Gp32 Emulation


DTH

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Hey,

Will gp32_console GP32 emulation be possible? As I recall there where some very good commercial games for it.
 
There were very few truly good commercial games for GP32 IMO. Off the top of my head... Her Knights, Super Plusha and Pinball Dreams. Everything else was pretty mediocre or just plain bad, to be honest.

But there were plenty of good emus and homebrew - and those things could be ported to Pandora.
 
And many of them won't be because the coders who made them have long since vanished from the community. All those games by Akuma No Houkon, for starters. And Gloop. And rather a few more at a quick glance through the archives, although I must admit, the number of Connect-4 clones is surprising, and not especially desirable unless some of them have *really* good AI.

I'm *still* hoping Spot makes it to the Pandora, and in a complete state, though I'm guessing that won't be the first thing on Squidge's mind at the moment.
 
Prophet said:
There were very few truly good commercial games for GP32 IMO. Off the top of my head... Her Knights, Super Plusha and Pinball Dreams. Everything else was pretty mediocre or just plain bad, to be honest.
No Astonishia Story?

Not that I ever played it, just thought that that was the biggest name.
 
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If you spoke Korean, there were certainly a couple more of note - most obviously Astonisha Story and Mill.

There was also Blue Angelo, although the dialogue in that was pretty abysmal. Gameplay was good, though.

But tbh, my interest in GP32 emulation is twofold:

First: There's some *amazing* homebrew for it.

Second: If it can be done using a stupidly efficient base of emulation (which seems to be how Spot works, just incompletely), then it is *conceivable* (but no more than) that GP32 emulators may be of use, seeing as they often ran far more efficiently than their 2x counterparts (i.e. often near fullspeed at ~133MHz, and in one case, at 66MHz, iirc). I don't hold out much hope for this, however... the method by which GP32 programs were run would have to be, as mentioned, ridiculously efficient to the point of silliness. Which is just silly.
 
Hiroe said:
maybe we can have a compatibility layer, like wine. it's not an emulator
That's usually a lot of work and probably not worthed. A convenience library for quick porting might be useful though.
 
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Commercial GP32 games had some kind of DRM that locked the game to the internal serial number of your unit. Breaking it is probably not that difficult, but it is a felony on many countries. Not that it is likely to ever be an issue, but is it really worth it for a handful of mediocre (at best) games? I bought Little Wizards and Die Hard With Infinite Stairs, and neither of them were spectacular.

Most homebrew titles will port with little trouble. That is probably good enough.
 
shmuck said:
Prophet said:
There were very few truly good commercial games for GP32 IMO. Off the top of my head... Her Knights, Super Plusha and Pinball Dreams. Everything else was pretty mediocre or just plain bad, to be honest.
No Astonishia Story?

Not that I ever played it, just thought that that was the biggest name.

It got ported to PSP and wasn't reviewed very well. I don't know that it's worth having a GP32 emu to play it.
 
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Tobriand said:
I'm *still* hoping Spot makes it to the Pandora, and in a complete state, though I'm guessing that won't be the first thing on Squidge's mind at the moment.
Not going to happen I'm afraid, to make the gp32 run fast, we need to run arm code directly, but the gp32 does too much hardware hacking for that to work properly. Disabling the caching would make it work, but would also mean it being too slow.
 
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Squidge said:
Tobriand said:
I'm *still* hoping Spot makes it to the Pandora, and in a complete state, though I'm guessing that won't be the first thing on Squidge's mind at the moment.
Not going to happen I'm afraid, to make the gp32 run fast, we need to run arm code directly, but the gp32 does too much hardware hacking for that to work properly. Disabling the caching would make it work, but would also mean it being too slow.


What's the problem exactly? GP32 and Pandora both have the same L1 cache configurations, and it seems unlikely that most apps would get away with flushing L1 indirectly or accidentally, meaning you should be able to catch the L1 clears and propagate them to L2. And of course supervisor level stuff should be trappable (thanks Trustzone) and hardware devices caught/emulated.

Not saying there wouldn't be problems, but since you were pretty certain about Spot earlier I'd like to know exactly what you're referring to.
 
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I've not played with it for a good while now, but I seem to recall that the problem was that it loaded an app from smc, unpacked it and then jumped to a location to execute it. It then hit an illegal instruction even though the code at that address was perfectly valid - I can only assume that what was in memory wasn't what was in the i-cache for that address for some reason.
 
I think Akuma No Houkon was kicking about last year and got or at least considering a GP2X. Haven't heard much since then.
 
yaustar said:
I think Akuma No Houkon was kicking about last year and got or at least considering a GP2X. Haven't heard much since then.
He ported all his GP32 games to GP2X and from what I understand adapted them to use SDL. He also mentioned something about a new game he's got in the works :)
 
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The Blue Angelo websites are still up. One of them even has a "2008" date. I guess they're planning something or other? :unsure:

It would be neat if they made it a downloadable commercial release for the Pandora.
 
Ok - well what about a GP2X emu / compatibility layer? Or is that pretty much the same thing / problems?

You know, reading this thread does not inspire a lot of hope in the Pandora. If the system that started it all didn't produce much of anything... You know what I'm saying?
 
chad78 said:
Ok - well what about a GP2X emu / compatibility layer? Or is that pretty much the same thing / problems?

You know, reading this thread does not inspire a lot of hope in the Pandora. If the system that started it all didn't produce much of anything... You know what I'm saying?
Oh the system that started it all produced a hell of a lot - both in emulators and homebrew.

The thing is, the vast majority of that stuff ended up on the GP2x because it got ported over by the coders that made the transition (though there are still anomalies, and a fair few at that). The presumption is that the same thing will happen for Pandora.

So it's not a matter of there not being much material. It's just material that we probably would get, for the most part, anyway, without needing to emulate the system. It's just that some of them, we wouldn't (which is where an emulator would be nice).

Incidentally, I suspect that whilst a compatibility layer might be possible for programs that don't make use of the GP2x-specific hardware, it would be more problematic (I'd expect realistically impossible, but I don't know) for that which does. I'm thinking the blitter, the scaler, and the second processor in particular.

EDIT: Another thought: much of the really good homebrew for both GP32 and GP2x has been done in Fenix. That, of course, doesn't really even need porting, once Fenix itself has been ported, although tweaking is good.
 
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chad78 said:
You know, reading this thread does not inspire a lot of hope in the Pandora. If the system that started it all didn't produce much of anything... You know what I'm saying?
All the really great programs for the GP32 are either ports or original homebrew. t would be easier to port them over to the Pandora than to try to emulate the GP32 itself.

The only programs you can't port are the commercial games. These were less than 2 dozen of them, and they were not terribly impressive. If you poke around various P2P networks you can probably find most if not all of them with the DRM removed. You can play them on the win/linux GP32 emulator called GeePee32.

Who knows, maybe Firefly will port GeePee32 to Pandora (or at least open up the source).
 
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Maybe somebody could clarify something for me.

There have been a number of people talking up ARM architecture on this board as being just, really spiffy. What I'm seeing here though is that it seems that every single platform requires its own set of specially customized software. Is that correct?

Naturally, I expect that any software designed to take advantage of platform-specific features (the GP2X's dual processors, for example) would have to be reconfigured, but is it out of the question to expect something more generic, but that was written for Linux on an ARM, to run without modification?

If, for example, I were to try to install an MP3 player binary that was originally written for a Zaurus, could I expect that to work?
 
shmuck said:
If, for example, I were to try to install an MP3 player binary that was originally written for a Zaurus, could I expect that to work?
No. The cpu is not the only thing that's platform-specific.

Binary compatibility is hard to achieve and mostly useless in the embedded world (where specialisation of software is sometimes needed). Source compatibility, possible (changes usually are required).
 
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