GBA Emulator Development

[old_macdonald]

EDIT BY: old_macdonald ::: IMPORTANT!!! : THERE IS NOT GOING TO BE AN EMULATOR! IM SORRY EVERYBODY MEEBE L8R!

If enough people support me i will begin coding/porting it straight away!!

Although i will need alot of help coz i can't code assembly. :unsure:

thanx! :lol:

 

[jlebrech]

GP32 and not PG32,

Do you know the gba's hardware good enough to be able to emulate it?

 

[Tobriand]

Certainly give it a shot - if it turns out waaaay too difficult, then you can always drop the project before it works.

I would say that I'd help, except I can't code, so I wouldn't be much use...

 

[Rigor Mortis]

Dude, if you could get a GBA emulator running at 100% speed (no sound emulation and a small frameskip would be just fine if necessary), I would pay money for it.

 

[old_macdonald]

Im sorry it's GP32 not PG32 just a typo.

Edit : Moderated : Typo corrected

 

[coltxL2717]

i would like gba emulation but i wouldnt kill for it. i mean i got my gp32 cuz of the homebrew, emus and the movies not to mention mp3's. i dont mean to discourage you but hey if u wanna do it go or it and GOT SPEED!!!!!!!!

 

[zboy9]

A GBA emu would be GREAT!! Only thing is the roms would be bigger than your traditional homebrew ones, so you couldn't fit as much as you could if the games were smaller.

 

[Rattboi]

yo,

I suppose you could try to port a gba emu, but don't get ahead of yourself. If you don't have any experience with writing emus, then this is an especially hard one to start with. Most people don't understand the technical side of things, but the feasibility of a GBA emu on GP32 is pretty slim, especially without assembly coding it.

Anyways, good luck if you try.

Maybe you should try gameboy instead (we still don't have a great gameboy emu).

 

[rcx21000]

I'll help, but since I don't know ASM I can't be much help.

 

[Swiss_Cheeseman]

This is an impossible project, at least impossible to get any practical use from. Most GBA roms are 8mb +, and the gp32 only has 8mb ram, which leaves no room for the emulator, or emulated GBA ram.

 

[abbibi]

perhaps design it so it treats the smart media card like virtual ram....

 

[stickofjoy]

This is an impossible project, at least impossible to get any practical use from. Most GBA roms are 8mb +, and the gp32 only has 8mb ram, which leaves no room for the emulator, or emulated GBA ram.

I'm afraid you're wrong! most GBA games are 8 Megabits and the GP32 has 8 MegaBytes. if my calculations are correct you can fit 8 GBA games at that size into the GP32 physical memory.

 

[Vanamonde]

This is an impossible project, at least impossible to get any practical use from. Most GBA roms are 8mb +, and the gp32 only has 8mb ram, which leaves no room for the emulator, or emulated GBA ram.

You are confusing ROM size with RAM size. I would suggest you look for GBA specs on the internet as you will find that the GBA has a small amount of RAM (compared to the GP32). From one source about GBA specs:

The device offers 32 kilobytes of Window Random Access Memory (WRAM) and 96 kilobytes of Video RAM (VRAM). It also has 256 kilobytes of external WRAM.



The only problem would be the relatively slow read speed of the SMC card compared to reading from ROM, maybe using partof the GP32's memory as cache could solve this...

 

[mafen]

The problem is that you have to load the emulator into ram as well. So most likely, only about 4 megs give or take 1 meg would fit into memory. If the data pages from the rom needed by the emulator is not in memory when it is needed, then loading the data into memory would take way too long, thus the emulation would be incredibly slow. That's why there are problems for snes roms over 4 megs as well.

 

[zboy9]

rom, ram......interesting

 

[abbibi]

For the laymen out there: ROM is READ ONLY MEMORY, and even though you can write to the SMC's, they are basically read only during gameplay. And they don't read as quickly as GBA advance cartridges do. So in order to emulate a GBA game, you'd have to take more of the game off of the ROM (card) and hold it in the RAM to maintain accurate gameplay. RAM is RANDOM ACCESS MEMORY, meaning it can quickly write/erase information to itself. NOTE: SMC's, flash cards, and other game cartridges aren't actually ROMs, they're EPROMs. Meaning ERASABLE PROGRAMMABLE READ ONLY MEMORY, and you can guess what that means.

On with the suggestions: Most games are fairly segmented: Opening sequence, menus, actual gameplay, separate levels/stages, and cut-scenes. If the emulator was designed to only load one segment of the game at a time into RAM, there would be plenty of space left to be used for increasing the quality of the emulation. This MIGHT mean that the emulator will have to be programmed with specific segment data for each game you want it emulate (so the file size might get a little big), but I think we all agree that's a worthy sacrifice to get a perfectly smooth emulator. Besides, it wouldn't take long to increase it's library of supported games, and would guarantee the game's would run perfectly in the emulation.

 

[sassdouille]

perhaps we could cut the rom ourselves on the computer, cose who cares about the opening or anything else? what matters is the part with the game, then we would have a smaller rom then it could be cool for the emulator, i think its better this way, cose asking the soft to split would be very hard for him, since the cut r not at the same place in different game. So we would have to "cut" the rom ourselves to use it in the emulator. we could then make some release of the "cutted" roms. wouldn't that be possible?

 

[abbibi]

Well, the roms aren't too big to begin with, but I agree cutting those annoying opening animations would be a blessing. I don't know how to do this myself. But I personnally don't want to lose any of the the in-game experience. Remember, if a "complete" GBA emulator is successfully made, the popularity for the GP32 would skyrocket (I know the mere possibility helped convince me to buy my unit). I think it would be better to leave the ROMs untouched, and instead program that into the emulator itself. Or perhaps program a "compiler" program for the PC that will convert the ROMs into the form you're suggesting. Maybe even convert the sounds and animations to GP32 formats.

I think the concept-building is on a roll. Now all we need are some programmers...

 

[sassdouille]

yes i guess it's a good idea, but sorry i can only give prog idea, but i can't prog myself. too bad

 

[mafen]

that would of course mean that coder who is writing the emulator would need to know how the roms are being cut. There would have to be a standard developed which is too hard to create unless the coder himself created that standard. That would them leave the coder to determine what sections of the rom are safe to "cut". Doing this for each game would be way too tedious given the amount of games out there for the gba. If one was to get started on this project, he should consult the people who have tried working on the project already to see what the main difficulties were and what were their ideas on how to get a faster emulator.