Daedalus N64 Emulator W.I.P. Update!

Well, taking a small break from our E3 coverage, I’d like to give give out a bit of homebrew news. StrmnNrmn, the guy behind Daedalus has just given an update. And boy, it’s something to look forward to!

First, the geek-speak. He’s thinking of writing a new dynamic recompiler. The reason’s I’ll mention below:

• The older dynarec was a huge memory hog. The recompilation engine is fairly enthusiastic about recompiling blocks of code almost as soon as it comes across it. This approach isn’t recommended for the PSP version since it takes up a huge amount of memory.
• There’s currently no way to easily flush old fragments of code from the cache to save memory. This isn’t much of a problem on the PC, but on the PSP you can’t afford to have old fragments of code lying around, chewing up valuable memory.
• The PC version of the dynarec is sufficiently old, poorly documented and overly complex that it’s almost impossible for to improve and properly debug.

Now in simple words, it means that he’s thinking of re-writing the main engine of the emulator. The actual core which translates everything from one platform to another. But this isn’t something which can be planned and done over the weekend.

If he does go ahead, be prepared to wait for it for some time. But once it’s done, you can look forward to a totally new experience on Daedalus. Speculating about it would be wrong. I’d rather wait for it to be released. No dates have been given out.

Well, taking a small break from our E3 coverage, I’d like to give give out a bit of homebrew news. StrmnNrmn, the guy behind Daedalus has just given an update. And boy, it’s something to look forward to!

First, the geek-speak. He’s thinking of writing a new dynamic recompiler. The reason’s I’ll mention below:

• The older dynarec was a huge memory hog. The recompilation engine is fairly enthusiastic about recompiling blocks of code almost as soon as it comes across it. This approach isn’t recommended for the PSP version since it takes up a huge amount of memory.
• There’s currently no way to easily flush old fragments of code from the cache to save memory. This isn’t much of a problem on the PC, but on the PSP you can’t afford to have old fragments of code lying around, chewing up valuable memory.
• The PC version of the dynarec is sufficiently old, poorly documented and overly complex that it’s almost impossible for to improve and properly debug.

Now in simple words, it means that he’s thinking of re-writing the main engine of the emulator. The actual core which translates everything from one platform to another. But this isn’t something which can be planned and done over the weekend.

If he does go ahead, be prepared to wait for it for some time. But once it’s done, you can look forward to a totally new experience on Daedalus. Speculating about it would be wrong. I’d rather wait for it to be released. No dates have been given out.