If you're familiar with the emulation scene (and let's be honest, you
are reading Engadget), then you know the name
ZodTTD -- the brain behind some of the best jailbroken emus for the iPhone, including variations on the PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, and most importantly... the TurboGrafx-16. Now the master-hacker has brought his goods to the Pre, cooking up a version of psx4all on the Palm device, with the aforementioned GBA and TG16 ports on the way! Interestingly, he reports that the performance on the Pre is actually better than that of the iPhone 3GS, and of course he's hacked access to the keyboard, allowing for (more) proper control of games. There are still kinks that are being worked out (sound emulation, screen scaling, etc.), but it looks like we can expect big things in the near future. We at Engadget know everyone will rest a bit easier tonight knowing that real gaming on the Pre is at hand. We'll hopefully be getting our hands on a version soon, but for now hit the read link for more info, and check out the full video after the break!
posted June 30th 2009 9:48PM
It probably wasn't *too* hard for him to port it, seeing as he already had (at least the psx4all) optimized to run on the OpenPandora platform, a TI OMAP 3530, and the Pre is a 3430.
Kudos, keep doing the great job that you are doing ZodTTD.
The tricky part was reversing /dev/input/keypad0 for keyboard events. Going between the Palm Pre and the Pandora gaming handheld is fairly straightforward. The TI OMAP 3530 and 3430 are from what I hear, identical except for the future paths the systems will take.
zodttd - no this sounds interesting.
Been looking for uae on my Nokia N800 (TI OMAP 2420) without luck. From what you are saying (and doing) - the coming Touch Book could be a perfect emulator machine.
Oh, I expect the Touch Book will have a lot of crossover from the OpenPandora and BeagleBoard communities, seeing as they all have the OMAP3530. I'm pretty sure the main differences between them is screen resolutions, input methods, and RAM size.
I'm sold, buying a Pre this week! Only thing that sucks is that with only 8Gigs I'd be kinda limited to 3 PSX games tops (including all the rest of my media and apps)
This would be a lot neater if the Pre had enough battery life to actually do anything other than the bare essentials. After about 2 weeks of usage I'm starting to think battery life on the Pre is going to be the single biggest liability. Hopefully Palm can fix some of this in software. I'm ok with charging a phone everyday (overnight) but it needs to last a full workday and ideally a few hours more. With light usage I'm finding the Pre can do about 6 hours. Just doing some phone calls and IM can get you under 4 hours. If Palm cannot resolve this (either through software or offering bigger batteries) there won't be much potential for the platform.
It would be EVEN neater if the Pre had either a larger hard drive or SD card support (as I'm sure SteveBorough would agree).
Also, a landscape-style keyboard instead of portrait would make it a lot easier to hold and would allow for the game to fill more of the screen.
Hmm, maybe the Pre and the PSP Go could have a love child?
You should replace your pre or battery. I have had minw for 3 weeks and mine lasts a whole day and I have it connected to bluetooh and use sprint nav quite a bit. I would say on my avg day of browsing and map using I get about 13-14 hours... Like the other poster mentioned seido is making extended battery, the smaller of the 2 they are working on they claim 2 additional hours of talk time and I think 6 additional hours of stand by.
Iphone 1g jailbreak can do that.
But it can't do it with buttons or with an awesome processor.
PSX 1 can do that too. What's your point?
That was to Richard...
/facepalm
Pre sucks. Go iPhone.
virgin ^
damnit, that arrow is pointing at my name :-(
Critical miss!
big props to the guy that did it... but just a tip:
if you are seeing increased speeds on the pre over the 3GS... you are doing something horribly wrong. If you are comparing to the 3G, then yes, i would agree 100%. ive developed on the iphone, and have started tinkering with the pre... and there just flat out isnt enough overhead on the pre to compare to the 3gs.
nicely done though.
YOUR WRONG. See ,i did exactly the same as you did there.
I dont exactly mean you in the following, but im seriously wondering where are all the iPhone boys now, when someone like Zod mentions that the pre runs something faster than the 3gs. Now they only have battery life and build quality to complain about, both witch have improved miles from the initial release versions. The battery life for example can be made as much as 100% better with the latest patch and some setting tweaking. For an example turning on wifi if you have coverage is better for the battery than evdo.. whoa surprise. Also the build quality is very good for a two piece phone. That is if your phone has no manufacturing flaws on it. If it does you can return to the store and get a new one instantly. If that one don't work you get a version that is inspected by palm first.
no... what you did was spew fanboy rhetoric.
im not sure what he is doing... but again, heres a little evidence to back my claim.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2349515,00.asp
please tell me that opengl benchmarks in gaming dont matter. i would love to hear it.
but regardless, both the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre use an ARM Cortex A8 CPU and a PowerVR GPU. so the only differences are in the software layers. and you're going to argue the point that the phone that must optimize for multiple apps simultaneously, is going to have less overhead than one that doesnt?
now... if he had said "its easier and quicker for me to program on the pre"... sure. maybe it is... maybe it isnt. but a lack of knowledge in how to streamline your program on one platform as opposed to another, does not mean that the other platform is faster.
Slightly off-topic but I would love to see a version of WipeOut for the iPhone - accelerometer-based control would be absolutely perfect for this particular game. WipeOut was the first game that I bought for the PlayStation when it was released in the UK, was totally wonderful when you could fly the courses correctly (maddening prior to that, mind) and also got me into techno music with a fabulous soundtrack from proper DJs.
can it run crysis (sorry it has to be said ....:P)
I would jizz in my pants... although 10 years from now my kids will look at crysis and laugh at it =P I can't wait to see what's just beyond the horizon with graphics and gaming ^_^