Just A Couple Of Ideas

[lulzfish]

actually, i think it would be possible to have a button (or flick a nub or something) to "switch" screens of the nds emulation for games like phoenix wright or kirby super star ultra.

Look what you did. You made me think about it.
Then I had to make some diagrams.

I thought of a few ways you could arrange the screens, assuming that there is something like an OpenGL framebuffer helping to scale the video output:

1. Traditional
2. side-by-side scaled
3. side-by-side scaled + unscaled
4. Zoomed in, with the analog nubs bound for scrolling.

edit: I think these are to scale, the Pandora was set to 800 by 480 and the DS screens are 256 by 192 each, right?

 

[psychodegu]

Look what you did. You made me think about it.
Then I had to make some diagrams.

I thought of a few ways you could arrange the screens, assuming that there is something like an OpenGL framebuffer helping to scale the video output:

1. Traditional
2. side-by-side scaled
3. side-by-side scaled + unscaled
4. Zoomed in, with the analog nubs bound for scrolling.

edit: I think these are to scale, the Pandora was set to 800 by 480 and the DS screens are 256 by 192 each, right?

You might also consider one turned at a right angle for stylus only use. The benefit of that is you could have it set up like Traditional but also have it scaled (I think).

 

[lulzfish]

Well, once you've got the DS framebuffers in an OpenGL texture, you can basically ask the SGX to do whatever you need to them.

In an actual system, there would probably be numerous combinations of different layouts based on which screen you needed to focus on, which hand you prefer, which way the Pandora's facing, etc.

 

[thatgui]

@fischju2000

I do not have any experience with DS Emulation, but what I have read during my quick sweep yesterday leads me to the conclusion, that No$GBA seems to be the most optimized DS emulator (and the one with the smallest amount of graphical glitches), so No$GBA seemed to me as the "obvious" choice (except for the not beeing open source thingy). As soon as I have enough money to buy me Contra 4 I will compare the capabilities of the available emus myself.

@ the others talking about screen orientation

Because the whole effort to bring NDS Emulation to the pandora is only for the purpose of me enjoying Contra 4 on the go both screens have be to be in their "natural" order without differet scalings (Contra 4 uses both screens - as far as I can tell from the gameplay videos on youtube at least).
So the only option is that the open pandora team get their a**es in line, dump their poor design and give us a pandora with a screen size capable of emulating the NDS in a proper way :blink:

But seriously as far as I could understand what Exophase wrote in the thread i linked to, screen orientation seems to be the smallest problem a "porter" has to worry about

 

[gruso]

Someone Twittered this the other day:

"I think emulation of the NDS on OpenPandora might actually be just possible through handling SIGSEGV and SIGILL ... and much voodoo magic."

I don't even know what that means, just thought I'd throw it amongst the pigeons.

 

[fischju2000]

Yes, no$gba is the best, but a brand new from-the-ground-up emulator is more likely than a port of it. You could vertically 1:1 both screens easily and with room to spare, but you might have to hold it pretty close to get all the detail.

 

[lulzfish]

According to Wikipedia, SIGSEGV and SIGILL are the POSIX signals for "invalid memory access" and "invalid instruction"

No idea how that would work.

 

[RajTakhar]

Someone Twittered this the other day:

"I think emulation of the NDS on OpenPandora might actually be just possible through handling SIGSEGV and SIGILL ... and much voodoo magic."

I don't even know what that means, just thought I'd throw it amongst the pigeons.

According to Wikipedia, SIGSEGV and SIGILL are the POSIX signals for "invalid memory access" and "invalid instruction"

No idea how that would work.

I think that was gruso's point

 

[Exophase]

No$GBA isn't even close to fast enough to be a viable emulator on Pandora. It's only barely fast enough on my 2GHz Athlon2X and the Pandora definitely doesn't come close to that in specs. It's probably not the fastest DS emulator out either (see NeonDS), but it's hard to compare when it's the most complete one.

 

[femngi]

Aren't we forgetting something important? One of the main criticisms of the DS was that 99% of games only use the second screen for displaying a map or current status. I'd be perfectly content with just hitting a button to switch between screens in what would probably feel like playing on a more traditional console. Much better than shrinking anything IMO.

 

[dflemstr]

We're not thinking about shrinking anything here. Both of the DS screens easily fit on the Pandora screen (see lulzfish's diagrams); it's just a discussion about scaling UP the screens

And, well, the emulator could easily be built in a way that made it possible to drag the screens around anyw ay you wanted them to (for example, as separate windows on the Matchbox desktop, or any alignment you want really) so this isn't an issue.
What would be more interesting to know is if someone here on the forums would be able to make a DS emulator from the ground up
It's pretty difficult, if we want decent performance.

 

[Patrick R Ludvigsen]

Fffff I'm not planning to rotate my Pandora sideways to look at the DS screen one bit


Because that's what broke my DS weak hinges fffffff

 

[Exophase]

What would be more interesting to know is if someone here on the forums would be able to make a DS emulator from the ground up
It's pretty difficult, if we want decent performance.

Did you mean able to or willing?

 

[dflemstr]

Did you mean able to or willing?


Both, since
a) I haven't heard about someone being interested in doing this.
b ) many of the "emulation devs" are busy already.
c) this is pretty unknown hardware we're talking about. I haven't seen the DS architecture specifications anywhere (and I've searched) but of course they must be available somewhere.
d) there are more important things for compentent devs to be doing, such as improving the pandora core (if they have access to it) or work on projects more important for the Pandora's launch.

 

[Exophase]

c) this is pretty unknown hardware we're talking about. I haven't seen the DS architecture specifications anywhere (and I've searched) but of course they must be available somewhere.

See Martin Korth's (No$'s) documentation, it's very thorough. There's a huge community of people who can easily run code on DS's so confirming or finding new information isn't too bad.

 

[calc84maniac]

It is a good sign that the processors on the DS are ARM, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that may make emulation on the Pandora a bit easier.

 

[Chip]

It is a good sign that the processors on the DS are ARM, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that may make emulation on the Pandora a bit easier.

Not really. The DS has a custom graphics processor that is the real nut to crack.

 

[Raz]

My opinion on DS Emulation is that the screens should be side by side scaling + non-scaling... Should provide a better screen... But a TV-Out should work splendidly with DS emulation....

 

[God Ginrai]

My opinion on DS Emulation is that the screens should be side by side scaling + non-scaling... Should provide a better screen... But a TV-Out should work splendidly with DS emulation....

My opinion is that a DS emu should support all the proposed methods of display. (Including the TV-out method) That way everyone is satisfied.

-God Ginrai

 

[Raz]

^ I like Gods opinion better :unsure:

I was never one to think of others