GP32 Project

[foft]

How much would a developer want $$$ to make a good (playable) speed gameboy advance emulator with sound?

I'm not certain it's even possible, but some posts from Guru members think it will be, only it will take about a year to happen, or maybe more.

So I'm just curious, how much would X developer want for such a project? Maybe something could be worked out through Escrow/RentACoder.com.

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Realistically I estimate that for a very good coder its 6 months full time work to do a decent port and optimise to that level. The estimate it based on pulling a random number from my head! Since this is a good coder they'd probably be paid tens of thousands of pounds for that time (30-40k?).

Course you could get a student in need of money to do it or a more junior coder. Reckon you could get someone to have a good go for a few grand.

Most emus here are ported for fun and the devs do not have the time/care to spend that much time on things. Some good stuff has been done as uni projects though.

Good luck,

Mark

 

[Mr_Munk]

i have 2 GBA's

and where did i come across as "badly" wanting a gba emulator? im willing to pay some programmer for an emulator which i want, nothing "badly" about it, maybe some people just have more money to throw about than others

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so... err... you've got 2 gba's already. and are still willing to pay someone to write a gba emulator?

wow.

i don't get it :blink:

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maybe cause he can get the games for free on an emulator

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I swear dude, you ought to be shot for bringing that up :angry: Begin flame war.

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Oh yeah dude, 'cause I bet everyone who plays roms on gp2x pays for every last one...sheesh. :rolleyes:

 

[Ferentix]

I think the difference is generally considered to be that most systems emulated popularly on GP32/GP2X are clearly out of production, and no new units are sold- so buying the software properly, second hand, doesn't actually let the owner make money from it anymore. It could not really be classed as stealing in those terms- in direct income. Of course, there are other legal issues, but it's not as morally dodgy as downloading games for free that you can still buy brand new- GBA for example.

Anyway, I have an original GBA classic (although I hardly ever play it any more because the buttons are fairly knackered) and a DS. However, if a GBA emu became available for GP2X I would be fairly keen on it, because whenever I take a portion of my GBA library on holiday with me, (so say anything up to 10 carts), I'm always worried I'll lose them. Being able to just dump a set of ROMs onto a single SD card to replace my physical collection would be kind of a relief. Of course that does mean a little trickiness for game saves between the physical and virtual versions of a game... Say, do any GBA emulators allow you to use saves dumped from a GBA cart using an Action Replay? I dug my GBA AR out recently and realised that apart from being a cheat device (although to be frank I've used it a grand total of about a dozen times, mostly to do stupid stuff like moon jumps and max speed on games) it also allows you to upload game saves to PC via a USB cable- a pretty smart feature.

 

[chaos engineer]

I think the difference is generally considered to be that most systems emulated popularly on GP32/GP2X are clearly out of production, and no new units are sold- so buying the software properly, second hand, doesn't actually let the owner make money from it anymore. It could not really be classed as stealing in those terms- in direct income. Of course, there are other legal issues, but it's not as morally dodgy as downloading games for free that you can still buy brand new- GBA for example.

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I do not think that the fact that a console is out of production makes any difference to the rom downloading issue as software companies are in the process of realising that their back catalogues for out of production consoles or arcade systems are still commercial assets. Look at all those classic game collections that you can buy for PSP, PS2 XBOX etc.

 

[Mr_Munk]

I do not think that the fact that a console is out of production makes any difference to the rom downloading issue as software companies are in the process of realising that their back catalogue for out of procuation consoles or arcade systems are still commercial assets. Look at all those classic game collections that you can buy for PSP, PS2 XBOX etc.

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Agreed.

Downloading roms is dodgy territory legally, although I don't disagree with it morally, I just think that people should recognise that the issue isn't as black and white as people make out: Use emulators, just don't expect to be righteous aswell

 

[donny662]

Realistically I estimate that for a very good coder its 6 months full time work to do a decent port and optimise to that level. The estimate it based on pulling a random number from my head! Since this is a good coder they'd probably be paid tens of thousands of pounds for that time (30-40k?).

Course you could get a student in need of money to do it or a more junior coder. Reckon you could get someone to have a good go for a few grand.

Most emus here are ported for fun and the devs do not have the time/care to spend that much time on things. Some good stuff has been done as uni projects though.

Good luck,

Mark

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Any kind of money the community would come up with not be a substitute for a real job. If there was to be offered 1000 dollars/pounds/euros/yen (ok, maybe not yen) to create a good GBA emulator, someone who has wanted to do it but not gotten into it might be more inclined to follow through with it.

 

[Aninhumer]

I do not think that the fact that a console is out of production makes any difference to the rom downloading issue as software companies are in the process of realising that their back catalogues for out of production consoles or arcade systems are still commercial assets. Look at all those classic game collections that you can buy for PSP, PS2 XBOX etc.

I think all he was saying was that the genral issue of emulators themselves being wrong is pointless. I agree, illegal roms are rightly illegal (actually I only use roms that I have access to copies of.) but if a game is out of production, they should release it free, people will still buy the classics packs because they are stupid!

 

[Paradox]

ok maybe i should have said "good port of visualboyadvance" instead of "make a gba emu from scratch" because people are coming up with crazy amounts like 30-40,000, which even for a from scratch emu is pretty stupid, thats what people make in a year doing 9-5 jobs.

someones already done a quick port of VBA on the file archive, its a straight simple port, with no optimizations whatsoever, and its running 6FPS, im pretty sure with optimizations and code cleanup or whatever else you do to make an emu go faster, FS1-2, you'd have a pretty decent speed emu there

 

[Qingdan]

Any kind of money the community would come up with not be a substitute for a real job. If there was to be offered 1000 dollars/pounds/euros/yen (ok, maybe not yen) to create a good GBA emulator, someone who has wanted to do it but not gotten into it might be more inclined to follow through with it.

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For 1000 British Pounds would try to do it, for 1000 yen, hell no , that not even full 10 euros