#37823 - abigsmurf - Thu Mar 17, 2005 12:20 pm
now that the method for homebrew is established and lots of the basic 2d functionality is sorted, has anyone started work on porting emulators over?
I would have thought that GBA emulators which don't have a large amount of ASM would be fairly straitforward to port over now. Please don't flame me for asking this, I know I lack knowledge of emulator programming and that they take a long time to produce but I was just wondering if any ports have been started?
#37824 - Vince - Thu Mar 17, 2005 2:03 pm
Hello,
| Quote: |
| I would have thought that GBA emulators which don't have a large amount of ASM would be fairly straitforward to port over now |
There are no such emulators AFAIK on the GBA. Almost every GBA emu is hand crafted assembly to make use of every machine cycle available. DrSMS, for instance, is pure hand-writtren ARM asssembly. I suppose Goomba and PocketNes are the same (check the sources to be sure).
So, you are (somewhat) wrong here because of the above point. On the other hand, however, the differences between the DS and the GBA are small if you are running code on the ARM7, which is the same CPU as in the GBA. This facilitates porting a lot.
I think that the lack of emulators/ports at the moment is simply due to non-widely available DS flashcarts : natrium42 passme requires some HW and soldering skills, which pure software writers may not have. There is little interest in writing software that only a few can use.
Keep also in mind that the HW is not completely understood either (atm, IIRC, DS code is simply GBA code wrapped into redirection routines, with the exception of touch screen control).
HTH and that I'm right as well,
Vince
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#37826 - MumblyJoe - Thu Mar 17, 2005 2:50 pm
Vince is mostly right for all purposes, but whats really important is that we are still at the "tech demo" stage of development where people are doing "look I got tetris/frogger/whatever on the DS!" so emulators to run on the DS are a little while off for the moment.
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#37828 - Lupin - Thu Mar 17, 2005 3:34 pm
Isn't ARM7 ASM compatible to ARM9? Wouldn't it be possible to just compile the ARM7 code as ARM9 without large changes?
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#37842 - olimar - Thu Mar 17, 2005 7:47 pm
Last edited by olimar on Wed Aug 20, 2008 9:26 pm; edited 1 time in total
#37846 - ampz - Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:04 pm
| Lupin wrote: |
| Isn't ARM7 ASM compatible to ARM9? Wouldn't it be possible to just compile the ARM7 code as ARM9 without large changes? |
Yes. I think the ARM9 instruction set is completely backwards compatible with the ARM7, except that the instruction timing is different. Instructions can take more or less time to execute than on the ARM7.
#37875 - tepples - Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:02 am
| ampz wrote: |
| I think the ARM9 instruction set is completely backwards compatible with the ARM7, except that the instruction timing is different. Instructions can take more or less time to execute than on the ARM7. |
Will it really matter in the short run? Unlike NES programs, GBA programs (and, I'm assuming, Nintendo DS programs) don't require exact cycle timing to create raster effects, as the GBA and newer systems have enough interrupts available to make cycle-timed code unnecessary in 99+ percent of cases, although you will be able to squeeze out more speed by making code cache-friendly.
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#37878 - assassda - Fri Mar 18, 2005 3:18 am
for NES we dont need a new one
now with 4 buttons, genesis and snes
it would be so cool to have a touch inferface for choosing roms options etc and fairly easy to code