GameCube Emulator on PowerPC?

[Altemose]

I was doing some Googling on a GameCube emulator for use on PowerPC Macs. Most of the threads I came to were people wondering about the CPU similarities rather than an emulator itself. I found Dolphin but it appears to be Intel only. My little brother will probably be getting my G5 since I upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo iMac but he would love to play some good old GameCube games.

Chime in with any emulators, even ones that are not GameCube specific! Thanks!

 

[MacCubed]

I was doing some Googling on a GameCube emulator for use on PowerPC Macs. Most of the threads I came to were people wondering about the CPU similarities rather than an emulator itself. I found Dolphin but it appears to be Intel only. My little brother will probably be getting my G5 since I upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo iMac but he would love to play some good old GameCube games.

Chime in with any emulators, even ones that are not GameCube specific! Thanks!

I dont think that there are any GameCube ones, sadly. But I do have VBA for GameBoy working on my G4.

 

[Intell]

None exist. However, a specially designed one would offer near perfect performance with a powerful ATI video card and be difficult to make.

 

[Altemose]

I was hoping that Dolphin had an old version that was PPC compatible, but unfortunately they don't.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Chime in with any emulators, even ones that are not GameCube specific! Thanks!

I'm not big on gaming but Snes9x is a great Nintendo emulator:

http://www.zophar.net/macintosh/snes/snes9x.html

Also there's Boxer for playing PC DOS games:

http://boxerapp.com/

And the Big E-UAE for emulating the mighty Amiga which is still being developed for PowerPC:

http://euaejit.blogspot.co.uk/

 

[ptdebate]

IIRC the Gamecube's CPU is basically a G3. Why this has not happened yet eludes me. You could basically put together a beefed up dev kit by using the appropriate ATI card. I'd imagine a G5 would offer the potential to upscale graphics to HD.

 

[LOLZpersonok]

IIRC the Gamecube's CPU is basically a G3. Why this has not happened yet eludes me. You could basically put together a beefed up dev kit by using the appropriate ATI card. I'd imagine a G5 would offer the potential to upscale graphics to HD.

I know that this reply is coming late in this thread's life span, but I just could not resist replying anyways.

The GameCube's processor is based upon the PowerPC 750CXe, which was used in the last iMac G3s and several iBook G3s. The GameCube's processor (Gekko) has 50 additional instructions compared to the 750CXe, and its floating point unit is a little different from the 750CXe, even having some SIMD support.

Based on what I know about emulation, I think it would take a much more recent G3 Mac, perhaps one of those iBooks with the faster processors, or maybe even a G4. Probably because the Gekko has some features the regular 750CXe doesn't have a more powerful PowerPC processor would be required. I wonder if one could scale an emulator across multiple PowerPC processors, like the dual CPU G4s and the dual/quad G5s. That would certainly help things along.

In the past, I've also thought about emulating Apple PowerPC software on devices like the Xbox 360. It would take a lot of technical expertise and black magic to make that work.

 

[franklyn]

Hi there sorry for replying to an old thread I have some questions about using the Gcube Emulator on macOS. I'm using this emulator for a half year but in the past 4-5 days when I first start the emulator I got a black screen on my PC. I go to the task manager, shut down the emulator, and then restart it again and it's working normally. Why the emulator on the first start every time give me a black screen?