Gameboy Advance Emulator for ARM

[jamesj1k]

Will it be possible to make an Gameboy ADVANCE emulator with the new ARM 200mhz palm os 5.0 pda's?

Im REALLY looking forward to getting one! that would be great, would even pay $60 if it worked fine with GBA game ROM's

Anyone have more info?

James

[JackAxe]

It's going to be a while. From what people have been mentioning on this board, OS5 has limitations which prevent higher end emulators. Also the current XScale PXA250 has some performance issues. Intel's solution is to replace it with the PXA255 which is significantly faster even at the same clock speeds.

A GBC and NES emulator would be cool in my book. Especially with the Clie' game controller.

The new GBA SP is nice.

<]=)

[jshap999]

No kidding the GBA SP is nice. I got mine last and haven't put it down since. I'm gonna get fired :)

[milmber]

I have gone and had a quick semi-serious look at this. From Nintendo's website it seems to get any development info, Nintendo first needs to approve your application. And then you need to pay US$28 000 for development tools. I am guessing this is important to have these in order to write a GBA emulator.
So...the first issue is a lack of available technical info.
The second issue seems to be legal. I am speaking under correction here,but it seems Nintendo took the writer of liberty (the Gameboy emulator) too court.( A quick search on google should provide some articles.)

So it seems once more the self-interests of corporations stand in the way of porting some really great software to the palm. Another notable example is the game 'elite' which was totally ported to the palm - but had to be withdrawn. Also...regarding the petition by RedShift to port 'Civilization' to the palm-has anyone noted that the Symbian version they had already completed has dissappeared from their website - that does not bode well for a palmos port....

[Zork]

milmber, check the other threads bout this topic. I posted once links with emulation tech stuff for GBA (including every hardware aspect described detailed). So Nintendo isnt necesarry at all by doin such a emu.
and yep, GBA is more then likely with the Clie, cause its usin the same CPU core (!) and even more important : The GBA doesnt use anything besides the CPU. So there arent any custom chips at all you have to emulate at the same time (like with the Mega Drive, SNES and Amiga emulation software).
The major prob with such development is the heap prob of the POS 5 and the custom opcodes and registers beside the ARM core, which have to emulated via software.
And legally it shouldnt be any prob, cause there are already GBA emulation software avail for other platforms.

[milmber]

Hi Zork,
Yeah...I did some more digging and it seems like you are right. There is a program called Virtual Gameboy which is a gameboy advanced emulator - the source code for windows and linux is available so a port is a definitive possibility...
The only thing making it a bit painfull is the fact that it depends on libSDL( www.libsdl.org) - which has not been ported to palmos - to do the graphics....so i'll have to write my own functions for that...
The is already a port for Virtual Gameboy on the PocketPC platform ( ARM as well) so I cannot see why it can't be done on the palm - well...at least with a bit of work that is....

[milmber]

Also...I did some more checking and someone has already started porting libsdl to the palmos platform...(this was before os5)...but he got stuck on the graphics implementation. If someone can get this source off him ( he said in a post that he would make it available) then it would be possible to port just about all of the games that use libsdl under linux to the palm as well as Virtual GameBoy.....most notably Ur Quan Masters (Starcontrol 2) - which in my opinion would be great........

[CRP]

I wrote to this guy but never got an answer...
btw, basic sdl functions are quite easily mappable to palmos equivalents

[Massman82]

Milmber,

I am very happy that you are seriously going to work on a Gamboy Advanced emulator!!! Could you email me at Massman82@PDArcade.com? I'll see if I can help you... (I'll explain how in the email.)

[iebnn]

Originally posted by milmber
I have gone and had a quick semi-serious look at this. From Nintendo's website it seems to get any development info, Nintendo first needs to approve your application. And then you need to pay US$28 000 for development tools. I am guessing this is important to have these in order to write a GBA emulator.
So...the first issue is a lack of available technical info.
The second issue seems to be legal. I am speaking under correction here,but it seems Nintendo took the writer of liberty (the Gameboy emulator) too court.( A quick search on google should provide some articles.)

So it seems once more the self-interests of corporations stand in the way of porting some really great software to the palm. Another notable example is the game 'elite' which was totally ported to the palm - but had to be withdrawn. Also...regarding the petition by RedShift to port 'Civilization' to the palm-has anyone noted that the Symbian version they had already completed has dissappeared from their website - that does not bode well for a palmos port....

Heh, that's not the reason at all for why there are not GBA emulators for Palm. People who code emulators don't get information from the company's on doing it :) The companies don't like emulators.

The reason there isn't any is because currently Palm OS sucks for memory management. That is why PPC has so many emulators -- they have much better memory APIs (well, that and it's easier to port a win32 app to ppc than it is to Palm).

[Massman82]

Originally posted by iebnn


Heh, that's not the reason at all for why there are not GBA emulators for Palm. People who code emulators don't get information from the company's on doing it :) The companies don't like emulators.

The reason there isn't any is because currently Palm OS sucks for memory management. That is why PPC has so many emulators -- they have much better memory APIs (well, that and it's easier to port a win32 app to ppc than it is to Palm).

It should be possible now though. Old devices had less powerful processors, less heap memory, and not all had hi-res screens. This had been solved by OS 5.

I would love to see you develop this.

[iebnn]

Yes, but they still have terrible memory management APIs. This is the reason Palm OS has so few emulators. With PPC you could port an emulator in days. With Palm, it takes MUCH longer.A *lot* of code has to be rewritten, and memory has to be handled completely differently. Palm makes coding emulators very difficult.

[Massman82]

Originally posted by iebnn
Yes, but they still have terrible memory management APIs. This is the reason Palm OS has so few emulators. With PPC you could port an emulator in days. With Palm, it takes MUCH longer.A *lot* of code has to be rewritten, and memory has to be handled completely differently. Palm makes coding emulators very difficult.

Maybe OS 6 will change this? (There is always that hope).

I also heard that PalmSource was thinking of posting some of the source code to the OS. (From Mike Mace at Palminfocenter). Would this help emulator development. (Since I know nothing about it...)

[iebnn]

Hopefully :)

I don't really think that OS source code would help much, since we can't make changes to it. We already have the sources for Palm OS 4 as well.

[watoke]

There are many version of GBA emulator on the PC, guess not a problem to have it on the Clie's :cool:

Well, will be waiting for that to happen :)
Got the GAB SP, think is a wonderful stuff .... geezz....

Oh well ...lets wait then .........

[iebnn]

watoke: If you had read through this thread you'd see that there is a very large problem with writing emulators for Palm.

Programming for Windows is entirely different from programming for Palm as well.

[nevarDeath]

Originally posted by milmber
I have gone and had a quick semi-serious look at this. From Nintendo's website it seems to get any development info, Nintendo first needs to approve your application. And then you need to pay US$28 000 for development tools. I am guessing this is important to have these in order to write a GBA emulator.
So...the first issue is a lack of available technical info.
The second issue seems to be legal. I am speaking under correction here,but it seems Nintendo took the writer of liberty (the Gameboy emulator) too court.( A quick search on google should provide some articles.)

So it seems once more the self-interests of corporations stand in the way of porting some really great software to the palm. Another notable example is the game 'elite' which was totally ported to the palm - but had to be withdrawn. Also...regarding the petition by RedShift to port 'Civilization' to the palm-has anyone noted that the Symbian version they had already completed has dissappeared from their website - that does not bode well for a palmos port....

Yeah, there's homebrew tools for making your own nintendo games, **** paying 28,000 bucks....

[JackAxe]

It was $500,000 if you wanted produce a game for the Nintendo 64. I know this because I used to work for Interplay.

<]=)

[milmber]

As a lot of people on this thread has said....writing an emulator for the GBA is quite difficult - especially on the palm platform.
It is possible though from a hardware & software point of view.
The only silver lining to all this is that the source code for arguably the best GBA emulator is freely available(Virtual Gameboy Advance)....it is just going to take a LOT of time.

[iebnn]

It is possible but very difficult. Hopefully OS6 will help us out with this with better memory APIs.

[TriPLeX]

the problem with the virtual gameboy advance source IS the source...
porting it is gonna be a *****, and although the new arm processors are similar to the GBA one, we have to keep in mind the cpu time for reading and translating the rom images, which complicates things a lot more because of the limited cpu time already...now if it were run like the CF driver....