Gba


I really don't know why the guys here are not that enthusiastic about GBA, am 100% sure that if it reached a good playability state, the number of those who will buy the GP2X will increase dramtically for this sole reason.
GBA is still being sold all over the world, and it has a great library.
 
Claym99 posted on Oct 15 2006 at 12:33 AM said:
why isn't anybody discussing the recent releases (two this week)?


What releases?
 
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sehs33 posted on Oct 15 2006 at 07:59 AM said:
I really don't know why the guys here are not that enthusiastic about GBA, am 100% sure that if it reached a good playability state, the number of those who will buy the GP2X will increase dramtically for this sole reason.

It's cheaper to buy a GBA + flashcard than a GP2X, so that would be a pretty dumb "sole reason" to buy a GP2X :p
 
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I think he's talking about the new Vba2x released on the archive, but there was no news :(
Anyway, GBA games on GP2X would rock :p

gaterooze posted on Oct 15 2006 at 11:33 AM said:
sehs33 posted on Oct 15 2006 at 07:59 AM said:
I really don't know why the guys here are not that enthusiastic about GBA, am 100% sure that if it reached a good playability state, the number of those who will buy the GP2X will increase dramtically for this sole reason.

It's cheaper to buy a GBA + flashcard than a GP2X, so that would be a pretty dumb "sole reason" to buy a GP2X :p


What about other emulators, DivX & homebrew? Off course if you play ONLY GBA, you're better off buying a GBA, but even then, GP2X will have some advantages (save states, bigger screen) when a fullspeed, compatible GBA emulator will come :ph34r:
Who cares about buying a Sega Nomad with those awesome MD Emulators on GP2X? or GameBoy? GameGear, etc :)
 
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Depends which cartridge you buy for the GBA - the SuperCard supports save states...
 
reiboul posted on Oct 15 2006 at 12:38 PM said:
I think he's talking about the new Vba2x released on the archive, but there was no news :(
Anyway, GBA games on GP2X would rock :p

gaterooze posted on Oct 15 2006 at 11:33 AM said:
sehs33 posted on Oct 15 2006 at 07:59 AM said:
I really don't know why the guys here are not that enthusiastic about GBA, am 100% sure that if it reached a good playability state, the number of those who will buy the GP2X will increase dramtically for this sole reason.

It's cheaper to buy a GBA + flashcard than a GP2X, so that would be a pretty dumb "sole reason" to buy a GP2X :p


What about other emulators, DivX & homebrew? Off course if you play ONLY GBA, you're better off buying a GBA, but even then, GP2X will have some advantages (save states, bigger screen) when a fullspeed, compatible GBA emulator will come :ph34r:
Who cares about buying a Sega Nomad with those awesome MD Emulators on GP2X? or GameBoy? GameGear, etc :)
Finally someone else thinks the same way I do :D
 
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WhizzBang posted on Oct 15 2006 at 11:16 AM said:
Here is a link: http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,1,0,0,5,1304

I just tried it but I only got a black screen. There is no readme in the archive, so I may have set it up wrong.
The latest version expects to be fed the rom from the command line or through something like selector or GMenu. I also had to remove spaces from filenames.
Mario Kart is running at 20 fps at fs2 270MHz and just about playable.
EDIT: Seems to give more like 30fps at fs1, but frame counter gives suspiciously round numbers. Either way, games are playable without sound.
If anyone's stuck, here's my GMenu config file:
Code:
title=vbafs2
icon=/mnt/sd/emulators/nintendo/vba2x/vba.png
exec=/mnt/sd/emulators/nintendo/vba2x/vba
params=[selFullPath] --frameskip=2 --no-auto-frameskip
clock=270
selectordir=/mnt/sd/roms/gba/
selectorfilter=gba
wrapper=true
This is a cracking release and shows great promise!
 
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But the M3 counterpart is a lot more expensive...since we're talking about the cheaper solutions to emulate GBA.
 
I have an M3 and my Mum has supercard. They support saves but not save states. i.e you cant save any time you want like you could on an emulator.

BTW The fps on vba2x is wrong. fps is always 60 at fs 0 30 at fs 1 20 at fs 2 etc. you should look at the number with the percentage sign. I think that tells you how fast its running as compared to a real gba e.g on mine its usually about 50% at 275 MHz. It sometimes goes to 100% in the intro.
If you try changing the fs, the speed doesn't change much.
Turning the sound on or off doesn't change the speed that much either maybe by a few percent.
So I guess the limiting factor is not in the screen draws or sound. I suppose the bottleneck must be in the places where surrounded by #ifdef C_CORE but I don't know enough to do anything about this. People who can actually develop programs would probably find it easy to rewrite those parts in assembly as was done for x86.

The only thing sI changed in the recent updates was
1) to use the upper 32MB for the rom and use the MMU hack which were posted on the wiki. So now a rom >16MB may work. I don't know cause I didn't try. So I don't think there is any speed change unless its because a)I had to reinstall a new toolchain and libraries(ooPo) or b)just because there is more memory left for the rest of linux c) I may have forgotten to turn of profiling and dev features in the previous release

2) remove selector etc cause now I use Gmenu2x. The builtin selector in gmenu2x lets you overclock vba2x very easily.

3)compressed with gpecomp so it takes less space

BTW I am using andlinux for compiling vba2x and I need to have around 768MB of ram for it to compile successfully otherwise gp2x-gcc or g++ crashes at GBA.cpp. Even if it doesn't crash, it takes an hour to compile.
 
pcklee123 posted on Oct 15 2006 at 10:18 AM said:
I have an M3 and my Mum has supercard. They support saves but not save states. i.e you cant save any time you want like you could on an emulator.
Uh, yes they do. In the M3 Game Manager, you have to enable real time saves when you patch the rom for the M3. Otherwise it just does normal saving.
 
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I tested this and if you set frameskip to a high value and disable auto-frameskip (so that it uses that value) it gets a bit of speed.
BTW this emu have problems with special characters in rom names, it's not gmenu2x's fault.
 
how can it be, that from one day to another, are coming so many updates for Vba2x? did someone decided that he will not stop coding unless he achieve near-perfect GBA emulation?? Anyway, many, many thanks to this guy!

Don't be shy, stop coding for a few minutes and take a look on this forum :p
 
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