I found this on GP32Spain and I had to share (why can't I LOL this right off the bat?).

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/t...h%3dgba%2520n64

When I saw the topic title, I thought you really meant N64 emulation on the GBA, but after that, I saw it was a joke. Quite funny. Now, as far as I know, if you're seriously talking N64 emulation on the GP2X, no. DaveC told me that the 3D chip it has is very advanced, so you can't emulate it. I doubt if the GBA can do N64, too...

You can emulate anthing you want. Even N64 on a 386 is possible. Speed is the problem.

Errrrrrrrrmmmmmm...........I don't get it

Serious question though, whats up with GBA emulation on GP2X? It can handle the PS1 moderately, so it should be able to handle the GBA resonabely too.

You've got a point there. I doubt that anything hanheld (save stuff like the PSP, DS, etc.) could measure up to the PS1. I think it's because the GBA may have a better 3d chip or something, but I doubt that the hardware/software, in general, could be anywhere as potent as that of the PS1's!

OMG, do you know who I am? It is a joke, and you don't recall me telling you no to n64 yesterday? I am well aware that there is no n64 on the GP2X.

I would like to see the DS ARM version of Mario64 ported over sometime (I can dream, I want my Mario64), although it might do just as well to make an offline recompiler to run that or an n64 version, probably not even worth it, every single game would need months of work to port.

I hope the GP3X will get a nice 3D core or a fst FPU or something , then this might be a possibility



Riiight. Suuure. I think that nobody is putting insane resources into a GBA emu because there is no point, buy one for $20 and leave it at that.

Also I think Zodttd started with a PDA/Pocket PC emu for the PS1, if you want a GBA emu you should start with a handheld source and optimize. The PS1 Emu has been optimized with 100s of man-hours of tweaking and hard genius type work, throw that at a GBA emu and of course it will show results.

But we are talking about portable PS1 vs. Portable GBA, which is a valid thing to spend all that energy to do?

What the fuck did I just watch?

..........................

Both the PSP and the DS are much, much, MUCH more technologically (and graphically and everythingelse-ly) advanced than the PSX.

And the GBA doesn't have a 3d chip. This may be apparent to some people since the GBA was not known for its great 3d games...

As far as I know, the GBA was never meant to be a 3D system, which is why I'm 99.9% sure there is no 3D acceleration in it. Fuck it, I'm 100% sure there isn't. I'm 65% sure the PSone doesn't really have a 3D accellerator either, though.

Is that a joke that does not translate into English ? Do they use the same word for 'run a program' and ' move' in Spain ? If not, I don't get it either.

GBA no 3d HW
PS1 has 3D HW + fixed point matrix mul vector HW.

I beleave the DS has the vector and multimiedia extensions to the arm9, which is why its 3d is so nice, but no dedicated 3D HW. (but please correct me on this bit)

N64 had as well as 3d HW a primitive kind of vertex shader HW. I've played both versions of Mario64, and the DS is more than just a port. I would not have been suprised if it was recoded from the ground up.

Someone is working on it

w00t! Advertising!
Don't over do it though, it'll be a few weeks before I can make a release.

For those of you that don't get the joke, in english we say "the GBA can emulate the N64" while in spanish it's "the GBA can move the N64".

Believe it or not, the PS1 only has a 2D gpu. The gpu itself works kinda like a 3d one, in that you feed vertices to it and then it draws triangles based on the vertices, but the coordinate data for the vertices is 2D only. The 3D games on PS1 accomplish 3D via software keeping track of 3D vertices, and then translating the vertices to 2D so the gpu can understand it. If you've ever payed a LOT of attention to 3d games on the ps1, you'll notice that textures on walls will get jagged/distorted when you look at the wall sideways, but it looks fine when you look at the wall straight on. That's because the ps1 can't do perspective correction (missing Z coordinate), and thus, all textures on the ps1 are drawn isometric.

Another way to tell this is the fact that triangles can't intersect each other. In 3d, sometimes you get a triangle that's halfway in front of another one, and halfway behind it (so the triangle is actually going through the surface other one). On the ps1, this situation is impossible because the ps1 doesn't keep track of Z, so a triangle can be only either completely in front, or completely behind another triangle at any given time. If you play devil dice, and move the character so its body is going through a dice, you notice that as it stands there breathing, entire triangles will flash on and off as they go through the dice. So I'm assuming it's the software's responsibility to do its own Z ordering and send the vertices in the correct order.

So yeah, 3d games, but 2d console. Isn't that weird? I don't know about the fixed point matrix multiplication vector thing, but I definately know about the 2d.

This might be why it's easier to do ps1 emulation, because the graphics emulation only needs to be 2d.

Sorry if I got off track there, I found the topic interesting and researched it before, and I felt like explaining it.

About the video, I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean, but it's definately not what I was expecting.

wow, after hearing about GBA in this topic again i was thinknig to myself..nah..wont ever happen, if it does it'll be years and even then require more power than zodtt and his team have thrown at the PSX emulator.

and then i come back with some ham sandwiches, scroll down a bit and someones actually working on it O_O

good luck to ya.

Drag: So they're using the Painter's algorythm on the PSX?? HAHA! This explains so many things! I always thought the PSX hardware looked kinda week despite the graphics, this totally clears that up.

I'm imagining that's what they use, but I haven't actually gone in depth into any games. I'm just going on what I found out, and what I've observed. Painter's algorithm is what made the most sense to me, but there are probably other methods in some games.

Edit: After doing further research, the ps1 has a seperate cpu which handles 3D transformations, called the Geometry Transformation Engine. This cpu is capable of doing 3D math and all that good stuff, but can also be used to project the 3D vertices onto 2D, giving you 2D coordinates which the software can feed to the GPU. So there *IS* 3D math hardware in the ps1, but the GPU still remains 2D only and unable to do any Z-axis-based effects (like Z-ordering and perspective correction for textures).

I don't know I think I would rather have a near perfect SNES emu. I wonder why no one wants to do that? It is probably more possible than GBA anyway really.

I mean I already have two handhelds that can emulate a GBA perfectly. One is called a "GBA-SP" the other is called a "DS"

And for the N'th time, one doesn't necessarily want to lug 2X and GBA/SD around. Everything in the same machine is a good goal.

And you have those that just don't feel like buying a new handheld or pay for it's games.

You can get a flashcart if P1r473d R0mz is what you want for the GBA and use it on an SP to have all of your games on one cart..

I don't like having to carry more than one thing round at a time. In my pockets when I go out I normally have my keys, phone, wallet and mp3 player. So carrying my gp2x along with that is bad enough, let alone carrying a gp2x and a ds/gda

Besides, GBA would require buying a flash cart, and digging up my GBA... and even then there are no 4 GB flash carts around... 4gb maybe... so with an emulator we could have a single device (single battery, single memory to keep roms on, single pocket used) and mr. Tkfi5h is talking about turbo (a must have for some games...) save states and all the other advantages of emulation. frankly, im as excited about this as i am psx4gp2x, which is why i bought the gp2x in the first place.

You can also buy a SD/CF card flash cart, which I heard supports all sizes of SD/CF cards... so it can use 4/8 GB =)

I can see the desire to run GBA games on the GP2X; I'd have use for it too. I hate carrying more than one portable, I hate carrying around all my cartridges ... as for flash carts, I had 2. I had to order them from China, they took MONTHS to arrive, one took LEGAL THREATS to get here, and they cost a ton, and a ton MORE for shipping. And getting the damn thing to work with Windows XP was a nightmare, too. Emulation accuracy is not much of an issue since almost everything, even audio, runs in SOFTWARE on the machine's ARM7-- the video subsystem is about all that doesn't.

I dont know if you had the same problem as me, but my flash cart was poorly made and the fact that it uses battery saves means you have to change the battery every year or so in order to keep your save data.

I know its hard to emulate but can someone explain why?

I would still prefer the "inconvienience" of carrying around a GBA-SP with flashcart (they make some now that use SD cards) and get decent playability. Playing a GBA game at 10 FPS with no sound ain't going to cut it for me. I guess that is just me though.

If GBA game program code is made to run natively on one of the GP2X's ARM9s performance would be far above and beyond that-- if video and audio can be emulated with decent speed (should be fine, since the 2D graphics/video subsystem should be about on par with the NeoGeo's, and audio is handled on the ARM7 CPU) .. it's quite feasible the emulator could run at full speed. With sound.

Alot of "ifs" there. "If" that happened then yes ok.

Actually GBA has more GPU effects than NeoGeo as it has transparencies -we all know how those bring down SNES emus- and hardware scaling and rotation. NeoGeo has simple scaling but no rotation and tilting/rotate mode 7 like F-zero

While it may be possible in theory to get decent GBA emulation with alot of ASM, months of coding, and starting from scratch (ports won't cut it, too much bloat), I doubt it will happen in the GP2X's life cycle. We don't even have decent SNES with transparencies yet.

I can see it getting to the level of maybe the PSX emu where most games are just too slow to actually play, with a few here and there that are tolerable. Still won't touch the real GBA hardware.

Lol, it's like on every post Epicenter is the optimist and DaveC is the pessimist. I'm sure the community needs both points of view though.

IMO, if the 3DO emulator ever materializes, that would open the door to 100% GBA emulation (hmm, I wonder if the 2X could handle tranparencies like the GBA though). Definetly not going to happen anytime soon though.

Isn't someone already working on converting the arm files from GBA to 2x?

Well, they're full game binaries containing a mixed bag of ARM7 machine code, graphics and audio data. The ARM7 code needs to be essentially translated to code in the ARM9 instruction set readable by the ARM920T or 940T for native executon-- removing the need to EMULATE a ~16 MHz ARM7 so they will use just a fraction of the CPU load, freeing both cores up, for the most part in theory, for video and audio processing. Due to the massive load taken off the machine if the code can be made to run natively (this does appear to work so far) Full-framerate operation IS possible and even probable, though some extraneous features may not play well, as DaveC said, like transparency or heavy mode7-ish effects. However, the games which could not be played due to lack of 'mode 7' is rather small, and transparency operation could probably be pulled off if there was not a huge CPU emulation load (like there is with existing SNES emulators.)



Probably sooner than you think, at least something playable. I'm sure it won't be perfected for ages. But hey, NES Emulation may not be 'perfect' anytime soon either. I'm just being as realistic as possible with my existing base of knowledge and experience on the matter-- I know ARM architectures and emulator design rather well so I can state some things like this with a reasonable degree of certainty. Much like I can say the much-argued N64 emulation at acceptable speeds will never surface on the GP2X, and could perhaps 'only maybe' be done on an XGP unit .. if it had a 400+ MHz ARM9 processor. And you might still need to overclock it. And it wouldn't approach 60 FPS.

i like the cut of your jib Epicenter!

Fro those people who didnt get it.

In spain people say: "gba moves n64 games". meaning "gba emulates n64 games"(the game is moving), do you get it now?

I thought it was "doing" them... ahem.