'Username' said:
Why is VBA so inefficient? That's the one I have always used.
According to the Wikipedia, their latest release was nearly 5 years ago.
Good news, though, there was a beta 4 years ago.
VBA-M is much more recent than that.
But this doesn't really mean anything. If anything, I'd expect an emulator done 5 years ago to be more efficient, out of necessity to work well on 5 year old hardware. And VBA was, IMO, a more than sufficient GBA emulator 6 years ago.
'lulzfish' said:
It's probably just a regular interpreter emulator. It's effective, and most computer have the strength to do it without much trouble, but it's hardly efficient.
Maybe one with a dynamic recompiler will work better, as these are supposed to be several times faster.
gpSP has a dynamic recompiler, and it is much faster. There are other major factors though - the biggest being the renderer. VBA's renderer is very straightforward, while gpSP's is heavily case-expanded and uses a lot of special formatting and caching and little tricks and what have you to improve typical performance (I'd say it's at least 5x faster than VBA's). There are some other things, such as the way DMA is handled (again, gpSP uses a much more case-optimized system, although the one I have in my codebase now is totally different from the one being used in existing builds out there...)
