= Emulation Benchmarks I have a working theory that the feel of a system is defined by it's limits. Meaning, "this is what we can give you, and no more". Within this space lives the programmer. When restraints are tight the programmer must work hard and come up with something special just to make something in the first place. When restraints are removed, programmers get lazy. Well let's be honest -- not lazy but in some ways more productive and in some ways less. When you have a lot of extra ram and processing speed, things tend to fall into a 3d open world environment. However, CastleVania SOTN on Playstation 1 showed that even in a 30 MIPS, 32 bit environment (the SNES was 8/16 bit, 1.4 MIPS) you could make a credible 2d RPG. The thing is though, Castlevania could do it because Castlevania came from that legacy. To make SOTN without the existing IP behind it would have been considered a mistake at the time. Therefore, let us attempt to allow emulation of modes and time periods -- NOT of hardware itself. The 8516 has a decent period-accurate "feel" ISA that should allow easy porting and in theory would be an excellent target for a C compiler. Those aren't going to be issues. The issues are going to be forcing programmers to comply. Therefore, when being considered for a "Gold Star" award by the SD-8516 foundation (I just made that up) programs must conform to the following specs: == Other Fantasy Computers * SD-8516 clocks in at 125 MIPS on an i7-12700K (Geekbench 6 baseline 2500) On the same computer, * SD-8510 runs at 4.5 MIPS * XR/Station running ASIX, dhrystone 2.1 shows 9.75 VAX MIPS == The Chart Legend: * Green: The SD-8516 is capable of emulating this level of performance on an i7-12700 (Geekbench 6 baseline). * Light Gray: Although the SD-8516 cannot currently emulate this level of performance, it is expected to once graphics acceleration is emulated. * Dark Gray: The SD-8516 cannot emulate this system. This is almost always because it is slower than 50% of the required speed. For example, it is unlikely to achieve Dreamcast-level performance even on the new M5 Pro Max chips (4000+ single core). This level of performance would require a C rewrite and some form of multithreading. * Red: The system is unlikely to emulate this level of performance because it's advanced hardware. It is possible that a C rewrite would get close, but would require enthusiast hardware. These benchmarks are for GB6 baseline systems. ^ Year ^ System ^ CPU ^ Width ^ Approx MIPS ^ RAM ^ Graphics ^ Audio ^ Notes ^ | @green:1977 | Atari 2600 | MOS 6507 | 8-bit | 0.30 | 128 B | 160×192, ~128 colors (T​IA tricks) | | No framebuffer; cycle-exact emulation needed | | @green:1979 | Intellivision | CP1610 | 16-bit | 0.35 | 1 KB | 159×96×16 | | 16-bit CPU but very slow clock | | @green:1980 | VIC-20 | MOS 6502> | 8-bit | 0.45 | 5 KB | 176×184×16 | | Simple video chip; CPU-bound | | @green:1981 | BBC Micro | MOS 6502 | 8-bit | 1.00 | 32 KB | 640×256×2 | | 2 MHz CPU; very tight timing | | @green:1982 | ColecoVision | Z80 @ 3.58 MHz | 8-bit | 0.58 | 1 KB + 16 KB VRAM | 256×192×16 | | Same VDP as MSX | | @green:1982 | C64 | MOS 6510 | 8-bit | 0.36 | 64 KB | 320×200×16 | SID | VIC-II steals cycles--slower than VIC-20 CPU-only | | @green:1983 | NES | Ricoh 2A03 | 8-bit | 0.50 | 2 KB | 256×240×25 | 2×PWM, 1×triangle, 1×noise, 1× DMC (4-bit PCM samples)| Heavy PPU timing--emulation harder than C64 | | @green:1983 | Apple IIe | MOS 6502 | 8-bit | 0.50 | 64 KB | 280×192×6 | | No sprites; CPU-driven graphics | | @green:1985 | C128 | MOS 8502 | 8-bit | 0.75 | 128 KB | 320×200×16 | SID | Faster CPU but still VIC-II limited | | @green:1987 | Amiga 500 | 68000 @ 7 MHz | 16/32 | 4.5 | 512 KB–1 MB | 320×256×32/64/4096 | Paula (DMA-driven PCM playback) | Custom chips dominate emulation cost | | @green:1991 | SNES | Ricoh 5A22 | 16-bit | 1.5 | 128 KB + VRAM | 256×224×256 | Advanced Sample Playback | Slow CPU; complex PPU & DMA | | @lightgreen:1991 | 386SX | 80386SX @ 25 MHz | 32-bit | 10 | 4 MB | 320×200×256 VGA | SB Pro | Software rendered; cache key for speed | | @lightgreen:1992 | Amiga 1200 | 68EC020 @ 14 MHz | 32-bit | 14 | 2 MB | 320×256×256 | Paula (DMA-driven PCM playback) | Much easier CPU than SNES to emulate | | @lightgreen:1992 | 486 Gamer | 486DX2-66 | 32-bit | 54 | 8 MB | 640×480×256 (S3 ViRGE) | SB16 | ~20 FPS software Quake; 3D accel emerging | | @lightgray:1994 | PS1 | MIPS R3000A | 32-bit | 30 | 2 MB + 1 MB VRAM | 320×240 | SPU | Geometry-heavy; no GPU T&L | | @lightgray:1994 | Pentium 90 | 586, 90 MHz | 32-bit | 90 | 32 MB | 640×480×16M (PCI VGA) | SB AWE32 | Smooth Quake @ 50+ FPS; Win95 ready | | @lightgray:1996 | N64 | MIPS VR4300 | 64-bit | 125 | 4–8 MB | 320×240–640×480 | | Hard due to RSP/RDP synchronization | | @gray:1998 | Dreamcast | SH-4 @ 200 MHz | 32-bit | 360 | 16 MB | 640×480 | AICA | Very emulator-friendly architecture | | @red:2000 | PS2 | MIPS R5900 | 128-bit SIMD | 6000 + 40 | 32 MB | 640×448 | SPU2 | Emotion Engine 6k MIPS; +40 MIPS for PS1 compat.; VUs dominate | | @red:2001 | GameCube | Gekko @ 485 MHz | 32-bit | 1125 | 24 MB | 640×480 | Flipper DSP | Dolphin emulator gold standard; clean PowerPC arch | | @red:2017 | Switch | ARM Cortex-A57 | 64-bit | 12,000 | 4 GB | 720p–1080p | | GPU & OS dominate emulation cost | == Observations Looking at the above chart, you will see "what happened". In the early 90s, the 486dx-66 was the last great consumer CPU before the 3d revolution really took off. The death of the Amiga, the rise of the accelerated playstation and the absolute dominance of the Pentium changed how home computing worked. After that moment, graphics acceleration was a must and MIPS did not matter anymore. Thus, the PS-1, even though it is only 30 mips, had enough graphics acceleration to do things a similarly priced PC of the day could not.
The original Pentium (P5, 1993–1997) provided several key architectural accelerations that Quake's software renderer exploited via hand-tuned x86 assembly (primarily by Michael Abrash), delivering ~2–3x the performance of a 486DX4-100 in rasterization-heavy scenes.
=== The Days before GPU Acceleration The Pentium was really the key that launched the GPU acceleration wars. * Superscalar dual integer pipelines (U/V): Allowed two integer instructions per cycle, allowing quake to draw pixels in bursts * Pipelined FPU: pipelined floating point ops let Quake fire FDIV for perspective-correct texturing in parallel with integer rasterization (r_alias.s), making slow DIV "free" (~1c effective). * 64-bit FPU data path: Enabled fast 64-bit FP loads/stores and near-free FXCH (stack rotates, 0-1c), optimizing matrix/dot products for geometry and lighting * Branch prediction: predicted branches (e.g., bottom-of-loop) increased throughput. These Pentium-specific traits were exploited via Abrash's hand-tuned ASM (id386.asm) delivered a 3x speedup over 486DX4-100 and AMD/Cyrix 5x86-133 style CPUs, crushing the clones' weaker floatinf point pipelining and marginalizing them in gaming. Pentium began to dominate the 1996 PC market as Quake's "minimum viable" software 3D benchmark, shifting devs from CPU raster hacks to hardware offload. Next, GLQuake/Voodoo (1996) hit 60+ FPS by rasterizing on GPUs, birthing the 3D acceleration era. == SD-8516 Emulation Strategy The SD-8516 operates at a GB6 baseline of 70 mips. This implies it has a similar operational power to a 486DX-66. While development is still ongoing, the strategy will be to allow the programmer to control various system modes that allow the "emulation" of various concept systems. Such as the typical 0.5 MIPS, 4k ram, low-res system you might find in 1980. Then we can allow modes that simulate the C64/128 era, which represents the 1 to 2 MHZ, 64k-128k RAM "basic" era. This will also include consoles like the NES and SNES. Finally, we can allow an emulation mode similar to an Amiga 500, 386, or Amiga 1200. This means a semi-advanced workstation; old style, probably not suitable for modern work which requires super-high resolution images and advanced sound processing; but more than good enough to represent most games that are not open-world 3d first person shooters. Next, with some minor graphics acceleration, such as writing commands to a memory mapped javascript game library, we can provide enough acceleration to push operational performance into PS1 and N64 territory. This more than covers the classic era of gaming; We can probably get quake to run decently. And frankly, Quake was really the last great development in gaming, half-life was essentially a kind of quake, and we love hl2 and hl3 for the story. There really does not need to be any further development. However, rewriting in C would blow the lid off performance, allowing dreamcast and gamecube level performance. There's something to that; rewriting the execution loop alone, and processing the image directly in web assembly, javascript can just project the image. C is viable but for all intents and purposes we are far far away from that need. For the forseeable future we need to: - stabilize the ISA - stablilize a kernal - Write a BASIC - INT helper function library - profile instructions and try to get MIPS up to 95-100 The ISA and kernal are essentially stable. I don't see a need to make major changes now. Possisbly some block operations or floating point operations can be added. But the very likely way this will be done henceforth is through the INT library. I like to keep a simple ISA. As for the kernal, we have a basic input system that looks and feels like a typical language machine -- similar to a BASIC terminal or Python command line. Functions can get pulled into the kernal maybe, but right now the main direction forward is to get BASIC up and operational by writing as few INT helper functions as needed. Once we have the BASIC system, video/audio mode switching will be slowly implemented by working on creating environments in various video modes, each of which will attempt to recreate the feel of an era. But, the actual operation will be kept separate, so you can mix and match. it will be beautiful!