/cen64-old

Primary LanguageCBSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" LicenseBSD-3-Clause

About

This is my pet project. It's something I pick up whenever I get bored. To me, what Nintendo and SGI did with this console is nothing short of amazing. The ingenuity and design of the hardware was well-ahead of it's time, and it is an absolute blast to reverse-engineer and study. I started this project in order to learn more about what really went on at the hardware level back in the (good old) days.

That being said, I've also grown tired of people complaining that "cycle accurate simulation on N-gen consoles is impossible." Not to be a bigot, but no, it's not. Is it hard to write a simulator that is capable of running fast enough to emulate a 93.75MHz processor on modern machines? Absolutely. Is it impossible? No, certainly not. It just takes time. Programming is an art, and like anything else, it takes time if done well.

Getting back on track: this simulator attempts to be everything that every other emulator hoped to be, but never quite attained due to... emulation. My hopes are that properly simulating things at the cycle and pixel-accurate level will preserve the original fidelity of the work that so many companies put out.

Thank you to every single one of you developers for filling my childhood with excellent memories. I'd also like to thank the community on all their hard work and effort spent reverse-engineering this little gem. Without further ado...

Building

The build system is, admittedly, a little hacked together. I'd like to get something more maintainable and non-Unix friendly in the future (e.g., CMake). Until then, I only support Makefiles.

For decent performance, your toolchain must absolutely be capable of some kind of link-time optimization. If you use gcc/llvm, the default Makefiles will already attempt to build with this feature. This is especially true when linking all the static library plugins into the final executable; performance will nosedive if the LTO isn't performed due to functions haved to be called several million times per second.

The project has been broken into submodules in order to separate the commit logs for each subsystem. Not only that, but it also is the most-amenable way to handle a project of this (intended) scale. I can easily give members commit access to individual parts of the project, or, I can also redirect one of the default submodules to somebody else's repository altogether.

First, acquire all the sources:

  • Using Git:

    $ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

  • Manually:

    • Extract a libaudio plugin to audio/
    • Extract a libbus plugin to bus/
    • Extract a libpif plugin to pif/
    • Extract a librdp plugin to rdp/
    • Extract a librdram plugin to rdram/
    • Extract a librom plugin to rom/
    • Extract a librsp plugin to rsp/
    • Extract a libvideo plugin to video/
    • Extract a libvr4300 plugin to vr4300/

Next, issue a build command:

  • (*nix/BSD) Using GNU make: Issue a make command.
  • (Windows) Simply double-click on an included cmd script in windows.
    • You will need to download the latest version of mingw64, here.
      • Make sure that it installs the x64 compiler, not the x86 one!
    • After installation, update your system path so that it includes the mingw64\bin directory.
    • You will also need to obtain GLFW2 libraries and headers, here.
      • Place the include directory and lib-mingw/libglfw.a file in the top-level (CEN64) directory.
    • Lastly, you will need OpenAL libraries and headers, here.
      • Place the include directory and lib/Win64/libOpenAL32.dll.a file in the top-level (CEN64) directory.
      • Copy the soft_oal.dll to the same directory as cen64.exe and rename it to OpenAL32.dll. This file must remain in the same directory as the cen64.exe file; keep this in mind if you redistribute the binary!

Running

As of right now, you will need ROM dumps from the retail console to run the simulator. The PIF ("BIOS") image performs checksums and security checks on the ROM image and initializes the environment. Please do not consult me on regards to obtaining ROM images; this is illegal in most countries.

Once you obtain the images, simply execute:

$ cen64 <pifrom> <rom>

All ROM and binary images must be supplied in native (big-endian), or z64 format. Other formats will fail the CRC check and result in the virtual console not booting.