GBA Emulator Released For the DSi 66
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the what's-old-is-new dept.
from the what's-old-is-new dept.
Busshy writes "Darkchen has released a Gameboy Advance emulator for the Nintendo DS/DSi that plays full speed with frameskip. This can only be played with the homebrew dev cart, the DS iPlayer. The emulator adds save states, cheats and tools to GBA games, and for DSi Fans the ability to finally get over the loss of the GBA Slot on the DSi."
Re:Not for the DSi (Score:1, Informative)
Except that the summary says it works for the DS as well. Ergo, the thing in your hand could be a DS, not a DSi.
It's actually very interesting..... (Score:3, Informative)
As the iplayer has one of these in it:
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tms320dm6441.pdf
As the DS isn't quite powerful enough to play video (2 cpu's 100MHz, 4MB of RAM), they put a decoder chip on board a flash cart. This is decoded into the 16MB included in the cart and then displayed on the DS screen. I had previously assumed that it wouldn't be that useful for much else due to traffic being one way only.
As a developer of the Linux port to the DS (http://www.dslinux.org) I am very interested to see if an X server or similar could be run on the iplayer cpu, leaving the DS cpu to handle wifi/touchscreens etc.
It's important to note that this is an unofficial development (darkchen admits to acquiring the SDK through not the normal methods). The iPlayer team are quite proud of the fact that their cartridge is one of the few that doesn't allow piracy. Having a GBA emulator goes against this.
Re:I'd rather have a GBC emulator for the DS (Score:5, Informative)
Lameboy DS seems to work fine.
Re:I'd rather have a GBC emulator for the DS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:nitpick (Score:1, Informative)
Technically, both claims are correct. I guess the question is whether or not frame skipping is required to achieve full speed emulation. If so, then then the original commenter is correct in that it is not really full speed emulation.
Re:nitpick (Score:1, Informative)
No, that is fast forward. Frameskip is for keeping the game at a playable speed either through manual or automatic dropping of frames.
I suggest that YOU learn the terminology before you start accusing others of ignorance.
Re:nitpick (Score:4, Informative)
From the looks of the video its frameskipping like hell. Emulation doesn't get good until it is as smooth as the original.
The core they are running this on is an arm9. I'd be willing to bet they could get it up to 100% with some optimization. The original GBA was only a 33mhz arm. The music doesn't seem quite right tho.....
Re:How does a DS play GBA games? (Score:3, Informative)
If the DS can natively play GBA games, is the DSi any different, besides the lack of the GBA slot?
For one thing, GBA games expect 0x08000000-0x09FFFFFF to be the Game Pak ROM. DSi appears not to have anything in that address space. Instead, as I understand it, DSi has extra RAM in 0x02400000-0x02FFFFFF and an SD card slot.