gba support in rockboy?

[Llorean]

You can pull off as many as 13 buttons on the iPod if you divide the scrollwheel into 8 regions, and count touching your finger to it in any of those regions, but NOT pressing the button beneath, as a button.

But the GBA is beyond the ability of the iPod to emulate, almost certainly, and the DS is well beyond it. Not even a question there.

[ZeRøB]

How do you want to press play without also touching play then? I just see 9 buttons possible. Maybe 10, if you make good use of the Hold switch (pauses game and gives option "Send thisandthis button").

[travishayes89]

yeah, a DS emulator will have to wait until iPod 10 LoL, and well isn't the GBA screen also slightly larger, i can't tell, i lost the GBA i had, and besides, it started not to act right anyway.

[Llorean]

ZeR0B: One solution would be to have a very slight delay in reading the button, to give time for the button underneath to be pressed down.

In my case, my iPod skin has a ridge around the edge of the scrollwheel so I can press the buttons without triggering scrolls (very helpful for going to the next song without accidentally adjusting the volume).

Or the buttons could only trigger on release of the scrollwheel, which is a bit more awkward, but still offers them as available.

All I'm saying is there's a whole host of ways to get a few more pseudobuttons out if it were necessary.

[travishayes89]

if that was possible, then we'd have a working GBx emu. and itd be kickbutt.

[ZeRøB]

But I don't think that ROCKbox wants to go the way iPodLinux goes, release a lot of semi working emulators that are slow, crash all the tie or just use half of the screen...

[travishayes89]

yeah, ive used ipl, and iboy, even though it works, its slow, buggy, and does only use a quarter of the screen.

[lareneg]

I have an idea:

Buy a gameboy!

They're real cheap second hand now in gameshops. The games are rare, but you can get them

[Jillorious]

The iPod is a 75mhz arm core. Fixed point math only.

but if you people 'll find a way to put the broadcom chip into doing something useful, wouldn't that increase the units' power?
(based on my ignorant knowledge of this chip - in my minds eye it is simply like  adding more CPU power. Correct me if i'm wrong).

[Llorean]

Adding another processor doesn't really speed things up.

For example, imagine reading a book. Two people can't read one book twice as fast. Two people can read *two* books twice as fast though. With a lot of tasks, you're constrained to only applying one processor to it, due to the nature of the task. Even when you can apply two processors, having the communications between them work is incredibly complex.  Imagine cutting the book apart into chapters, and dividing the chapters between the two, but only one of them gets the chapter numbers, and has to tell the other one which chapter to read next, and get the summarized updates from him as to what has happened before he can continue reading his own chapters.

Right now, with the two-core processors Rockbox is likely to either keep everything on one-core, or handle everything *but* audio on one, and audio on the other. For video playback, the idea is to split video on one core and audio on the other. If the broadcom chip is ever enabled it'll probably be used to offload video to, since it's pretty much designed for this purpose and may not even be terribly useful for anything else.

[Jillorious]

Thanks for clarifying things.
but isn't this exactly what photoshop & other high-end computer programs are doing with the multi-core CPUs, simply "tearing apart the book" as you call it (much like a raid0 setup works for the hard drive)?

[Llorean]

In the case of something like the GBA emulator though, you only have one hard to divide task, that of pretending to be the GBA hardware.

For photoshop and others there are often multiple tasks that can be spread out, and their results returned.

[SilleeString]

If I'm not mistaken you can't split the task of emulating a GBA into different tasks (ie. GBA music, graphics, button input).  Any emulation (I believe) is one task as a whole, and I really highly doubt the iPod can run a working GBA emulator, let alone rendering the pseudo-3D graphics/sprites used in some of its games.