Homebrew New VBA GX fork (2.3.0)

[nakata6790]

No sorcery, just common sense

Check the pics my previous post.
Download the VBA dol from the first post of this thread. Use the same settings i do and that's it. Just point to the correct folders (i personally have my covers in /vbagx/covers folder and they are in .png format. Size should be no more than 260X260.

Btw, you can google for a complete GBA romset & covers 2d and 3d for VBA GX. It is for an older version, but substitute that for this one (overwrite the .dol files) and the covers still work.

 

[ShadowOne333]

No sorcery, just common sense

Check the pics my previous post.
Download the VBA dol from the first post of this thread. Use the same settings i do and that's it. Just point to the correct folders (i personally have my covers in /vbagx/covers folder and they are in .png format. Size should be no more than 260X260.

Btw, you can google for a complete GBA romset & covers 2d and 3d for VBA GX. It is for an older version, but substitute that for this one (overwrite the .dol files) and the covers still work.

He can use the Wiiflow covers for GBA games too?
I have those ones but I don't know if they are compatible or not.

On a side not, I now have two versions of VBAGX in my SD, one is 2.3.0 for GBA games exclusively and the other is 2.2.8 to play any GB game to work with custom palettes properly.
I even did a custom icon for it haha

 

[nakata6790]

If they are in .png format and the correct size, you can. Give it a shot

Hey man, a small tip: You can use Goomba color to make a rom with gb games and force GBC palettes or SGB borders. Just make sure that the goomba rom is smaller than 8MB. Those act like GBA roms and on startup let you choose from the gb games included in the rom, as well as choose border and palette. Goomba roms work on VBA GX 2.3.0 as well as Retroarch's VBA Next core.

 

[ShadowOne333]

If they are in .png format and the correct size, you can. Give it a shot

Hey man, a small tip: You can use Goomba color to make a rom with gb games and force GBC palettes or SGB borders. Just make sure that the goomba rom is smaller than 8MB. Those act like GBA roms and on startup let you choose from the gb games included in the rom, as well as choose border and palette. Goomba roms work on VBA GX 2.3.0 as well as Retroarch's VBA Next core.

Wow that sounds awesome!
Do you know if Goomba Color also has an option to use SGB palettes intead of GBC, or just GBC palettes?
Does it need a gbc bios?

 

[nakata6790]

it does not need gbc bios. I think there are forks of goomba with many more palettes than the 20 within goomba color. Check here as well: http://kuwanger.net/gba/goomba/

 

[ShadowOne333]

it does not need gbc bios. I think there are forks of goomba with many more palettes than the 20 within goomba color. Check here as well: http://kuwanger.net/gba/goomba/

Great! Thanks for the help!
So should I go for the Goomba Fork instead of the Goomba Color one?

 

[Apostrophe]

No sorcery, just common sense

Check the pics my previous post.
Download the VBA dol from the first post of this thread. Use the same settings i do and that's it. Just point to the correct folders (i personally have my covers in /vbagx/covers folder and they are in .png format. Size should be no more than 260X260.

Btw, you can google for a complete GBA romset & covers 2d and 3d for VBA GX. It is for an older version, but substitute that for this one (overwrite the .dol files) and the covers still work.

Alright, I changed the screenshots folder to /vbagx/covers/ and put a Fire Emblem.gba.png in there with a 256x256 dimension. But there's still no cover showing up. Are you giving the covers a specific name?

 

[nakata6790]

Great! Thanks for the help!
So should I go for the Goomba Fork instead of the Goomba Color one?

I personally can vouch for the default goomba color, games like Super Mario Land 2, SML 1 and others look great. Besides, the rom builder (goombafront.exe) asks you if you wanna use a full catalogue of palettes & SGB borders or just the 20 or so GBC ones.
Try that and if you are not satisfied, try the fork.

Alright, I changed the screenshots folder to /vbagx/covers/ and put a Fire Emblem.gba.png in there with a 256x256 dimension. But there's still no cover showing up. Are you giving the covers a specific name?

The cover must have the exact name as the rom. If the rom is named Super Mario Advance.gba, then the cover must be named Super Mario Advance.png. You must remove the .gba part from the cover's name

 

[Apostrophe]

The cover must have the exact name as the rom. If the rom is named Super Mario Advance.gba, then the cover must be named Super Mario Advance.png. You must remove the .gba part from the cover's name

Awesome that did the trick! Thank you. Now if only this could be done for Snes9x GX and FCE Ultra GX, that would be amazing.

 

[nakata6790]

Awesome that did the trick! Thank you. Now if only this could be done for Snes9x GX and FCE Ultra GX, that would be amazing.

Hahaha...it is your lucky day!
http://gbatemp.net/threads/snes9xgx-fceugx-and-vbagx-with-screenshots-support.366990/

Also, i repeat. There is a ready made collection for FCE Ultra GX, VBA GX and Snes9x GX with roms and covers, just google it .

 

[Apostrophe]

Hahaha...it is your lucky day!
http://gbatemp.net/threads/snes9xgx-fceugx-and-vbagx-with-screenshots-support.366990/

Also, i repeat. There is a ready made collection for FCE Ultra GX, VBA GX and Snes9x GX with roms and covers, just google it .

OH MY GOD. Thank you! This is awesome.

 

[ShadowOne333]

WOA WOA WOAAAA!
There is something screwed up in this!

I loaded up Pokemon Crystal, my last save was right in front of the nurse in a Pokemon Center.
I started walking to the PC and got a call from a random trainer, no issues there.
At two steps away from the PC, I got ANOTHER call from the SAME trainer (odd... well not that odd since it's my only registered trainer ).

Verified some things in the PC, ok. On my way out, got another 3 calls from the same one...
Got out, walked for a while and got a shitload of calls.

Here is the funny thing...
I opened up the menu, entered the PokeGear, and the time is all fucked up!
It's going ahead one hour every second, then one whole day shifting from Thursday to Friday then Saturday in like 10 seconds.
A whole freaking week in-game went by in less than 20 seconds.

My guess is that something regarding the internal clock in the emulator got changed in such a severed way.
It affected that game in such weird way.
I haven't tried GBA games yet to verify if the GBA games are affected by this too.

Will check it out...

I'm not liking this, I guess I will have to sacrifice Frameskipping switching, I will go back to 2.2.8. :/

 

[Magnus87]

Sorry for the semi-OT
Mame for Wii needs a new Frontend.

is not possible use Libwiigui like to vbagx?

 

[Bladexdsl]

Why so tense?

If you look carefully, you can use 2D or 3D covers or even pics in 2.3.0 The only difference in the one you posted is that is not separated per letter in folders and that the games are stacked horizontally.

o wellz i'll just stick to 2.2.8 with the cover mod. games run fine for me as you can see in my vids.

 

[libertyernie]

The custom palettes not working probably has something to do with the VBA-M core being updated. Same with that weird Crystal bug (I could probably test that with Gold/Silver too, right?)

I haven't been checking this thread much, but I have recently been working on two new features. One is the 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1 pixel ratio options - these are done, and when enabled they just override the zoom settings.
The other is SGB borders. I only had to fix the pitch value to get them to work. But I still need to add a setting, and it would be really nice if you could load custom borders - especially since borders don't load in GBC mode.
(Goomba Color handles this by booting the game in SGB first with SRAM off, then booting again in GBC mode once the border loads. But I'm not sure I want to do this if I can get custom borders working.)

 

[ShadowOne333]

The custom palettes not working probably has something to do with the VBA-M core being updated. Same with that weird Crystal bug (I could probably test that with Gold/Silver too, right?)

I haven't been checking this thread much, but I have recently been working on two new features. One is the 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1 pixel ratio options - these are done, and when enabled they just override the zoom settings.
The other is SGB borders. I only had to fix the pitch value to get them to work. But I still need to add a setting, and it would be really nice if you could load custom borders - especially since borders don't load in GBC mode.
(Goomba Color handles this by booting the game in SGB first with SRAM off, then booting again in GBC mode once the border loads. But I'm not sure I want to do this if I can get custom borders working.)

So far only Crystal/Gold/Silver seems to be affected. I cannot say for Fire Red or other GBA (Emerald doesn't have a clock in-game as far as I know, but I played it like an hour to be sure and nothing out of the usual stuff).

Custom palettes is handed by the VBA-M core itself? Can't the custom palettes code be left like it was on 2.2.8 and compiled like that in the new revision?

Also, glad to know that you are still working on this project.
Really appreciated and I am thankful for your work so far. I've been finally enjoying Pokemon Emerald just fine without that nagging frameskipping and jumpy sprites.
Even more awesome is the fact that you are working on SGB borders! I was expecting this since a long time ago! THANK YOU!

One question, what is the 1:1, 2:1 and 3:1 options?

Is it something like this:

You can see the different in the pixels rather quickly. I am not using anything different, no filters or anything, just the default settings in both emulators.
IS that what you are refering to?

 

[SuperrSonic]

...

Suggestion1: Change both viWidth(video encoder) modes to 704, this will get the pixel aspect ratio of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance to show up correctly in Wii pixels. It's especially helpful if using 2x scaling, you'll easily spot a major difference in how wide the image is supposed to be. Nintendo did something similar by using a lower horizontal resolution (608) and the video encoder upscaling to 666.

Suggestion2: Remove the vfilter (deflicker), according to the source it is only enabled in "filtered" mode.
In theory the deflicker filter here only serves to blur the display which is already using bilinear filtering.
I did some eye tests with the Game Boy Player and removing deflicker in VBA made it extremely similar in quality.
In short this should improve the output image quality when using bilinear(filtered mode) for both 480i and 480p signals.

It's all in video.cpp

One question, what is the 1:1, 2:1 and 3:1 options?

He probably means perfect, unfiltered scaling. For GBA it's 480x320(2x), 720x480(3x), it explains why he said it overrides zoom options.
3x for GBA requires a widescreen TV and some hacks. A Wii U gamepad is perfect for this because vertical overscan is not a problem.

 

[libertyernie]

1x, 2x and 3x video modes are looking good on Dolphin, and on a TV set to 4:3 mode.
Is there a way to get the Wii to render as widescreen, and not just squish everything to a 640x480 picture? Does the viWidth do that? That way it might be possible to get 1:1 on the GamePad with no filtering or resizing.

I think I might have fixed the palette thing (mostly by using the old gbGfx.cpp instead of the new one), BUT I have a problem with this Super Mario Land palette. Whenever I open/close the vba-gx menu, Mario's colors get messed up. The thing is, this also happens on 2.2.8!

<game name="SUPER MARIOLAND" use="1">
    <bkgr c0="0x90A0FF" c1="0x80AD00" c2="0x636300" c3="0x301800" />
    <wind c0="0xFFFF40" c1="0xADAD00" c2="0x636300" c3="0x000000" />
    <obj0 c0="0xFFE080" c1="0x0000AD" c2="0xFF0000" />
    <obj1 c0="0xFFFFFF" c1="0xADADAD" c2="0x636363" />

 

[ShadowOne333]

1x, 2x and 3x video modes are looking good on Dolphin, and on a TV set to 4:3 mode.
Is there a way to get the Wii to render as widescreen, and not just squish everything to a 640x480 picture? Does the viWidth do that? That way it might be possible to get 1:1 on the GamePad with no filtering or resizing.

I think I might have fixed the palette thing (mostly by using the old gbGfx.cpp instead of the new one), BUT I have a problem with this Super Mario Land palette. Whenever I open/close the vba-gx menu, Mario's colors get messed up. The thing is, this also happens on 2.2.8!

<game name="SUPER MARIOLAND" use="1">
    <bkgr c0="0x90A0FF" c1="0x80AD00" c2="0x636300" c3="0x301800" />
    <wind c0="0xFFFF40" c1="0xADAD00" c2="0x636300" c3="0x000000" />
    <obj0 c0="0xFFE080" c1="0x0000AD" c2="0xFF0000" />
    <obj1 c0="0xFFFFFF" c1="0xADADAD" c2="0x636363" />

Well if it happened in 2.2.8, that's fine with me
I use the colorized hack for Super Mario Land 1 (and SML2 too but that one loads screwed up tiles :/ Only VBA-Next opens it properly) so no harm in that one.

Many, MANY thanks for keep working on this!
Seriously! I thank you from the bottom of my soul XD

Also, hope my reports about somethings not working well do not nag you. I just wanted to report some bugs and give some good feedback

 

[SuperrSonic]

1x, 2x and 3x video modes are looking good on Dolphin, and on a TV set to 4:3 mode.
Is there a way to get the Wii to render as widescreen, and not just squish everything to a 640x480 picture? Does the viWidth do that? That way it might be possible to get 1:1 on the GamePad with no filtering or resizing.

No, 3x for GBA is complicated, it was sort of figured out on RetroArch because of the custom resolutions.
The user used screen resolution 530x480, the game image set to 480x480, viWidth to 656 and let the widescreen TV stretch the image. This creates a simulated 3x because the Wii can't render to 720x480, viWidth only upscales to 720.
VBAGX is missing custom resolution support so it would take some work to port them over from something like snes9xgx.