gba support in rockboy?

[n16ht5]

will ipod ever be able to play gba games? i have a bunch of gba roms...

[Llorean]

Probably not.

[Suntiger]

This is like saying "can you port Halo 2 to the Palm OS?"

Never going to happen. The chips in iPods are simply NOT POWERFUL ENOUGH.

I wish people could learn a rudimentary grasp of hardware requirements and stop asking these questions...

[RotAtoR]

I wish people could learn a rudimentary grasp of hardware requirements and stop asking these questions...

Easy there, I think it's a fair question to ask. After all, Rockbox already supports GB and GBC, so GBA support may appear a logical extension. Even though the GBA is still a GameBoy, AFAIK it's more powerful than even the SNES system. It's highly doubtful that any of the current Rockbox targets could even emulate the SNES with decent speed. To put things into perspective, some people over at the ipodlinux project are having a tough time getting even the NES emulated well.

[n16ht5]

i thought the ipod had some new chip that was supposed to be good/..? i have no idea what is in the ipod hardware.. and snes is extremely slow, even the playstation only had like a 133mhz processor or something

[Llorean]

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

[Yotto]

i thought the ipod had some new chip that was supposed to be good/..? i have no idea what is in the ipod hardware.. and snes is extremely slow, even the playstation only had like a 133mhz processor or something

The bigger the chip, the faster the battery drain.  Doesn't take that many mHz to play music.  I don't think the engineers at Apple expected you to want to turn it into a $300 gameboy emulator.

[n16ht5]

pfft apple.. if only they had teamed up with sony on the psp...

[Mathlar]

The GBA only contains a single 17MHz ARM7 core.  In that respect the iPod has way more power...  But we lack the graphics hardware and nintendo are very good at exploiting that.

Just look at how the DS (with it's single ARM9 and ARM7 cop) plays Mario64... guess those funky 3D chips do a hell of a lot of work.

[RotAtoR]

The GBA only contains a single 17MHz ARM7 core.

And look at the original GameBoy, it only has a 4.19MHz Z80 processor and still can't be emulated at full speed on the ipods yet. Emulation requires at least an order of magnitude more work.

[ZeRøB]

VisualBoy Advance (a gba emulator for the PC) runs at 300-400% with a GBA game on one core from my computer (AMD Dual: 2x 2,2GHz)

[Llorean]

In terms of "way more power" we only have approximately 4 times the speed. In terms of emulation this is NOT a lot of space to work with.

As well, that's simply a comparison of raw computing frequency, and says nothing to the additional hardware in the Gameboy Advance.

[travishayes89]

VisualBoy Advance (a gba emulator for the PC) runs at 300-400% with a GBA game on one core from my computer (AMD Dual: 2x 2,2GHz)

thats because desktop and laptop units are equipped with 3D graphics chips, and look at your cpu frequency, 2.2 GHz, versus the iPod Video's 75 MHz chip, and with a quick calculation on windows calculator , 2200 / 17 is approximately 117.64, thats a whole butt load of space to work with. why do you think you can run Windows Media Player while playing video games on some computers and not experience anything, but when you are playing music in Rockbox while playing bubbles, it skips like heck.

[ZeRøB]

That wasn't my point, my point was that even with 2,2GHz you can't run a GBA emulator very fast (300% isn't that fast if you think of it). 17MHz * 3 == 52MHz =! 2,2GHz

[travishayes89]

but one thing, what would you do for buttons, the GBx (1980s/1990s), has 8 buttons, the GBA has 10, the DS has 12, 13 if you count the touchscreen, the iPod only has 7, and thats counting scrolling left and right as two different "buttons".