Homebrew Will GBA emulators ever fully work?

Imaginesafety

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Is there an issue with the 3ds that's holding devs back? Will they be able to overcome it so we have smooth gameplay and sound? Mgba is showing promise. I know most New 3ds users are getting great frame rates, but usually bad sound. Are we close to achieving perfect emulation, or is it impossible? BlargSnes runs great on my o3ds (IMG below, can't upload video for some reason) I just hope I can play gba games the same way.

P.S Extra questions. Do you ever think we'll achieve something like Usbloadergx, but for SD Cards on 3ds? And maybe one day NDS emulator? I hope we will, but I doubt we will see one if we don't get GBA working first :)
 

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The Real Jdbye

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It's still early in the 3DS homebrew scene, and it hasn't matured yet. I believe fullspeed GBA emulation will happen eventually given enough interest, but the homebrew scene has been really slow for anything other than CFW, and it's already late in the 3DS' life. It's certainly powerful enough though. It all depends on if the homebrew scene will pick up speed before it's too late.
 

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I wondered that too. The PSP currently runs GBA games better with sound, which is weird because it has weaker specs and it uses different architecture (MIPS) instead of the GBA's and 3DS's ARM.
The PSP also had a homebrew scene from practically launch day. Just give it time. :)
 

suloku

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There's no dynarec access with current exploit. PSP is actually more powerful than o3ds (don't know about N3ds). With a kernel exploit perfomarnce will improve.
If nintendo does it, homebrew can too.
Booting nds titles from SD is a different story though.
 

gamesquest1

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even blargsnes is far from "fully-working" yeah its good, but not perfect and has its bugs psp got so much attention for homebrew as at the time it was pretty much the only realistic consumer grade/priced handheld with homebrew capabilities (disregarding all the relatively niche open source machines like GP2x and pandora etc as lets face it they didnt really "take off" for the general end user and mostly relied on emulators for their gaming content, while most people actually want new titles + emulation)

with more powerful phones offering specs worthy of running emulators and open platforms being a thing, and having legal SDK's available to work with, and programmers being able to actually profit from their work, i think most dev's have shifted focus away from homebrew and onto flappybird clones,angry birds clones, paid for emulators and in app purchase riddled games on platforms such as iOS and android, all thats left is the more die hard homebrew devs who simply do it for fun rather than it being the best platform for their work to get the most appreciation/recognition from, and as such progress is much slower than in previous generations (i.e original xbox, wii, psp)
 
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Julizi

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I can't understand why people want emulators. They rather should concentrate on VC-Injecting/AGB-Firm Methods. Native is always better than emulated.
 
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Ryupower

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I can't understand why people want emulators. They rather should concentrate on VC-Injecting/AGB-Firm Methods. Native is always better than emulated.

not everyone can do(people on newer FW 9.2+) or want to do(some people to not want to mess with the 3ds NAND) to do VC-Injecting/AGB-Firm Methods.

emulators can be safer
 

kontrolaltdelete

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Is there an issue with the 3ds that's holding devs back? Will they be able to overcome it so we have smooth gameplay and sound? Mgba is showing promise. I know most New 3ds users are getting great frame rates, but usually bad sound. Are we close to achieving perfect emulation, or is it impossible? BlargSnes runs great on my o3ds (IMG below, can't upload video for some reason) I just hope I can play gba games the same way.

P.S Extra questions. Do you ever think we'll achieve something like Usbloadergx, but for SD Cards on 3ds? And maybe one day NDS emulator? I hope we will, but I doubt we will see one if we don't get GBA working first :)

Why not just buy a DSTwo or buy Drastic and get Retroarch for Android? The DSTwo works great and so do emulators for phones. Both options are inexpensive and efficient.
 
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There's no dynarec access with current exploit. PSP is actually more powerful than o3ds (don't know about N3ds). With a kernel exploit perfomarnce will improve.
If nintendo does it, homebrew can too.
Booting nds titles from SD is a different story though.
nds from SD is already a thing. Sudokuhax...
 
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doctorgoat

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I can't understand why people want emulators. They rather should concentrate on VC-Injecting/AGB-Firm Methods. Native is always better than emulated.

I'd rather have emulated, actually. The "native" thing isn't going to work in every case or I think Nintendo would've released a lot more GBA games on the VC.

Savestates, fast forward, and cheats are also a really, really good thing.
 

link6155

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Why do people keep asking this? People don't understand how much effort it takes to emulate a system.

Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program in an electronic device to emulate (imitate) another program or device.

To be able to do this, you need hardware that's superior to the original console first. Then you have to make a program (the emulator) that sits between the hardware and ROM, this program has to be able to translate what the ROM is 'saying' into what the computer can understand (emulation). This is a difficult task because unlike games running natively on the original console, games on an emulator don't have a direct access to the hardware. GBA emulation is certainly possible on the 3DS, but it will take some time before we get perfectly optimized emulation (especially for the old 3DS). A lot of the 3DS hardware is still be discovered by homebrewers, at this point we don't know the true potential the 3DS has.

I don't see an NDS emulator anytime soon. The reason being that there are flashcarts that can play NDS games on your 3DS, basically making emulation near pointless. The only real benifit of emulating NDS games is that you won't need to buy a flashcart.

Something like Usbloadergx is not going to happen with the Homebrew Launcher. The main reason is that the Homebrew Launcher is strictly for Homebrews only, Smea condemns pirating 3DS games for obvious reasons. If you could sideload 3DS ROMs, this would catch Nintendo's attention pretty quickly and we'll have no more Homebrews altogether.
 
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Why do people keep asking this? People don't understand how much effort it takes to emulate a system.

Emulation refers to the ability of a computer program in an electronic device to emulate (imitate) another program or device.

To be able to do this, you need hardware that's superior to the original console first. Then you have to make a program (the emulator) that sits between the hardware and ROM, this program has to be able to translate what the ROM is 'saying' into what the computer can understand (emulation). This is a difficult task because unlike games running natively on the original console, games on an emulator don't have a direct access to the hardware. GBA emulation is certainly possible on the 3DS, but it will take some time before we get perfectly optimized emulation (especially for the old 3DS). A lot of the 3DS hardware is still be discovered by homebrewers, at this point we don't know the true potential the 3DS has.

I don't see an NDS emulator anytime soon. The reason being that there are flashcarts that can play NDS games on your 3DS, basically making emulation near pointless. The only real benifit of emulating NDS games is that you won't need to buy a flashcart.

Something like Usbloadergx is not going to happen with the Homebrew Launcher. The main reason is that the Homebrew Launcher is strictly for Homebrews only, Smea condemns pirating 3DS games for obvious reasons. If you could sideload 3DS ROMs, this would catch Nintendo's attention pretty quickly and we'll have no more Homebrews altogether.
NDS exists. Sudokuhax. The only problem is that it intentionally corrupts the decryption keys. They did that to prevent piracy.
 
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