ZodTTD: iPhone 3GS – Call it a comeback!
Hi everyone!
I’ve been laying low for a long time now. But I am back and coming full steam ahead!
I just received my iPhone 3GS, and to many it may seem like a rediculous upgrade…But wait til you see this video!
You see, the iPhone 3GS has had a large upgrade in the performance department. It’s very powerful CPU and GPU, its guts are very similar to the OpenPandora.org’s Pandora project. They both have an ARM Cortex A8 processor, and they both have the PowerVR SGX video chipset. The iPhone 3GS clocks in at 600MHz too!
These similarities have me quite excited! While working with my Pandora MK2 devkit I have made psx4pandora, which has many games running fullspeed (60 FPS for NTSC) with sound @ 500MHz. The iPhone 3GS sounds suited for psx4iphone now!
The catch? There’s currently no jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS.
The temporary solution? I’m codesigning my emulator binaries for my own use.
The result is shown in the video below where you can see gpSPhone running at a minimum 150 FPS and maxing out at about 225 FPS, with sound and 0 frameskip! This is a HUGE performance increase where the iPhone 3G needed frameskipping just to reach 60 FPS!
Some technical notes on this build: For some reason gpSPhone is able to fit the dynarec memory it uses in executable memory. So I lucked out and was able to get the dynarec working on the iPhone 3GS without a jailbreak. I’m curious as to why this can even occur. Typically you need a jailbroken firmware to allow memory to be made executable for dynarecs to work. I’ll have to see if psx4iphone will work next!
This is an exciting moment for iPhone gaming! Subscribe to my YouTube channel and discuss below!
Thanks,
ZodTTD
Via Zodttd blog