Rockbox Technical Forums

Support and General Use => Plugins/Viewers => Topic started by: mlogans91 on March 08, 2008, 09:43:31 PM

Title: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: mlogans91 on March 08, 2008, 09:43:31 PM
Sorry if this has been done before but I couldn't find anything on it. Since you can do a regular gameboy emulator, would it be possible to emulate any GBA games?
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: Llorean on March 08, 2008, 09:48:21 PM
Yes it'd be possible, but on any player except possible the Gigabeat, it would be very, very, very slow.
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: saanaito on March 09, 2008, 02:32:53 PM
And some players only have just enough buttons for Game Boy emulation; the Game Boy Advance needs two more.
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: froggyman on February 01, 2009, 04:38:26 PM
I think it would be possible to get a decent GBA emulator for Rockbox, they are able to do it with iPod linux ( http://ipodlinux.org/wiki/Igpsp ). They were able to overcome the main problem of speed by overclocking the processor to about 78mhz(up to 81MHz). They problem though is that if you over clock your ipod too much you can end up damaging it (atleast to my understanding, please correct me if I am wrong).
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: saratoga on February 01, 2009, 04:56:24 PM
I think it would be possible to get a decent GBA emulator for Rockbox, they are able to do it with iPod linux ( http://ipodlinux.org/wiki/Igpsp ). They were able to overcome the main problem of speed by overclocking the processor to about 78mhz(up to 81MHz). They problem though is that if you over clock your ipod too much you can end up damaging it (atleast to my understanding, please correct me if I am wrong).

Thats the normal clock speed, so its not overclocked.  I'd expect advance emulation to be fairly fast on the ipod since it uses the same CPU as the Ipod.
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: LambdaCalculus on February 01, 2009, 10:19:06 PM
I'd expect advance emulation to be fairly fast on the ipod since it uses the same CPU as the Ipod.

The PortalPlayer SoCs and the CPU in the GBA are both ARM7TDMI, so not just iPods, but Sansas and the H10 as well.

However, I still wouldn't expect it to be very fast, because you still have to factor in graphics and sound emulation as well.
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: RChickenMan on February 02, 2009, 02:31:02 PM
I think GBA is asking for a bit too much.  What we really need is NES.  I bet the Gigabeat at least could easily handle NES.

I really, really want to play Mario 3 on the go.
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: LambdaCalculus on February 02, 2009, 02:48:21 PM
Then get to work and write an emulator.
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: froggyman on February 02, 2009, 04:48:48 PM
After thinking about to though, GBA does use a few to many buttons for some of the players, but it could probaly be done on the iPod. button wise. You could do the arrows, A, B and start the same and then have center as the right trigger button and bottom left and left trigger button and then just cut out the select, because how often do you actually need to use the select button.

As for the NES, thats also been done for the iPod with iPod Linux(so it would be possible on atleast the iPods with Rockbox)

Just some random ideas, dont be to harsh on it.  ;D
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: cool_walking_ on February 02, 2009, 05:38:30 PM
There's already a somewhat-working patch for a NES emulator.  It really needs some love if it's going to get into SVN though.

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/2911
Title: Re: Gameboy Advance Emulator?
Post by: Chronon on February 02, 2009, 05:45:54 PM
Zagor got it to build fairly recently, but it looks to be out of sync again.