Dear homebrew developers why the original Xbox was able to emulate N64 games flawlessly and a twice faster CPU on a Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+/4 (and far more RAM) still can’t?
In: Technology
Point of order, N64 emulation on XBOX was kinda crap IIRC.
Secondly while the clock speed on the Pi maybe be faster by a good bit, it runs on an ARM64 processor which is designed for power efficiency and cost savings over raw compute power. The XBOX is based on an x86 processor which can effectively do more per clock cycle, at the cost of using note transistors and therefore more power.
Another problem is that ARM64 is a relatively new architecture. N64 emulation was more popular back in the OG XBOX days, and there was more effort put into optimization for that architecture. ARM64 coming up only fairly recently hasn’t had the same amount of optimization/development put into it. Specifically dynarec comes to mind or dynamic recompiling which translates n64 specific code into x86 or ARM64 specific code. It’s entirely possible that whatever emulator you used just didn’t come with this as a feature by default. (Though it’s probably doable with some configuration, seems like someone did manage to write something about 3 years ago.)
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