-Dome is where it's at, if you couldn't have guessed.

EDIT: Yes, I said "quite" twice in the above sentence.

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 2:37 pm 0

Wow. I'd swear that you're screenshots directly from the Nuon itself.

I think you said it best yourself:

K3V wrote:Holy schneikes!

Fantastic!

Now, I assume that this loads the game off of a normal PC DVD drive?

Post by **Snakey** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 3:23 pm 0

Dave wrote:Now, I assume that this loads the game off of a normal PC DVD drive?

Not yet. It works from an image file. I imagine Riff will be trying to get it running at a playable speed before he works on that part.

WNivek · Post by **WNivek** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 8:17 pm 0

progress on Nuance just keeps on coming, doesn't it? Hmm, tasty screenies...

Rambozo · Post by **Rambozo** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 10:01 pm 0

Right, when it's full speed I hope they make an Xbox version of the emulator....and I hope they give an option for speeding up emulation a bit to get rid of the framerate issues in all the games.

WNivek · Post by **WNivek** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 11:27 pm 0

Rambozo wrote:and I hope they give an option for speeding up emulation a bit to get rid of the framerate issues in all the games.

would the games know what to do with extra processing time per frame?

Or do you mean speading up gameplay as well?

Rambozo · Post by **Rambozo** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 1:37 am 0

Well yes it would speed up gameplay....but you wouldn't have to speed it up too much to iron out the framerate issues.

zbandito · Post by **zbandito** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 2:26 am 0

How timely. I was just going to start a thread thanking Riff for his efforts! Of course, I hunted for a N501, had a friend ship it across the pacific (well half way, at least) and have a Flossie autographed

T3K (in gold writing no less!

), but it really is great to see this. It's unfortunate, but I imagine some day my nuon will die. I'm really, really glad to see T3K won't be lost. And who knows if the xbox is powerful enough, but here's hoping (bastard console that it is

) !!!!!

thanks K3V. and Riff. and Yak!

Rambozo · Post by **Rambozo** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:29 am 0

It emulates N64 fast enough (TOO fast on some games) So I'd assume that the Nuon, which pushed graphics on par with PS1 games, can be emulated on the Xbox.

Hell....if someone really got their hands dirty with 8x6 ASM, I wouldn't even put the Dreamcast beyond the scope of Xbox emulation.

p-saurus · Post by **p-saurus** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:35 am 0

Rambozo wrote:It emulates N64 fast enough (TOO fast on some games) So I'd assume that the Nuon, which pushed graphics on par with PS1 games, can be emulated on the Xbox.

Hell....if someone really got their hands dirty with 8x6 ASM, I wouldn't even put the Dreamcast beyond the scope of Xbox emulation.

I'd imagine the N64 wouldn't be able to do T3k to save it's life. Sure, some of the games had pretty shitty graphics but in the hands of a competent and dedicated programmer, I think the thing was capable of a good deal more.

WNivek · Post by **WNivek** » Mon Nov 24, 2003 4:42 am 0

It would be nice to see such pieces as T3K eternally preserved, playability intact, for the future generations. I'm really wondering now... if T3K was given enough extra cycles per frame, would it be able to render every frame without slowing down during a heated battle?

I'm no expert, but if the timing stuff is based on recieving certain signals (such as vblank) then I'd think that simply emulating more cycles before emulating the signal would give it the time it needs to make the virtual-framerate all silky smooth. Of course, there's still the issue of the emulator being able to run faster than a real nuon... ^_^;

Er... am I at all correct about any of this, or am I completely clueless?

Riff · Post by **Riff** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 1:58 am 0

To the best of my knowledge, none of the games attempt to count cycles in order to execute delays. The only processor that would want to do it is the main processor which controls the the main game executive, and thats always MPE3 which is cached. You might be able to set up a routine so that you know you don't cause a cache miss, but in general it would be very difficult to use a cached processor to wait for exactly the amount of time specified using a fixed instruction loop. Therefore the only syncronization routines used by games are the BIOS calls VidSync and sometimes TimeToSleep and its close cousin TimeElapsed. These are all timer based so there will be no problems if the emulator ends up running at an emulated speed faster than 54 Mhz.

Snakey was incorrect about the games though. All of the playable games have been accessed through my DVD drive using the original discs. This isn't a requirement, and in fact I had to rip the nuon.run and nuon.dat files from the Ballistic DVD due to some diversionary tactics used by the developer. The disc has an ISO9660 directory entry preceding the UDF directory entry. This confuses Windows and the files will not show up in explorer and you cannot access using file commands. Snakey helped me find a utility that would recognize both entries and report the LBA for the files. This allowed me to index into a dump of the data track and extract the individual files.

Dave · Post by **Dave** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 2:51 am 0

Riff wrote:due to some diversionary tactics used by the developer.

Yeah, people really tried to pirate/hack that one.

WNivek · Post by **WNivek** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 3:41 am 0

So... er... *is relatively confused* ... uh... ... uhm... So... once the emulator can run significantly faster than a real Nuon, would T3K's framerate lock in at a constant FPS, instead of slowing down when there's too much happening on screen? And if so, would the gameplay still be propper speed?

Post by **Snakey** » Tue Nov 25, 2003 8:46 am 0

Riff wrote:and in fact I had to rip the nuon.run and nuon.dat files from the Ballistic DVD due to some diversionary tactics used by the developer.

Ah, right you are, I thought they were all like that.