Release Visualboyadvance

[cosam]

well i got beat to releasing this, no biggie ;-)

Heh, it's only out so soon because it compiled ridiculously easily. Some casting errors needed fixing, but apart from that it really was just configure and make!

what is the pnd using to select the rom?

Just a boring bit of zenity right now, I'm afraid.

 

[Pickle]

well i got beat to releasing this, no biggie ;-)

Heh, it's only out so soon because it compiled ridiculously easily. Some casting errors needed fixing, but apart from that it really was just configure and make!

what is the pnd using to select the rom?

Just a boring bit of zenity right now, I'm afraid.

yeah i know its an easy app to port, i tried to get the gtk gui to work but always had issues from what i can remember.
ok zenity is what we have been using for frontend-less apps.

 

[HackModford]

Yay! L works now.
Never noticed actually... been a while since I played GBA

 

[fusion_power]

GBA games look like they were made for the pandora.

Lucky, that. GBA = 240x160, scale it up 3x and that's 720x480, so just tiny borders at the sides.

Yupp, I guess even 3x scaled it will look great because of the high res screen from the Pandora. At my GP2X, GBA was only 1:1 with a huge border or scaled with ugly Pixel-sizes.
Can somebody who is blessed with a Pandora make some Pictures that show the Quality of the GBA Emulation?

Oh, VBA was this one Emulator for PC, right? Was this the same base that was used for the nice GP2X Emulator? (There I can play Advance Wars with only 200MHz pretty well)

 

[Pickle]

GBA games look like they were made for the pandora.

Lucky, that. GBA = 240x160, scale it up 3x and that's 720x480, so just tiny borders at the sides.

Yupp, I guess even 3x scaled it will look great because of the high res screen from the Pandora. At my GP2X, GBA was only 1:1 with a huge border or scaled with ugly Pixel-sizes.
Can somebody who is blessed with a Pandora make some Pictures that show the Quality of the GBA Emulation?

Oh, VBA was this one Emulator for PC, right? Was this the same base that was used for the nice GP2X Emulator? (There I can play Advance Wars with only 200MHz pretty well)

VBA is an interpreter based emu, just like snes9x is for snes, thus why VBA is slow. The gp2x emulator is gpsp which features a arm dynamic recompiler, which hopefully exophase spends dome time porting to the pandora. gpsp should be pretty fast on the pandora.

 

[DaveC]

GBA games look like they were made for the pandora.

Lucky, that. GBA = 240x160, scale it up 3x and that's 720x480, so just tiny borders at the sides.

Yupp, I guess even 3x scaled it will look great because of the high res screen from the Pandora. At my GP2X, GBA was only 1:1 with a huge border or scaled with ugly Pixel-sizes.
Can somebody who is blessed with a Pandora make some Pictures that show the Quality of the GBA Emulation?

Oh, VBA was this one Emulator for PC, right? Was this the same base that was used for the nice GP2X Emulator? (There I can play Advance Wars with only 200MHz pretty well)

VBA is an interpreter based emu, just like snes9x is for snes, thus why VBA is slow. The gp2x emulator is gpsp which features a arm dynamic recompiler, which hopefully exophase spends dome time porting to the pandora. gpsp should be pretty fast on the pandora.

Didn't Exo release the source to gpsp ? That would run really well here considering it runs so well on the Wiz.

Hopefully that gets ported.

 

[MDave]

I've gotten the impression that Exophase would rather build a new GBA emulator from scratch than port gpsp

 

[Exophase]

I'm not porting gpSP. However, the source to the latest version on Wiz and GP2X is available (if not ask notaz, he will give it to you).

I asked zodttd to port it, but he's probably busy with other things. SteveM, if you're interested it'd be great if you could take a stab at it. The compatibility is lower and it doesn't have all of the features that VBA has, but it should be much faster. It would be nice to have both as options right now.

I do have interest in doing a new GBA emulator. While it'd be some substantial work I can see that it fits somewhat into other goals of mine.

 

[Mjlink]

Thanks Steve!

I think the M is short for Machine.

Peace & Pandora,

Link

PS You have a PayPal link where folks can donate?

 

[pder]

I was never able to get Visualboyadvance working properly on any linux x86 machines. I could get it to build and run, but games tended to run at the wrong speed (usually much too fast). Instead I used mednafen which is an emulator that handles several systems including GBA and the code is based on Visualboyadvance. It also looks like the code has been more recently maintained.

I wonder if it might be worth either trying to build mednafen for the Pandora or merging some of the mednafen GBA code into the visualboyadvance pandora port.

I would also be excited to see gpSP ported. Does anyone know if its feasible to utilize any of the gpSP code in VBA to give it a speed boost?

 

[Exophase]

I would also be excited to see gpSP ported. Does anyone know if its feasible to utilize any of the gpSP code in VBA to give it a speed boost?

gpSP's rendering code could probably be grafted without killing yourself, although it'd still be a fair amount of work to match the different interfaces. Moving over the recompiler would be much less feasible. Same goes for audio and DMA, other areas that are probably a lot slower on VBA.

If you used gpSP's interpreter instead of its recompiler you'd probably get better compatibility with worse performance, although I don't really know how it compares with VBA's.

 

[cosam]

SteveM, if you're interested it'd be great if you could take a stab at it.

Sure, I can take a look. I'll drop notaz a PM about the sources.

 

[naples39]

I'd love to see a port of gpsp--it's so much faster. Upon a quick look, gpsp on gp2x at 260mhz runs Racing Gears Advance faster than unoptimized VBA on pandora at 750mhz.

 

[Surkow]

Maybe it is interesting to look into VBA-M. This fork tries to integrate the best features from the various builds floating around.

 

[TitanUranus]

Gpsp was probably my favourite emulator on the Wiz, had a great ballance between speed and compatibility. Porting it would be a big bonus in the early Pandora days. I remember being struck by how many of the old amiga games turned up on the GBA, and strangely I owned a few but never played them cause of my GBA's shitty non backlit screen. Playing Wings and IK+ remakes was great on the Wiz using gpsp, as was GTA advance. All games I sadly couldn't enjoy on the real hardware. Now though I'm hoping to run the original IK+ and Wings when I get my Pandora. All emulators have their merits, and gpsp is definitely one I'd love to see make an apperance on my Pandora.

PS: While porting if you could just fix it so "Payback" works I'd be most obliged

 

[fusion_power]

VBA is an interpreter based emu, just like snes9x is for snes, thus why VBA is slow. The gp2x emulator is gpsp which features a arm dynamic recompiler, which hopefully exophase spends dome time porting to the pandora. gpsp should be pretty fast on the pandora.

Yes, it was GPSP. Very nice piece of software, I had alot of fun with it. I found the compatibility of GPSP always good, only som minor graphical glitches here and there but nothing serious. Only hanged in combination witth save-states but also not a problem.

So, how fast could a GBA Emulator be if it is highly optimized for the OMAP ARM Chip of the Pandora? 500MHz Full speed or even underclocking possible?
I hope we see some optimized stuff in the Future. We already have alot of programs but I guess none of them only touches the possible hardware power of the Pandora. ^^

 

[SomeGuy99]

I'm looking forward to GPSP for sure, however VBA has nice compatibility; I'm playing the Bit Generations games at the moment... with a nice big screen, loud speakers (without the buzzing from the real hardware) and retrolicious chunky upscaled pixels. Hmmmmm, nice.

VBA needs a nice in-built rom selector and menu though (i'm not keen on all the zenity launchers, but that's me).

 

[Joshwaan2k]

Thanks Steve

Now people who requested pics here you go.

2x

3x

I ran no frameskip and Metroid runs pretty average. better to run 1 frameskip I think to be playable OC to 750MHZ also.


You should all know this game if you like GBA

Again 750MHZ frampskip 1 almost full speed

 

[Gaeryc]

The Pandoras resolution is great for gba games, it's really nice that you can keep the original aspect ratio and it leaves only little black bars on the both sides of the screens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxBwu5elKKs

 

[fusion_power]

THX for the Pix joshwaan2k. I only know Metroid Fusion, I played it alot onto GPSP. Nealy full-speed with some small frame Skip at only 266MHz. If we get GPSP that optimized for the Pandora, I guess we could clock the Handheld to somewhat around 300MHz and enjoy Full GBA Fun.