[PANDORA] Pcsx-Rearmed (Merry Psx-Mas)

December 28th, 2010, 23:15 Posted By: wraggster

News via http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php...dpost&p=931457

submitted by notaz
PCSX-ReARMed is yet another PCSX fork, based on PCSX-Reloaded. It has no relation to psx4all/psx4pandora or pcsx4all (other than being PCSX derived), is (almost) drama free* and has the source available now. The main feature it has is Ari64's dynarec, modified to suit PCSX. There is a bit of NEON for color space conversion too. The compatibility should be close to the PC version.

Performance is close to psx4all and heavily depends on game in question, as it uses P.E.Op.S. GPU and SPU code (slower than psx4all), but uses much superior Ari64's dynarec. The frontend should also be much more pleasant to use than psx4all one though. It uses HLE emulation and does not need BIOS (does not even support it yet but will do in future for compatibility reasons).

download:
http://notaz.gp2x.de/releases/pcsxr/pcsx_rearmed_r1.pnd
source (GIT):
git://notaz.gp2x.de/~notaz/pcsx_rearmed.git

* even though I have no physical or legal means to enforce it, I'd like to state that Zodttd is not welcome to use any of my code from this project (including Ari64's dynarec modifications) due to personal reasons.

Backstory

I was rather unhappy with the state of PSX (PSOne if you like) emulation on pandora and wanted to play some games, so I've started planning on doing psx emulator around 2 months ago. First I thought about doing ARM oriented emulator from scratch; I used to play some games back in the day and am quite interested in the hardware. However after thinking about it a bit it became obvious that I don't have enough time to finish such project in reasonable amount of time, and doing a recompiler that could reach or surpass Ari64's level would need a lot of effort that could be considered wasted as we already have such a thing (although it's under rather restrictive GPL license).

So I decided to go for combining Ari64's recompiler with PCSX and ended up with this build of PCSX-ReARMed that you can try now. Something like 95% of the time was spent on integrating the recompiler and fixing various related issues that arose from this work. No matter how good it is for recompiling, it's *very* difficult and frustrating to work with due to code quality issues. Code duplication (usually 3-4 times), most variables given 1 to 3 letter long names, globals all over the place, magic constants and some hardcoded N64 logic made it a really tough job (no offense Ari64, I'm really pleased on how it works now, at least until new major bug pops up B) ).

Right now I'm looking forward to squeezing some more performance from GPU and SPU code, then maybe doing some NEON on GTE (doing it's flags with NEON might be an issue). We'll see how this turns out, meanwhile I hope you enjoy this release

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