about GBA emulator :-)


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i read korean emulator developer's article about gba emulator in gpzigi.

he said that his purpose is personal interesting to developing emulator on gp32.

and his wonderswan emulater is no sound but perfectly work! and GBA emulator speed is 20-40 frame.(i don't know about sound)

but many people fight each other for gp32's future. and he also don't want himself to be bad by his work. of cause he consumed a lot of time and power for developing emulator.

so he won't distribute his emulator. and now in gpzigi korean user fight about this topic as well.
i want you know about this story. but i can't translate their text. my english is poor. :(
 
Well, the mere fact that a full speed GBA emu is possible (even if unrealeased) is VERY encouraging. It means that eventually one WILL be released. Whilst I'm sorry that this one will never see the light of day, the fact that it exists is encouraging. That is enough.
 
To emulate GBA you would need someone who is familiar with using Nintendo modes, and then these modes will have to be emulated in software mode, in fact the gba and GP32 are really similar all you would be emulating is the extra instructions that nintendo have included in the hardware. and one hurdle would be the GP32 firmware because i think the GBA has all the firmware stuff in the cartridges.

Correct me if im wrong :D
 
Well, this topic isn't really about how to emulate it, it's more about the morals of emulating a current generation console AND the 'rival' to the GP32 :)

The answer basically is no, but honestly, emulation is sort of like a science, and morals and things get in the way. After all this is Nintendo we're talking about. They have an unfair monopoly on the handheld market much like they once were found to have monopolized the console market. Personally, I would not use such an emulator to pirate games, but carrying around gba games is a pain. There's no carry case that I know of for them except PSX memory card cases. And my case is full of memory cards! (long story)

I know people will say 'nintendo can afford the losses' and 'nintendo are *bleep*ing *bleep*s and so on, but ultimately it's the developers that suffer. That's my opinion. And I know people will disagree. I don't have a problem with that :)

I think the basic fact is you can't avoid the unavoidable. Emulators like UltraHLE proved that. And who knows? Maybe someone will make a GBA emulator then ask for money for it. So even if I don't like it, I still say I'd like to see one. I sure as hell wouldn't want to pay for one though. Not unless if that money went back into Nintendo's pocket!
 
If you did make an emulator, you could sell the technology to people that want a quick way of porting their games to a another arm based console.
 
What would be fantastic would be a port of ultrahle for GP32 :D

And then lik-sang could sell a catridge copier with the emulator so you can tranfer the N64 game you own to your gp32.

But i doubt it possible to emulate N64 <_<
 
Good point, simply emulating GBA games on GP32 would be a good way to make ports for authors. It may sound lazy, but they've done that before to some extent...I think some coders just used Speccy sources on C64's and Amstrad CPC's. Which would be fine, but the Spectrum is very monochromatic and the others usually aren't (but can be). It'd be nice, but I'd rather see the games made for the GP32 specifically...and take advantage of the extra speed and better sound and everything.

I doubt the GP32 could run a N64 emu...I'm no programmer, but I think it might barely handle a few PSX games. I think it's possible to emulate PSX on GP32, without many features and so on...but of course, fitting a cd on a SMC is a bit tricky :)

The GP32 is very powerful for a console, but ultimately I think it's gonna be a bit limited past 2D. You have to remember, compared to a PC, you don't have much fiddly stuff. PC's really struggle cos' they're all made to be backward compatable. I expect my GP32 could outperform my crummy old P166MMX laptop. But then again, it takes 2-3 minutes to load the windows login screen, so I think a GBA could probably outperform it!
 
I just want to put a reign in on the whole hyping up of GP32 thing. :)

Personally I think emulation of the GBA is highly possible if done by an experienced coder.

N64 and PSX... no way. (I can't tell if anybody was being sarcastic or not.. but I feel it must be said! We all know how hype tends to make it around quicker than fact.. :))

Ciao
 
Its not hype its speculative. Anyway the n64 roms would fit on an smc easyliy, but i dont know about the processor of the n64 i think the n64 had a 66mhz 64bit processor that its would probably be possible (as the gp32 is half the bits but twice the speed), maybe if you decrease the quality of the rendering and as most n64 games are 3d you would need some pretty good coding.
 
The N64 needs a 3D accelerator to run decent on a fairly fast PC. The gp32 has nowhere near the graphics or CPU horsepower.

GBA emulation at decent speed is doable. Personally, I haven't seen a lot of GBA games I would want anyway. Most GBA games are, well, childish.

SNES has some interesting games, though.
 
yeah forget about n64 its processor is 94mhz.

and forget about psx as it uses cdroms
 
The typical ratio of Original CPU to the one its being emulated on as minimum speed is 10:1... so an N64 is unlikely to work, as is a PSX... both have CPU speeds that far exceed that ratio. I suppose you might be able to get them to RUN, but I can't imagine either of them ever really PLAYABLE... and certainly not nice to play (i.e. too juttery). An appropriate comparisson might be the running of a SNES emu on a 486 SX 25 - it just wouldn't work ... possibly even the running on a 386 16 MHz. Its not something easily imaginable.
You can't think in terms of "the processor speed of X system is less than the one I've got available, and so it must be able to run on it" - think in terms of "The processor speed is roughly 10x slower than the one I've got available, so stuff should eventually work" - its a much better rule of thumb.
 
Who said anything about playing it? :p

GBA, as was said, doesn't really need much to be done. The GP32 has the same CPU...I dunno if clock speed would be an issue, though...
 
From what I can gather, the two issues for GBA emulation are clock speed (less of one, but still there), and tiling/rotational/"3D" effects possible on GBA; whilst they've got similar ARM processors, the GBA also has some rotational/scaling hardware that the GP32 does not, and its this people have trouble emulating (although its already been proven possible).

Also, I'm slightly concerned about the size of roms - 4 meg ones will definitely work, but 8mb? We've got a total of 8mb of ram, so you couldn't load the emu and the rom into it... and anything over 8mb (if such a game comes out)? Well, it might be doable, but it'd be awkward - e.g. splitting the files in two and loading each section as it was needed type of thing, discarding it when it wasn't. (Actually, with enough sections and a bit of predictive loading, that might be quite fast - but nonetheless)...

I hope it happens :)
 
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