I Know Gba Emulation Wont Be Happening Anytime Soo


essin

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I know GBA emulation wont be happening anytime soon, but I have a question about it nevertheless: Is it be impossible to emulate GBA (not just the old games) even if you have a upgraded GP32, with 180-200 mhz and 32 mb RAM?
Thanks for taking time and answering my perhaps naive question.
 
What i sthe GBA emualtion like though?Thats the whole reason i want to get back into gp32.
 
noone knows at the moment, maybe you can run it with 8mb and >166mhz in the future, but i wont hold my breath
 
gp32boy2 posted on Aug 4 2004 at 03:32 AM said:
What i sthe GBA emualtion like though?Thats the whole reason i want to get back into gp32.
............. Dont buy the gp32 if its because of gba emulation. get a gba and a flash cart.
 
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GBA emulation is possible, as evidenced by GPAdvance. In case you didn't know, it doesn't actually "emulate" the entire GBA console; it lets it partly run directly on the GP32 hardware, which is why it's so fast ATM (some primitive games can run fullspeed without sound at 60Mhz).

GPAdvance still doesn't have any sound, and enf65 says that it would be tricky to do but that he'll try anyway. However, it has a lot of VERY NICE ideas, such as loading only the portions of the game that it needs for games >4mb, which allows some of those games to run (most of GBA's good games, with a few exceptions, are over 4mb).

Also, it's being actively worked on right now. I think there's quite a good chance that we'll get decent speed with sound on it, but really nobody knows for sure... but hey, there is very playable SNES emulation, and many good GBA games are just SNES remakes anyway, so... :D
 
gp32boy2 posted on Aug 4 2004 at 03:32 AM said:
What i sthe GBA emualtion like though?Thats the whole reason i want to get back into gp32.
Like Jr2swiss said, forget GBA. Even if it is possible it may be quite awhile before anything practical comes out of it.

However, there are many other great emus out that make the GP32 worth it.
 
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Esn posted on Aug 4 2004 at 04:59 AM said:
(some primitive games can run fullspeed without sound at 60Mhz).
partially correct, the current version and many before are quite slow, but 1.41 and before was fast as hell, because there wasnt IRQ already implemented.
but this doesnt say that fullspeed gba emulation is not possible, enf65 is only right now working on compability instead of speed, and he may optimize the whole thing when everything runs without gfx bugs or stuff ;)
 
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Yeah - at the minute GBA emulation is at the stage where it is gonna get a lot slower before it starts to get faster again.

As Wolfsclaw says they seem to be adding features to the emu to improve compatibility (and it is becoming compatible quite quickly) but each release gets slower than the last one.

I think it will be a while before they start to optimise the code they have - By then the new gamepark console might be out and that might be able to emulate the GBA okay!
 
I have 1.38 on one of my cards and a copy of MrDriller 2, it´s somewhat playable at 166Mhz, albeit with a frameskip of 5. I must say I still prefer playing mr Driller on my real gba-sp. But the fact that it is playable on the gp32 is a great accomplishment!

If you want to play gba games anytime soon, get a gba.

I am interested in the emulator because of the technical achievement: it´s partially high level emulation running the game code natively on the gp32´s ARM cpu and emulating the gba´s hardware calls with fast routines.
 
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