GameGear Emulation (Please nothing about VideoCompression)

[hansschmucker]

http://hansschmucker.no-ip.biz/Clie/ggemu.png

Well, I think there are a lot of people talking about SNES emulation, instead of doing it... I personally don't think it is possible at the standard application level.

But a GameGear emulator just might be possible. Here just a few screenshots, so everybody can take a look and say what he/she thinks about it.

The original version of SMSPlus, which was used to take these screenshots (I actually own a real GG, but I don't see any point in taking pictures of something that looks no different when emulated) can be found, along with the sourcecode at
http://cgfm2.emuviews.com/emul.htm#sms

The sourcecode looks quite clean, and while the author says that some of the code is specifically for big-endian systems, it should work most of the time with a basic recompilation and a few fixes.

Any comments?

*BTW, the GG has a horizontal resolution of 160 and a vertical resolution of 144, which would fit a standard palm screen perfectly

-P.S.
GameGear and MasterSystem are about the same. The GG was just the portable version with a reduced screen size. Sega even offered an adapter to play MS games on the GG. I opened it and basically it linked the MS cardrige connectors to their GG counterparts. Nothing more.

[DoctorDED]

Great idea, here's the but part. Would something like this need an ARM processor like every other new Palm app being made now. That's the real question? I hope someone can port this one like the ScummVM Emulator...

PEACE!

[hansschmucker]

I *guess* this will need an ARM, the only way I could imagine letting these things run on 33mhz devices would be extracting data, like images, sounds and the like on your PC, then using a very high level emulation to redirect calls for this resources to the corresponding files and then use POS native functions to present them (i.e. drawing the tiles). But even then it would probably be VERY hard to do. An ARM version would need less optimization and could probably do low-level emulation, which would be a lot easier,

ScummVM is no emulator, it's an interpreter, basically am ultra-mega-high-level emulator that can use very much optimized stuff without many changes to the code. Still the source might provide a framework for a first implementation of a GG emulator (it's probably best to start off with a slow OS$ version and port indiviual parts to ARM lateron)

[CRP]

I am currently trying to port the Coleco emulator ColEm, but am still having problems with PalmOS' memory limitations. But once (if :)) I am done with it SMS should be easy...

[Zork]

Hey Hansschmucker, good, old SMSPlus run perfectly fine with my 25 MHz 68030 Mac then. So a Dragonball version is beside the usual heap prob surely doable too and would increase the user base by a factor of 10 to 20.
So ARM is kewl and most of us Dragonball Palm OS users surely gonna switch to it sometime ( i for myself will still wait for a T series ARM Clie (means 480 * 320 and Virtual graffiti instead of this useless thumbboard), but within the next years Dragonball still is the user base of the Palm OS.

[Zork]

CRP, Colecovision were awesome then. It offered the best graphx of the early 80s consoles and had support of most of the huge game developers. Cant wait for such an emulation, especially cause the games are really, really small (appr. 32 K per game).
BTW Still hoping for the best emulation possible for any PDA .... Atari VCS 2600 emulation ;) . The Stella sources surely will be a perfect starting point for such emulation software.

[jimod]

Intellivision?? Anyone??

[skeezix]

The game gear didn't have a lot of great games; the time woudl be far better spent on Colecovision or NES, which would be doable on existing Palm OS devices without a large problem.

jeff

[CRP]

skeezix, you said you are working on 2-3 emulation projects... is colecovision one of them? I would hate to waste my time, since your coding skills are obviously far superior to mine :)

[skeezix]

Nope, feel free :)

Shadow Plan is my bread and butter and takes up most of my time. I'm working on XCade improvements for Palm OS, a XCade port for GP32, a Magnetic Scrolls emulator for Palm OS and other unmentionables :) XCade and Shadow are my main boys :) I'm also occasionally helping out with Palm Frotz.

I can help out by answering questions if you get stuck, but I'm stretched too thin to take on more projects :)

jeff

[chrilith]

Originally posted by CRP
I am currently trying to port the Coleco emulator ColEm, but am still having problems with PalmOS' memory limitations. But once (if :)) I am done with it SMS should be easy...

For coleco, i don't think you will have lots of troubles with the palmos memory. But if yes let me know :)

I'll try to take a look at this sms emu

:D

[Zork]

skeezix, no great games for the GameGear ??? It were the best supported arcade port handheld at the late 80s. All the classics like Out Run, Space Harrier, Galaxy Force, Hang On, etc. are avail only for that handheld. The GameGear had IMHO way better arcade support then the GameBoy (which had thousands cartridges, but beside Parodius not much popular arcade ports).
So a GameGear emulation software would include all the classics of the second half of the eighties, while some Colecovision emulation tool would include all the arcade classics of the first half of the 80s. So both emulation tols are equally useful (Colecovision games look way more simple then GameGear games, but on the other side they were way smaller) and would be more then welcome (thinkin bout playin Sonic on yoiur Clie. I presume I will then think again bout the external Joypad for the Clie ;) )

[CRP]

crilith, indeed the only (small) problem right now is that colem at a certain point allocates 64k as the system's memory. the top 32 of those is for the carts. but if i try a memhandlenew(0x10000) I get a null handle. right now I am bypassing this by allowing max 24k carts, thus cutting away the top 8k of the ram... any better suggestions?
btw, I am having another problem which I have not yet investigated in depth: at a certain point of execution I get a message from POSE saying: "Starter (1.0) called Palm OS routine #0xA256 (HwrIRQ6Handler). This
routine does not exist in this version of the Palm OS." Anyone know what's up?

[skeezix]

Originally posted by CRP
crilith, indeed the only (small) problem right now is that colem at a certain point allocates 64k as the system's memory. the top 32 of those is for the carts. but if i try a memhandlenew(0x10000) I get a null handle. right now I am bypassing this by allowing max 24k carts, thus cutting away the top 8k of the ram... any better suggestions?
btw, I am having another problem which I have not yet investigated in depth: at a certain point of execution I get a message from POSE saying: "Starter (1.0) called Palm OS routine #0xA256 (HwrIRQ6Handler). This
routine does not exist in this version of the Palm OS." Anyone know what's up?

You can circumvent the 64k allocation limit pretty easily; you can use BmpCreate...() to create a *bitmap* that is 200k easily, and then just use it for RAM instead :) offscreen window). Or use MemChunkNew which doesn't have the 64k limit.

jeff

[CRP]

Wow, thanks, I'll try that as soon as I get home :)

One more question: the original ColEm code contains some standard memset instructions. Should I replace them with PalmOS MemSet instructions or is that a useless change?

[CRP]

And sorry for all those stupid questions, but this is my first attempt at Palm programming...
not that I have much more experience on other platforms anyway :)
But I am having fun, learning both the Palm OS API and how the coleco hardware works :D