Hacking Any information on TempGBA4PSP

[TecXero]

I came across an emulator that I can find little information on. The only information I could find about it was from another thread on this site http://gbatemp.net/threads/tempgba4psp.361298/

I'm wondering if anyone can give me more information on it and how well it stacks against gpSP (and its unofficial forks). I know that TempGBA is made by Nebuleon but according to the above thread it's been modified by someone else. From what I've noticed it seems comparable to gpSP-J, though I haven't tested it enough to say if it's more compatible or faster than gpSP-J. Any information on it would be great.

Here's a link to the revision I know of, there might be a newer version. Please share if you do know of a newer version.

http://www2.axfc.net/uploader/so/3057449

Also, if anyone wants to take the time to translate the documentation that comes with the emulator, please share. I'd be very grateful.

 

[Kingofknights]

hi, as someone who had been trying to find an emulator on psp that can run Golden sun properly. TempGBA is the only emulator can do that job. Each emulator has its strenght. gpSp kai UO has the best speed out of three but low compatiliy (cannot run kingdom heart, megaman zero has glitch, golden sun lag like hell in battle). gpSP is better compatility than Kai UO (can run kingdom heart perfectly, megaman zero does not have glitch but slow on boss battle, Golden Sun lag just like in Kai maybe more). TempGba is well, i haven't tested it much but Golden Sun and its sequel The Lost Age are emulated almost perfect on TempGBA. So you can not compare those emulator. I suggest having all of them in your MS bc different games demand different emulator. Hope this help :d

 

[FailName]

Navigating with the help of google translate, I searched the site and found a slightly newer version dated October 20 rather than October 13.

http://www1.axfc.net/uploader/so/3063963

Since I don't know Japanese, I can't translate the documentation that comes with it, but running them through google translate doesn't seem to give me any no changelogs or any sort of list of improvements over other psp emulators. They're mostly talking about things such as how you should dump the BIOS and games yourself (readme-first.txt), defining the directories (directory.txt), and walking you through the settings (readme.txt). The only thing that I found in this emulator that I wouldn't think applies to the other gba emulators for psp this the line in thanks.txt:

"This software is based on gpSP kai 3.1 takka of Mr., the TempGBA of Mr. Nebuleon."

The thread you linked to includes many games that TempGBA4PSP seems to work better/worse in. I, personally, only played Mario Tennis and Golden Sun in it, and they seem to work much better than gPSP Kai or gPSP J. I'll still use Kai for most of my other games though.

 

[VGA]

With Frameskip set to AUTO, Golden Sun runs pretty good on gpsp for me, even in battles. I've been using that game to compare the different gpsp forks. I will test this one, too.

 

[TecXero]

hi, as someone who had been trying to find an emulator on psp that can run Golden sun properly. TempGBA is the only emulator can do that job. Each emulator has its strenght. gpSp kai UO has the best speed out of three but low compatiliy (cannot run kingdom heart, megaman zero has glitch, golden sun lag like hell in battle). gpSP is better compatility than Kai UO (can run kingdom heart perfectly, megaman zero does not have glitch but slow on boss battle, Golden Sun lag just like in Kai maybe more). TempGba is well, i haven't tested it much but Golden Sun and its sequel The Lost Age are emulated almost perfect on TempGBA. So you can not compare those emulator. I suggest having all of them in your MS bc different games demand different emulator. Hope this help :d

I have a few different forks installed on my PSP. Mainly the original gpSP by Exophase, gpSP-J, and now TempGBA. I've seen a lot of explanations why there isn't the perfect GBA emulator for the PSP, so I've had different forks throughout the past few years. I'm just trying to figure out what the advantages are to this TempGBA fork. I'll probably test it out some once I get the time.

Navigating with the help of google translate, I searched the site and found a slightly newer version dated October 20 rather than October 13.

http://www1.axfc.net/uploader/so/3063963

Since I don't know Japanese, I can't translate the documentation that comes with it, but running them through google translate doesn't seem to give me any no changelogs or any sort of list of improvements over other psp emulators. They're mostly talking about things such as how you should dump the BIOS and games yourself (readme-first.txt), defining the directories (directory.txt), and walking you through the settings (readme.txt). The only thing that I found in this emulator that I wouldn't think applies to the other gba emulators for psp this the line in thanks.txt:

"This software is based on gpSP kai 3.1 takka of Mr., the TempGBA of Mr. Nebuleon."

The thread you linked to includes many games that TempGBA4PSP seems to work better/worse in. I, personally, only played Mario Tennis and Golden Sun in it, and they seem to work much better than gPSP Kai or gPSP J. I'll still use Kai for most of my other games though.

Thank you for the find. Wish I could find a changelog to these.

Overall, I just find it odd how little information about this fork there is on English sites.

 

[VGA]

I think it's a fork of gpsp-j ?

Anyway, like gpsp-J, this tempGBA emu runs considerably slower in mode7 screens, like final fantasy ... 4 I think (?). It's one of the games I use for testing. tempGBA does seem to run Golden Sun almost perfectly without frameskip. I haven't tried the intro of Kingdom Hearts yet.

I've seen a lot of explanations why there isn't the perfect GBA emulator for the PSP

I find this interesting, can you explain or give links ?

 

[FailName]

I find this interesting, can you explain or give links ?

From the thread linked in the first post:

So the Japanese person may have taken my version, but then attempted to improved some games, which happened to be at the expense of Metroid Zero Mission and Mother 3. My version doesn't crackle or pop in either, but that's for the DSTwo and GCW Zero.

For the record, what happened with Unofficial gpSP Kai was that Takka took great pain to fix some things in Final Fantasy, Dragonball Z and possibly other games, but this broke some different games. It was a similar thing to what I think happened with gpSP-J and now this TempGBA4PSP.

 

[TecXero]

I find this interesting, can you explain or give links ?

I'll explain it the best I can. I'm not a dev and my coding skills are rudimentary at best.

There's a few things that go into it. The emulator was originally made by Exophase, he's going to understand it the best. The different forks have had a lot of work put into them, but they're not made by Exophase so those devs aren't going to have the same understanding and have to put a lot more time into optimizing the code after any changes they make and make sure their changes don't break anything.

Exophase never got far enough along to implement High Level Emulation. That's why it needs the BIOS. Low Level Emulation is more precise and has less debugging that needs done, but it runs really slow. They use exceptions and hacks for specific ROMs to get a lot of the games to run faster. Also, it's very reliant on Frameskip. It tends to be unstable for games that haven't been properly added to the cfg list or games that use something nonstandard, like KHCoM's cutscenes.

I might be misinforming you. Anyone, please correct me on anything I put wrong here. It's been years since I looked into this kind of stuff. Last time I really looked this indepth into any emulation was when I was talking to Exophase and Kreationz back when DaedalusX64 was still bustling with activity.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

TecXero
in #8

You are right about it being Exophase's code at first. It was improved upon by 2 people in succession, which were Takka (for game fixes) and myself (for optimisations that attempt not to break games, but fix very few). Optimisations mean that less frameskip is needed in auto mode, and that you can run more games with lower manual frameskips. Game fixes mean that some crashes (of the entire emulator) and hangs (of a game, during which you can still return to the menu) are fixed.

Then TempGBA4PSP is TempGBA (i.e. us 3 people's code) improved by a Japanese person, with game fixes for less crashing, and yet more optimisations that are PSP-specific. The source code was released in such a way that I don't know which code changes fixes or improves what, in what game(s), and which code is more optimised because it's PSP-specific or which code is optimised because it's a new algorithm that runs in less time on all platforms.

Due to the language barrier, I cannot communicate with the Japanese person who modified the code either.

You're also right about other developers not understanding Exophase's code as much as Exophase - but Exophase told me he didn't care at all about the code anymore. Here's some background information about this, starting at post #458 in /NDS/Flashcarts/Supercard/TempGBA: NDSGBA revival. It took me about 4 months to optimise games without making them crash, but also fixing only 2 games that had a very specific ARM emulation bug (code being executed as both ARM and Thumb). Kingdom Hearts still froze at the end of its introduction. Meh.

And for the record, I'm better at optimising than fixing or implementing from scratch

edit: Did you look into the TempGBA4PSP thread at GBATemp?

 

[TecXero]

TecXero
in #8

You are right about it being Exophase's code at first. It was improved upon by 2 people in succession, which were Takka (for game fixes) and myself (for optimisations that attempt not to break games, but fix very few). Optimisations mean that less frameskip is needed in auto mode, and that you can run more games with lower manual frameskips. Game fixes mean that some crashes (of the entire emulator) and hangs (of a game, during which you can still return to the menu) are fixed.

Then TempGBA4PSP is TempGBA (i.e. us 3 people's code) improved by a Japanese person, with game fixes for less crashing, and yet more optimisations that are PSP-specific. The source code was released in such a way that I don't know which code changes fixes or improves what, in what game(s), and which code is more optimised because it's PSP-specific or which code is optimised because it's a new algorithm that runs in less time on all platforms.

Due to the language barrier, I cannot communicate with the Japanese person who modified the code either.

You're also right about other developers not understanding Exophase's code as much as Exophase - but Exophase told me he didn't care at all about the code anymore. Here's some background information about this, starting at post #458 in /NDS/Flashcarts/Supercard/TempGBA: NDSGBA revival. It took me about 4 months to optimise games without making them crash, but also fixing only 2 games that had a very specific ARM emulation bug (code being executed as both ARM and Thumb). Kingdom Hearts still froze at the end of its introduction. Meh.

And for the record, I'm better at optimising than fixing or implementing from scratch

edit: Did you look into the TempGBA4PSP thread at GBATemp?

Yeah, that's the thread I linked in the OP. It's the only thing I could find Googling around about this fork. I just found it really strange how little information there was and the lack of interest in it. Also thanks for taking the time for responding to this thread. I have a lot of respect for coders like you and Exophase. I even avoided forks of gpSP for the longest time out of respect. Sorry about the clump of text, I'm on my PSP right now.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

Yeah, that's the thread I linked in the OP. It's the only thing I could find Googling around about this fork. I just found it really strange how little information there was and the lack of interest in it. Also thanks for taking the time for responding to this thread. I have a lot of respect for coders like you and Exophase. I even avoided forks of gpSP for the longest time out of respect. Sorry about the clump of text, I'm on my PSP right now.

I'd say use the forks Forks are the best thing about open source, but only if they're maintained well and contribute to either each other or a common upstream once in a while. Exophase didn't like the lack of contributions to his repository from others. That's a given, really, for open source software.

I prefer VBA-M for the GBA. It demands a gigahertz or so, though, for good emulation.

 

[TecXero]

I'd say use the forks Forks are the best thing about open source, but only if they're maintained well and contribute to either each other or a common upstream once in a while. Exophase didn't like the lack of contributions to his repository from others. That's a given, really, for open source software.

I prefer VBA-M for the GBA. It demands a gigahertz or so, though, for good emulation.

When I got back into homebrew recently, I did end up using gpSP-J simply due to how much has been improved over the past six years I was gone. This GBATemp4PSP also seems like a great fork. I've been using it this past week and seems to have the speed of gpSP-J but slightly more compatible. I haven't run into any games in my library that require me to use a different fork than this one, so far. Unfortunately, I don't have a large library yet, as all my ROMs I've dumped from cartridges I own, so I can't do an extensive compatibility check.

PSP is still my preferred pocket device. I know a lot of people have switched to using smart phones or Vitas for homebrew, but the PSP just has great controls and homebrew support. I have been watching the vita scene, but so far they're still struggling with getting PSP homebrew to run on it, due to the lack of ME and Vita mode access. I think smart phones are great but lack of proper controls kills that as a gaming device for me. Other enjoy them, which is great, but it's not for me. I have looked at open handhelds like the Pandora from Open Pandora, but currently money is an issue.

VBA-M is great, I have it on my laptop, desktop, and a port on my Wii. I'll probably grab a Vita this year since it has been out for a while now to built up a library of games, though I doubt Ill mess with brewing it until towards the end of its lifespan.

 

[Flame]

I'd say use the forks Forks are the best thing about open source, but only if they're maintained well and contribute to either each other or a common upstream once in a while. Exophase didn't like the lack of contributions to his repository from others. That's a given, really, for open source software.

I prefer VBA-M for the GBA. It demands a gigahertz or so, though, for good emulation.

why dont you join the VBA-M team... I know some of the people of VBA-M team and could help you join them.

but with your work, they will have no problem allowing you if you ask yourself.

 

[Deleted member 319809]

why dont you join the VBA-M team... I know some of the people of VBA-M team and could help you join them.

but with your work, they will have no problem allowing you if you ask yourself.

VBA is already nearly perfect. I don't think I'd do much that isn't already done.