#32931 - ffly - Wed Dec 29, 2004 9:56 am
Hi,
I am new to the GBA scene. I decided to write an emulator for GBA to learn how to program it. I am posting to ask about the minum hardware that I need to emulate/learn to write small demos and or run freeware demos. Any feedback is welcome.
Thanks
Happy new year!
#32944 - Fatnickc - Wed Dec 29, 2004 1:37 pm
I may be wrong here, but I think that you should atempt to write an emulator after learning to actually make games for it, so you know what is needed. I'm sure someone else will give a better answer, though.
#32947 - Quirky - Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:28 pm
If you haven't written an emulator before, then you could start off with a Chip 8 "virtual machine". That should pose enough problems for you to learn the basics of emulation and the GBA hardware. You could even write it in C and it'd be more or less fast enough.
#32948 - NoMis - Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:33 pm
I would be interessted in learing basic emulation stuff to. Are there any good places to get basic emulation information? And whats a Chip 8?
NoMis
#33038 - ffly - Thu Dec 30, 2004 9:20 am
I do have experience with emulation (wrote emus for NES and GB).
I read some technical docs for GBA. All I need to start is the answer of this question: "what are the minimum feature that I need to emulate?". For example, do I need to emulate any video mode other than mode 0 & 4? What are the most commonly used video mode among PD demo/games coders? Same thing goes for DMA and for sound.
Any input is appreciated.
Thanks.
#33039 - NoMis - Thu Dec 30, 2004 9:23 am
I found a nice site to the topic. It has some good articels and a chip8 tutorial.
http://how.to/emulation
NoMis
#33062 - tepples - Thu Dec 30, 2004 4:47 pm
Are you trying to emulate the GBA on the PC (hard), or are you trying to emulate something else on the GBA (easier)? "Chip 8" was an example of a platform you could emulate on the GBA.
To 'make' a GBA emulator, all you really have to do is download the VisualBoyAdvance source code and run 'make'.
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#33113 - Torlus - Thu Dec 30, 2004 10:28 pm
Yeah, you should try to emulate a PC on the GBA :)
To be a bit more serious, demo/game coders usually try to use all GBA's GPU features, so emulating only modes 0 & 4 is pointless.
I contribute(d) to GPAdvance, a GBA emu for GP32 that is based on the fact that a ARM9 is able to run ARM7 code (no need to emulate the processor itself). GP32 ARM9 proc can reach 200Mhz which seems much compared to GBA's 16Mhz.
But even with all graphic modes emulated (with the help of VisualBoyAdvance source code), we're far from getting a good emulation. Some homebrew and even commercial games work, but the large majority of them don't.
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#33127 - ffly - Fri Dec 31, 2004 12:34 am
| Quote: |
To be a bit more serious, demo/game coders usually try to use all GBA's GPU features, so emulating only modes 0 & 4 is pointless.
I contribute(d) to GPAdvance, a GBA emu for GP32 that is based on the fact that a ARM9 is able to run ARM7 code (no need to emulate the processor itself). GP32 ARM9 proc can reach 200Mhz which seems much compared to GBA's 16Mhz.
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Very interesting indeed! How are you doing it? Are you just monitoring memory writes? If so, how are you doing it?
#33572 - ffly - Wed Jan 05, 2005 5:29 pm
What is the min. GBA hardware that can run most of the PD games?