[mathew_m]

How hard would it be to engineer a GameCube emulator to run under OS X? Doesn't the GC run on a PowerPC?

Because the Mac market is so small I don't see how this would much effect the console itself. We all know that it's the software that makes the money and the hardware is a loss leader.

Apple needs content gamers ( year old PC ports are so stale) and I believe Nintendo porting the likes of Zelda and Super Mario would be the ticket.

Jobs pulled a major coup with the record companies with the iTunes store. Why shouldn't the software market be any different?

You might ask why I don't just buy a GC. Well it is another $150 that I can save and honostly I'd rather play games on my nice 17" iMac display than on a tv.

[snerdini]

If you're talking about running the GC discs on a Mac, there will be one big disadvantage. They won't work in any slot-loading machine, since they aren't standard size...

Plus, if I remember right, Nintendo designed their DVD reader to actually spin backwards, to help avoid piracy.

[mathew_m]

Actually I was just thinking of porting the games in the standard CD/DVD format. Unfortunately you're right that the piracy issue would be the biggest stumbling block in this venture.

Oh well I guess we'll just have to wait for the bootleg emulator..

[buffalolee]

Originally posted by mathew_m:
Actually I was just thinking of porting the games in the standard CD/DVD format. Unfortunately you're right that the piracy issue would be the biggest stumbling block in this venture.

Oh well I guess we'll just have to wait for the bootleg emulator..

I believe the antipiracy is what is leading to Nintendo's downfall.

1. The lack of DVD player hurts it sales. I would rather spend a little more money to get the DVD player function.

2. Because of the spinning backwards, its global sales are quite low. In the Asia markets, piracy may run rampant but the PS2 is the only Playstation to get. Nobody buys Nintendo in the Asian markets unless you want that "one game" to play.

[peppering]

Originally posted by buffalolee:
1. The lack of DVD player hurts it sales. I would rather spend a little more money to get the DVD player function.

Nintendo doesn't want a DVD player put into their system because the GameCube is for playing games not watching your movies. Anyway you can just get a Panasonic-Q if you really want to watch DVDs on your GCN.

[redJag]

Originally posted by peppering:
Nintendo doesn't want a DVD player put into their system because the GameCube is for playing games not watching your movies. Anyway you can just get a Panasonic-Q if you really want to watch DVDs on your GCN.

It would be stupid for Nintendo to not want a DVD player in their system. Nintendo only wants the anti-piracy aspect, which is foolish to begin with. If they put a regular DVD player in there, piracy would be easier, but their system would be more popular. The average person doesn't pirate video games. $$$ Factor in the fact that those that would normally pirate *will* no matter what measures you take, and more system sales = more game sales.

They don't want you to be able to watch DVDs? Of course! Why would they want to sell something that was more useful? Anyway, if you really want to watch DVDs get an xbox or PS2, and play the better games, too (I acknowledge there are good games on the gamecube..)

[Beer Penguin]

The day a Macintosh computer can run a Gamecube game at more than 3fps will probably not occur until around 2010 at this rate.

[mishap]

piracy is big business...especially over seas. Gamecube has no popularity over there...because you cant pirate the discs. I think other companies will adopt similar ways of protecting their games in the future.

Why would nintendo want to boost the popularity of their system (using DVD--and also boost piracy) when they probably make most of their money off their games.

Putting effort in developing games for the mac is such a lost cause.

Mac games just wont move units.

[mathew_m]

Really I was hoping for some more intelligent comments regarding the possiblility of porting GC games to the Mac because they use a similar hardware architecture.

I found some good info over here:
http://pub2.ezboard.com/fglobalgamer...picID=67.topic

for the Gamecube, my personal favourite gaming console, it possesses an IBM PowerPC architecture at the task speed of 405Mhz. Essentially, this is a modified version of the PowerPC 7450 chipset, the heart of the Macintosh G4. That said, I do not forsee a Gamecube emulator soon. In theory, and I state this loosely, it would be possible to design a Gamecube emulator under the Macintosh hardware environment with brute force assembly programming. OS X would the minimum OS requirement."

With Jobs cooperating with the recording studios with the iTunes store I just thought he might also have the moxi to pull it off with a company like Nintendo.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by mathew_m:
Really I was hoping for some more intelligent comments regarding the possiblility of porting GC games to the Mac because they use a similar hardware architecture.

...

With Jobs cooperating with the recording studios with the iTunes store I just thought he might also have the moxi to pull it off with
a company like Nintendo.

Well, when you post a rumor what you get is speculation and rarely more than that - take it for what it's worth.

Anyway, just because the GC uses a PowerPC doesn't mean porting should be straightforward. Besides the media issue already mentioned, the GC will have specialized 3D hardware that would be difficult to reverse engineer (in the true sense of the term, not the "steal it" sense), and even then performance would be an issue.

[mathew_m]

uhhh...so you're speculating on the difficulty of porting? Do you know anything about this 'reverse engineering'?

Never mind I should of posted this over on another forum. Too many cynics here.

[blizzard]

Dude, you're getting some straight answers here...the fact that they're not what you would like to hear doesn't make them any less valid.

I don't think your idea would fly anyhow - I mean, if Nintendo games are doing such a poor job of moving two hundred dollar GameCubes, they CERTAINLY won't move two thousand dollar Power Macs. And I've never thought of console games and computer games as being all that similar either - I mean, I wouldn't buy a console to play WarCraft 3, and I wouldn't buy a computer to play Super Mario Brothers. The only argument you could come up with for the games being similar would be for the XBox, and that's mainly because it was designed from the get-go to make it easy to develop for both PC and XBox. The same parallel doesn't exist between Mac OS X and the GameCube.

Finally, I doubt that Mac hardware is fast enough to do justice to GameCube games. You can argue that with the Power Mac G5 (or whatever) coming out soon, Mac hardware WILL have caught up to the point where it is possible...but if the original point you were making was that the hardware was similar to being with, then Macs making the step to 64-bit processing might actually nullify some of that advantage.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no expert...just explaining why I doubt the idea would fly from my admittedly limited knowledge of hardware and politics.

[absmiths]

Originally posted by mathew_m:
uhhh...so you're speculating on the difficulty of porting? Do you know anything about this 'reverse engineering'?

Never mind I should of posted this over on another forum. Too many cynics here.

Man, you've got issues. Yes, I understand about reverse engineering, and I understand about hardware emulation. That aside, you asked for speculation and you got it (as I sepcifically pointed out in my post - I was criticizing your attitude not the quality of the responses).

You remind me of people who view a forum as their own little group of worker bees rather than a place where people voluntarily go to engage in discussions.

Besides, there are already loads of emulated games (including all the PC games which run in VPC and the Playstation games in Game Station) and I haven't ever seen a single one of them used as an argument for buying a Mac.

[P]

The CPU is a PPC, it's essentially a G3 with some extra instructions IIRC. That's sort of beside the point though, because you need to emulate the GPU. The GPU was designed by Art-X, which is now owned by ATI. A recent Radeon is supposedly similar, though that's only loose rumors. The memory subsystem is also special - it uses something called 1T-SRAM, which is supposedly as fast as SRAM (used in L3 caches). Matching this with the DRAM of a Mac (or PC) is all but impossible, so you have to have a very fast CPU/GPU to make up for that.

[angelmb]

it possesses an IBM PowerPC architecture at the task speed of 405Mhz

GAMECUBE PowerPC CPU runs at 485 Mhz