I'm Looking For A Gba Emulator Without Blurry Upscaling

[Esn]

The GBA's screen resolution is 240x160. If each pixel is tripled, this is 720x480, which should fit almost perfectly into the Pandora's 800x480 resolution.

However, neither gpSP nor VisualBoyAdvance seem to have an option for that; instead, the price of making your games fullscreen is to make all of the pixels blurry.

Is there something I've missed, maybe? Or is there some other emulator that would allow me to have pixel-perfect upscaling?

 

[sebt3]

change the filter, there is an option somewher in the system setting for that (not inside gpsp, but gpsp will use that setting)

 

[DaveC]

The GBA's screen resolution is 240x160. If each pixel is tripled, this is 720x480, which should fit almost perfectly into the Pandora's 800x480 resolution.

However, neither gpSP nor VisualBoyAdvance seem to have an option for that; instead, the price of making your games fullscreen is to make all of the pixels blurry.

Is there something I've missed, maybe? Or is there some other emulator that would allow me to have pixel-perfect upscaling?

No such luck.

The sad fact is that due to the lack of development there really isn't a decent GBA emu for the Pandora. gpSP is the best we have and that is not native and doesn't look like it will be (Exophase said he has no interest in porting it, and others have tried and failed).

So no it is nothing that you have missed, it is just a result of too few Pandora's in dev hands.

I am no fan of the blurr filters either. Ginge has it set and you can't get rid of it without some hacking around. If you search there is some kind of script to shut off the FIR filter in Ginge but I don't remember where it was. Even then gpSP renders to a target resolution of 320 x 240 so no luck in pixel tripling anyway. You still get an ugly fractional scale (or a post stamp sized image).

 

[Prometheus]

There is no hacking around necessary to disable the blur-filters.

To disable them, paste the following into a terminal (this must be done each time the Pandora is booted currently, but I seem to recall that an option to set this permanently was due to be included in Hotfix 5)...

sudo /usr/pandora/scripts/op_videofir.sh none

... And then hit Enter. This will be saved in your terminal history, so when you need to use it again, all you'll need to do is open a terminal, hit up on the d-pad and hit enter the next time it's required.

Obviously, this won't be necessary after the ability to set this as a user preference is available, but for now it does its job.

 

[soulanger]

There is no hacking around necessary to disable the blur-filters.

To disable them, paste the following into a terminal (this must be done each time the Pandora is booted currently, but I seem to recall that an option to set this permanently was due to be included in Hotfix 5)...

sudo /usr/pandora/scripts/op_videofir.sh none

... And then hit Enter. This will be saved in your terminal history, so when you need to use it again, all you'll need to do is open a terminal, hit up on the d-pad and hit enter the next time it's required.

Obviously, this won't be necessary after the ability to set this as a user preference is available, but for now it does its job.

Or go to Accessories > LCD-Settings > Select current video filter > Simple pixel doubling (no filter)

 

[Esn]

There is no hacking around necessary to disable the blur-filters.

To disable them, paste the following into a terminal (this must be done each time the Pandora is booted currently, but I seem to recall that an option to set this permanently was due to be included in Hotfix 5)...

sudo /usr/pandora/scripts/op_videofir.sh none

... And then hit Enter. This will be saved in your terminal history, so when you need to use it again, all you'll need to do is open a terminal, hit up on the d-pad and hit enter the next time it's required.

Obviously, this won't be necessary after the ability to set this as a user preference is available, but for now it does its job.

Or go to Accessories > LCD-Settings > Select current video filter > Simple pixel doubling (no filter)

I don't have anything like that. All I have in LCD settings is brightness and gamma. Are you using HF5, maybe? I'm on the "stable" HF4.

Anyway, I'll try the terminal method for now.

EDIT: the terminal method seems to make it a bit less blurry, but the problem is that the emulator gpsp doesn't actually stretch it to 3x, but to something like 2.7x. There are thin black bars along the top and bottom.

EDIT2: This does work for VisualBoyAdvance, though; it now stretches it fullscreen without blurring. But it's SLOW. Maybe I'll try overclocking to 900Mhz and see what happens...

EDIT3: damn, still not fullspeed at 900Mhz... then again, I'm in xfce, maybe it'll be fullspeed in minimenu.

 

[Prometheus]

There is no hacking around necessary to disable the blur-filters.

To disable them, paste the following into a terminal (this must be done each time the Pandora is booted currently, but I seem to recall that an option to set this permanently was due to be included in Hotfix 5)...

sudo /usr/pandora/scripts/op_videofir.sh none

... And then hit Enter. This will be saved in your terminal history, so when you need to use it again, all you'll need to do is open a terminal, hit up on the d-pad and hit enter the next time it's required.

Obviously, this won't be necessary after the ability to set this as a user preference is available, but for now it does its job.

Or go to Accessories > LCD-Settings > Select current video filter > Simple pixel doubling (no filter)

I believe that that's the option in Hotfix 5 that I was referring to.

 

[DaveC]

EDIT: the terminal method seems to make it a bit less blurry, but the problem is that the emulator gpsp doesn't actually stretch it to 3x, but to something like 2.7x. There are thin black bars along the top and bottom.

Well even on Pandora you have to remember that GPSP still thinks it is running on a Wiz when doing it through Ginge. So now it fractionally scales 240 x 160 to 320 x 240 then the Pandora takes that and doubles it to 640x480. It is hideous any way you will do it. If you don't filter you get ugly blocky un-even fractional scaling if you use the filter it smooths that out a bit but now it is blurry. The only way it will look nice is with a native Pandora port with even 3X integer scale.

 

[Esn]

Indeed, with the new scaling option in HF5 I can remove the blurriness, but gpSP still scales up at some weird fraction and doesn't take up the full screen. VisualBoyAdvance looks good, but is pretty slow even when overclocked to 900Mhz. It would actually be playable if it had auto frameskip, but it doesn't.

Anyway, still waiting for a good GBA emulator; I guess this isn't a very sexy thing to work on, but I'm happy that we have some good other emulators of more advanced systems (like PlayStation and N64... though if I'm honest, my favourite systems to play right now are the Sega CD and 32x through PicoDrive).

 

[Blue Protoman]

Too bad Exophase doesn't wanna port GPSP...

 

[Prometheus]

It would actually be playable if it had auto frameskip, but it doesn't.

It's been a while since I've tried the VBA port, but I'm pretty sure that it does have this - I recall it being too juddery for my liking, but it was certainly playable with it (I'm fine with the GINGE-wrapped gpSP, even if it doesn't fill the entire screen).

I'll take a look after, and post back (or edit this post).

 

[cosam]

Yes, VBA has auto frame skip but you need to enable it manually in the config file (in appdata).

 

[DaveC]

Too bad Exophase doesn't wanna port GPSP...

The source is out, too bad no one at all wants to port it that can code.

Maybe someday when there are more units out there a port will pop up with a nice 3X integer scale.