Gp Advance Become Open Source

[diablo2]

rocking
now the gba emu will come together much much faster

 

[c0ncept]

there's not really THAT much on the GBA that I want, though there are a few top notch RPG's to look forward to. Though I will be VERY interested to see this project complete, just as a intellectual exercise...

 

[Phil]

golden sun would be nice to see running as its a fantastic game with great combat.

 

[mattmagoo]

and the new Metal SLug

 

[WhiteFalcon]

Are any parts of the emu in asm? With the great Cyclone 68000 core in asm and (if it is true) the Z80 core in asm it would not be a bad idea to put the sources/modules on a single site so a collection of asm emulators of different chips could be build. Then anyone who wants to make an emu could use the optimalized emulators of chipsets his desired system contains.

 

[Squidge]

The GBA runs on an ARM processor the same as the GP32, so the emulator runs the code natively. Interrupting it check for access to the graphics chips etc.

 

[kai123]

What about ram limits? Some games won't be playable at all I would imagine.

 

[Squidge]

4mb and under games should be playable. It'll just be the 8mb ones that will not be playable.

 

[fdave]

However, i would have paid a LOT of money for a real good running GBA Emu...  :rolleyes:

why?

I don't see what the fuss is, if you want to play gba then buy one, the original units must be dirt cheap by now

Well, clearly they want to pirate games, since a real GBA is smaller than a GP32.
Nintendo's lawyers are going to have a field day...!

>they are, but the flash linkers are still expensive, and a gp32 emu would do away with the flash linker part.

And of course don't forget the 'paying money to legitimate developers' bit

Honestly, if you are going to pirate games, at least have the decency to *call* it piracy! It's like everyone on this and the Zodiac board thinks it's their moral right to rip off all Nintendo's games. The Zodiac even has it written into it's design from what I can tell.

Makes you wonder if when you get the Zodiac box there's a little sticker on it saying "Plays thousands of pirated GBA games*! Never buy another cartridge from Nintendo again!", and at the bottom "(* Pending results of litigation...)"

Right, I'm just off to try the next PicoDrive for Nokia 6600 (just call me 'slightly hypocritical but wannabe moral Dave'...)

 

[Squidge]

I think of it more of a "being able to play future GBA games before they are released so you know which games to buy", but hey, that's just me

 

[The Moose]

What about ram limits? Some games won't be playable at all I would imagine.

I thought this problem was fixed through "dynamic rom loading" Or at least, I thought it was said it could be fixed.

 

[Tobriand]

"Dynamic loading" is suggested as a possible solution. Whether it would actually be fast enough is completely unknown, though...

 

[craigix]

For me it isn't about piracy at all, hell i have enough blank carts if i wanted to do that, it is 100% an impressive technical achievement which i'd like to see working.

-Craig

www.gbax.com

 

[ShenFlare]

i still have my flash advance extreme linker for sale... lol

 

[diablo2]

what exactly is dynamic loading?

 

[Tobriand]

Basically, getting round memory issues by loading some of what you need, and then when something else is needed, unload what's currently in memory to whatever storage device you're using (in our case, the SMC) and load in the next bit.

Personally, I doubt it'll work very well, but we'll see

 

[Akuma no Houkon]

Basically, getting round memory issues by loading some of what you need, and then when something else is needed, unload what's currently in memory to whatever storage device you're using (in our case, the SMC) and load in the next bit.

Personally, I doubt it'll work very well, but we'll see

The problem there is, there is no way to tell what each individual rom needs at any given time. Dynamic loading is great and all when its programed into each game, but when game was designed to have access to everything at any point in time, there is no way you can dynamically load that. Its not like an MP3 or AVI where there is a linear progression of data, where each byte comes after the next. Its very very different.

 

[Tobriand]

Which is why it probablyt wouldn't work, however much its suggested as a solution. Which is a shame.

Though presumably it would be possible, if exceeding hard a thousandfold, to take an individual game, use an emu with a debugger to find out which bits of the rom were in use at any one time, find something that would effectively act as a counter, and then unload/load when it ticked. But that would be a little useless; it'd be easier to port the game. And you'd, I imagine, have to do it with every game you wanted to play. Which kind of defeats a lot of the point...

Personally, I reckon if this works for 4Mb roms, I'll try and get the 32mb upgrade done and see if anyone releases a patched 32m version. Coz that'd be sweet .

 

[declaration]

Personally, I reckon if this works for 4Mb roms, I'll try and get the 32mb upgrade done and see if anyone releases a patched 32m version. Coz that'd be sweet .

i asked the author if he had any plans to support the ram upgrade in the EMU and he replied "Yeah, I could do that.", so you may not need a patched version at all.

 

[Tobriand]

Nice... like I say - this would drive me to get a 32mb upgrade....

Well, this and possibly GPLinux, if it turns out we need more than 8 in order to do anything decent on it in due course...