What is the status of Panzer Dragoon Orta emulation on PC? My understanding is the most active Xbox emulation project is Cxbx. @blueshogun96 is/was working on it.
Has Panzer Dragoon Orta emulation progressed at all? I’d love to play this game on a PC one day, along with Smilebit’s other original Xbox games.
Emulation programming is one of the things I would love to get into when I have more time. I actually would love to get the source code for ssf to port that to other devices.
SSF depends on Direct X (Microsoft only technology) if I’m not mistaken. It might be easier to work on improving one of the multiplatform Saturn emulators, such as Yabause. Yabause is open source too, whereas SSF is not.
I just want to see how they are achieving such accuracy in SSF. Porting to another api shouldn’t be as difficult. I will look into Yabause when I get more time.
@Solo_Wing, wow, I haven’t been here in a while, and didn’t know anyone was talking about me! I hope this thread isn’t too old to bump, but I wanted to give you all an answer on this.
Anyway, multiple people besides myself were working on getting Panzer Dragoon (Orta and PD1) working on Cxbx. It’s definitely a nightmare, as for once, it was an Xbox title that was properly programmed as a console game (long story), so with Cxbx’s emulation model, it didn’t translate very well, as the threading model didn’t perform too well on Windows. Even worse, this game only went in game on Windows Vista. XP, Win7, Win8 etc. would all hang. There were many things wrong with Vista, and it’s bugs actually helped a couple of games go in game.
Although I haven’t had the time I once had to work on Xbox emulators, Cxbx is no longer the emulator too look forward to. There’s been a collaberative effort between 3 guys (JayFoxRox from Germany, espes from Australia, and myself from Murica) working on an LLE emulator called XQEmu (based off of QEmu). This was originally started by espes, then he let me hop aboard, and I helped him by giving him my original bios and dashboard. Although he’s done most of the hard work, aside from the necessary bios/dashboard files, I got a couple of games working (Smashing Drive and Sonic Heroes). JayFoxRox got them running more smoothly and fixed many visual bugs and added more missing features. I tried running Panzer Dragoon, but it didn’t do crap. Website: http://xqemu.com/
Long story short, Panzer Dragoon has been a real challenge to emulate. For those who remember Xeon, it was the first emulator to get it running properly, but the speeds were very slow, and that update was never released.
Hopefully this is informative enough to clear things up.
Shogun
Thanks for the update @blueshogun96! Hopefully XQEmu will get better at emulating Orta in the long run.
I’m hoping that Sega will release Panzer Dragoon Orta in HD on Steam at some point and deem emulation unnecessary. It seems the most likely candidate of the Panzer Dragoon games (besides the original Panzer Dragoon which already has a PC version).
One can only hope, but I keep hearing that Sega lost the source code to many games, including Panzer Dragoon (and I’d kill to have the source code to ANY one of those games in the series). Hopefully not ORTA at least. Tbh, this is one game that I’d rather play on a console, although if it were on Steam, I’d still buy it regardless and play the heck out of it. Would also be great if it had extended versions of certain episodes too!
As for PD1, I have issues getting it to run on Windows8. Considering that it was ported over to PC back in '97 (the software rendering version, not the NV1 version), it’s going to be kinda hard to rely on Windows keeping it’s compatibility. That’s one reason why I’d like to see PD1 on mobile. I remember you said that you didn’t like the controls as much as later installments to the series (I haven’t had the privilege to play Zwei and Azel), Given the simple control scheme, I think it would work nicely.
And speaking of that thread, I didn’t realize that you had asked me a question about what API console games tend to use. If you want, I’ll answer that now. 
All Xbox titles use a superset of DirectX which is custom designed for that version of Xbox’s hardware. It usually has the features that standard DirectX should have had the whole time. There is one exception to this, and that is Microsoft’s ANGLE library, which is basically an OpenGL ES wrapper to ease the stress of porting to Direct3D (afaik, it doesn’t officially support Xbox, but it can rather easily). Playstation games, on the other hand use Sony’s custom API, and there’s never a PC equivalent. OpenGL [ES] is typically used for almost everything else that isn’t Windows and isn’t a game console.
Shogun.
I wonder how feasible it would be to import the assets (models, sound, textures etc) from the Saturn Panzer games into a modern game engine such as Unreal Engine 4 or Unity and just recreate the programming side of the game? Even if it were possible, I imagine it would still be a lot of work, but perhaps less work than dealing with the assembly code that Saturn games were written in.
Unless you plan on totally rebuilding the game from the ground up, using a major middleware engine such as UE4 or Unity isn’t really necessary and overkill. A modern PC or console could easily emulate Saturn hardware, and assuming they still have the specs on the asset files, they can import new texture files for things such as buttons.
One interesting solution would be (for PD1 on PC) to run the .exe using a lightweight x86 interpreter like libemu, and emulating the Win32 and DirectDraw/DirectSound functions on a high level (similar to what Cxbx does). Of course, that will be easier said than done because PD1’s resource system is a bit unconventional since they are storing many of their files inside of .dlls, and I never understood how that worked internally. I’m quite convinced that it’s possible, but it will take some time though. I threw the exe into a disassembler, and got a feel for what it’s going to take. Imagine if it worked, and Sega approved it on the iOS and Android app store…
Shogun.