![]() ![]() ![]() I announced my early tinkering with JITting back when the project was announced, having been working secretly on it until it was ready for a general showcase.Īnd finally, it's here: The first JIT-enabled Mikage release shipped in February! The translation process doesn't cover the entire ARM instruction set yet, so it will be another couple of weeks until all comercial games benefit from the JIT. ![]() It takes dedicated experimentation and research over several weeks, and then there are still several components that need to be written independently. That said, writing a JIT is a complex undertaking, certainly not something you can pull off in a couple of days and immediately collect fruits of labor from. This method of CPU emulation can provide massive speedups (up to 10x) depending on the situation, so logically I assigned high priority to the JIT on Mikage's roadmap. The big weakness of interpreters is performance: Emulating every 3DS CPU instruction with a C++ function call flat out isn't going to run at great speeds.Ī more performant solution is called Just-In-Time binary translation (commonly abbreviated to JIT in emulation circles), where you disassemble and recompile functions executed by an emulated game to equivalent binary code that can be executed on the target device (i.e. Let's dive right in! AArch64 JIT for super-fast CPU emulationĮvery emulator project has to start somewhere, and in terms of CPU emulation that's usually an interpreter core: Easy to get early results from, with little complexity, and adaptable when surprising hardware behavior is discovered. Retro City Rampage will be releasing on the 3DS eShop this holiday season.We have another update in store, this time with major optimization work going on and of course the obligatory compatibility improvements. While I don’t personally have a 3DS XL, it’s a bit ironic that the game that actually makes me want upgrade is a game that looks like it came straight out of the 80’s. I was able to traverse through the city without issue, have a clearer sense of where my character was in action-packed situations, and pick up on details that I wasn’t able to on the PS3 version of the game, since all the small characters and text are accommodated for the smaller resolution. Having a game that’s supposed to look like it came out on an NES on a lower resolution screen made all the details I mentioned earlier stand out more. It’s no secret that the 3DS doesn’t have a very high screen resolution, but I feel like that actually helps a game like RCR. The main point that I wanted to focus on was how playing it on a 3DS XL impacted my view on the game. You can check out our review of the WiiWare version to get the full rundown of what the game has to offer. It’s a free-roaming sandbox game set in an 8-bit metropolis, and gives you the option of doing the game’s missions to progress the story, or cause your own havoc by random carjacking, murder, getting involved in police chases and more. The game plays exactly as it would on other platforms. After playing it on a 3DS XL, I feel like the game finally found its perfect home. Brian Provinciano, the sole staffer of VBlank Entertainment, recently announced the game would be coming to the 3DS eShop, and had the game on display in Nintendo’s Handheld Lounge at PAX. The high resolution of the Playstation 3 release looked nice, but it was really hard to make out some of the finer details of the game such as text, enemies, NPCs, and other small annoyances. As much as I love the idea of Retro City Rampage, an 80’s style 8-bit homage to Grand Theft Auto, playing the game on a TV was a hassle. ![]()
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