Gp2x - Gba Possible?

[Blah]

IMO GBA was dead the day it came out Suckiest console ever. The only point of even emulating it is for the very few games it had which were good and original.

 

[junker]

despite the whole revolution thing, there is still a big difference between emulating a "dead" machine and a new one. like worldwriter pointed out, newer games make money for their creators, while older ones rarely continue to make much if anything. and the money made from old games being brought back through those retro compilations, etc.. doesn't usually go back to the original guys, anyway.

call it hypocrisy, but you can't deny that there is a difference. this is also the reason some emulators won't load newer games like in the case of the neo geo emulator(forgot which one) that won't allow you to load the new games.

 

[DijiTao]

Copyright law was always suppose to strike a balance between the public domain and content creators, a fact that seems completely forgotten today. Any work should become public domain after a 20 year period, but though what could only be described as bribes to law makers extensions to this 20 year period have been made. Content creators are suppose to enjoy a period of time where they have the exclusive right to distribute there content, not all eternity. Age does make a difference, so it is different to copy a game that came out last week verses one that came out 20 years ago. To say otherwise is asinine.

 

[greenmikey]

IMO GBA was dead the day it came out Suckiest console ever. The only point of even emulating it is for the very few games it had which were good and original.

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Suckiest console..never play virtual boy?

I own one, I personally enjoy it and the headaches that come along with playing. (warning about it every 45 minutes during games). GBA is fun without the traumatized brain.

 

[BBTroll]

The only thing that stops people form emulating another platform is hardware specs.

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And thanks to GPH, we have(or will get)some neat hardware to play with.

 

[Epicenter]

It's possible, but it's going to take a fast emulator and some clever programming, most likely. From what I've seen of VBA on the PC, it's not very fast-- it takes a pretty beefy PC to be able to handle it, so a direct port from its SDL source compiled for the GP2x probably will be quite slow. I wouldn't be surprised if an ASM emulation core had to be written for it to run on the ARM9-- though since it's not a custom or uncommon CPU (just an ARM7) it's very likely one exists already.

There is an emulator or two for the GBA to run on the PocketPC with the XScale series of CPUs, and neither has really come close to full speed even with CPUs around 500-700 MHz (granted, this is perhaps the speed of a 100-200 MHz ARM9 in terms of actual performance), but this is really not an insurmountable feat, and I'm sure that the GBA will be emulated decently sometime within the GP2x's lifespan (though I predict a lot of us will be overclocking our consoles to get away with it.)

The ethics side of it-- the few GBA games I want to play, I'll buy, regardless of what hardware I end up running them on. Honestly, we need an "Ethics and Morality of Emulation Megathread" to keep all this out of technical discussions. In fact, I think I'll start one..

 

[Alpha2]

If you build it, they won't come.

My impression of getting a GBA emulator is that it might happen but it'd look like the videos of the NeoGeoCD emulator assuming we use existing code bashed together to work on the 2X instead of tarting it from scratch, and that's saying what it'll look like 2 years from now, only with sound but still no transparancy.

 

[Minkoff]

From what I've seen of VBA on the PC, it's not very fast-- it takes a pretty beefy PC to be able to handle it

A while back I tested one out with FFTA (which I do own, before you ask) and got around 300 FPS when I didn't throttle it with the emulator. This was on maybe a... 2.8GHz Athalon 64 processor, a Radeon 9600 video card, and 512 MBs of RAM.

 

[Alpha2]

Is it just me or is ther an abundance of fruit this season? ...Apples and Oranges... again.

Athalon, pentium, what does any of that have to do with ARM?

 

[Minkoff]

Nothing, but if there's an emulator that runs well on a PC that's fast, it generally means the people coding the emulators have at least some sort of a grasp on the system, if you know what I mean.

I don't expect GBA on GP2X though... But then, I didn't expect NeoGeo CD either.

Of course we don't know jack until we've got our hands on the thing, but it's always fun to wonder.

 

[Alpha2]

But I mean sure, yay, it runs pretty cool on my WinXP 1.7Ghz Pentium laptop, and boo, my father's Win98 desktop can barelykeep from dropping to frameskip 2, but disscussing it's not exactly going to help a whole lot on the 2X platform so it's kinda pointless to bring the fact up here.

 

[Epicenter]

You can run GBA games in VBA with 0 frameskip and 100% speed, without any graphical or audio degradation, on a measely 600 MHz Celeron with the right settings. You need to adjust roughly 4500 options after you install to get it just right. This is hyperbole of course, exaggeration for comedic effect. The actual figure is 74,000.