Author Topic: Emulator or Engine?  (Read 4141 times)

RW_66

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Emulator or Engine?
« on: 2007-02-18 17:37:43 »
I've been following you guys (?) since the start of this project, and respect the progress you have made in decoding and reconstructing the way the game engine(s) works. And though it might seem naive, I have to ask..

Are you constucting an emulator or a new game engine?

The reason why I ask is that there are a lot of PSX emulators out there, many that offer outstanding plug-in support for varying hardware/software capabilities with-in different enviroments. Many of them, depending on your hardware, offer advanced graphics capabilities (increased resolutions, smoothing, shaders, etc.). You have stated that (at least for now) you will only use the PSX CD data to 'run' Q-Gears. So I have to ask, what are you doing different from the emulators?

I'm not trying to down-play or denegrate your work, I'm just wondering what is the difference?
Because unless you have something different to offer, why would anybody choose your 'one-game' engine over a multi-game PSX emulator? Just a question..

nope

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Re: Emulator or Engine?
« Reply #1 on: 2007-02-18 17:48:16 »
From my understanding the difference between a PSX emulator and Q-Gears is that Q-Gears runs Final Fantasy 7 with native code that loads the files directly, whereas an emulator loads the original engine and dynamically recompiles the code to work with your processor, obviously the former will be much faster and therefore more compatible with differing hardware types, Q-Gears also opens up the possibility of Final Fantasy 7 to be played on pretty much any machine assuming it can handle it, so this allows for ports to consoles and PDA's with a bit of work.

gigaherz

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Re: Emulator or Engine?
« Reply #2 on: 2007-02-18 18:11:41 »
Technically, qgears is an "engine emulator", meaning, it emulates what the original engine did with the data files, without using any code from it.

Remember "emulating" means "doing the same something/someone else would do."

Cyberman

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Re: Emulator or Engine? (Think Virtual Machine)
« Reply #3 on: 2007-02-18 19:59:13 »
Just to make this as clear as mud :)

A Playstation emulator emulates the playstation.
Q-gears is a virtual machine that behaves like the engine that runs the original content.  See SCUMVM for this concept.  The problem with the PC versions of the FF series is they are hitting the brick wall of OS obsolesence.  The PC version's content is similiar to the PS1 version, so once the PS1's content is up and working, the PC version's content is next to be run.  The intent is to reuse almost ALL of the Q-gears engine the primary distinguishing difference will be the GameFileSystem,  which should abstracted between the game engine fetching data and running content and the actual content (data).

A RAW image file system for PS1 content is being worked on as well (my work at least).  This is for platforms that do not sport CD's or what have you.  (Think Palm).  So to keep it simple, it's not an emulator, it's a Virtual Machine that runs the content.  Just like Java runs under Linux, Windows, custom specialized workspace terminals .. etc.  Q-gears is designed to do the same with FF7.  FF7s data content is very similiar to what a Java program and it's data is in reality.

Erstwhile I'm going to continue redoing what I had done (because of all the updates).

Cyb