Homebrew OPEN_AGB_FIRM discussion thread
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wow this is generous thank you
Pokemon FRLG/RSE 386 hacks
all the Mega Man Battle Network games
Metroid: Zero Mission
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Unfortunately on my N3DS XL this still looks dingy compared to VC. Hopefully better brightness control will be implemented at some point.
Larger brightness range is coming if my pull request is merged, but in the meantime you can also set the outGamma to 2.2 for a brighter/more accurate color scheme
Random quick question independent of my inquiry for help below:
Since this is more akin to the likes of Nintendont on Wii/Wii U rather than an actual emulator, what would this mean for the implementation of certain emulation functions, particularly a custom frame cap / game speed setting that accordingly adjusts the audio speed and pitch with no stretching? (both Dolphin and mGBA on PC have such a function, mGBA's gui even allowing for rediculous fractions like 57.1832fps...though Dolphin can do the same if you edit the according config file manually).
While I'd love to see such a function, I'm totally not holding my breath as this isn't really a request so much as it is me trying to understand what sort of inherent limitations this has with regards to future theoretical feature development vs that of a traditional emulator.
I must be a derp or something. I followed the "3ds.hacks.guide"...uh, guide to a T today (with the single exception of instead using Nanquitas' 3GX luma3ds fork rather than the vanilla luma3ds) on my original 3DS that hadn't been modded at all and was gathering dust for the last couple years, and sure enough everything and all of the steps in the guide "just worked". I'm even able to load open_agb_firm via luma3ds's chainloader perfectly fine by holding the start button when powering on the console.
Yet for whatever reason, when I try to use v2.0 of your "Open AGB Launcher", I get an error that nobody else seems to have reported - it says "bad firm location" when I try to launch whether via 3DSX or CIA. Then the screen goes black and then returns back to the system menu. This also happens regardless of whether there's a "GBA.firm" in the root of my SD card or not, though from what it sounds like it shouldn't be necessary as it should be able to find the "open_agb_firm.firm" located in sd:\luma\payloads
So yeah, any idea what I'm doing wrong, if anything?
I even humored myself and installed fastboot3ds, yet that made no difference and honestly has certain behavior that I do not prefer (I like having luma3ds CFW active even when the SD card is removed). Therefore I rolled back to the SysNAND that was made at the end of the "3ds.hacks.guide"...uh, guide and re-ran the SafeB9SInstaller to get things back to the way things were before fastboot3ds.
Since this is more akin to the likes of Nintendont on Wii/Wii U rather than an actual emulator, what would this mean for the implementation of certain emulation functions, particularly a custom frame cap / game speed setting that accordingly adjusts the audio speed and pitch with no stretching? (both Dolphin and mGBA on PC have such a function, mGBA's gui even allowing for rediculous fractions like 57.1832fps...though Dolphin can do the same if you edit the according config file manually).
While I'd love to see such a function, I'm totally not holding my breath as this isn't really a request so much as it is me trying to understand what sort of inherent limitations this has with regards to future theoretical feature development vs that of a traditional emulator.
I must be a derp or something. I followed the "3ds.hacks.guide"...uh, guide to a T today (with the single exception of instead using Nanquitas' 3GX luma3ds fork rather than the vanilla luma3ds) on my original 3DS that hadn't been modded at all and was gathering dust for the last couple years, and sure enough everything and all of the steps in the guide "just worked". I'm even able to load open_agb_firm via luma3ds's chainloader perfectly fine by holding the start button when powering on the console.
Yet for whatever reason, when I try to use v2.0 of your "Open AGB Launcher", I get an error that nobody else seems to have reported - it says "bad firm location" when I try to launch whether via 3DSX or CIA. Then the screen goes black and then returns back to the system menu. This also happens regardless of whether there's a "GBA.firm" in the root of my SD card or not, though from what it sounds like it shouldn't be necessary as it should be able to find the "open_agb_firm.firm" located in sd:\luma\payloads
So yeah, any idea what I'm doing wrong, if anything?
I even humored myself and installed fastboot3ds, yet that made no difference and honestly has certain behavior that I do not prefer (I like having luma3ds CFW active even when the SD card is removed). Therefore I rolled back to the SysNAND that was made at the end of the "3ds.hacks.guide"...uh, guide and re-ran the SafeB9SInstaller to get things back to the way things were before fastboot3ds.
Last edited by Nintendo Maniac,
I mean neither is Nintendont yet it has some fancier things normally only seen in emulators like the widescreen hack (though such a function is for the GBA is obviously of extremely questionable value when the GBA's 3:2 ratio already takes up a good amount of the 3DS's top screen).
Last edited by Nintendo Maniac,
Widescreen doesn't require emulation. You can patch the game binary in memory to do it, even on real hardware. People with GCLoader (and Xeno, and SD Gecko, and Action Replay) can run games in widescreen on real GameCubes.
So if I understand correctly GameBoy Advance isn't emulated but it is indeed real hardware backwards compatibility.
Is that correct?
What about game boy and game boy color?
Does the 3DS has the hardware inside?
Could something like this be used to load gameboy and game boy color games?
Is that correct?
What about game boy and game boy color?
Does the 3DS has the hardware inside?
Could something like this be used to load gameboy and game boy color games?
gb and gbc are both emulated. GBA has a hypervisor aswell as NDS. I dont believe gb and gbc could use something like this.
Hypervisor like a virtual machine?
Does this mean GBA is emulated inside a VM on the 3DS?
I figured the 3DS actually had the DS and GBA hardware inside.
Just like the PS2 has a complete PS1 inside.
They do have the actual hardware. its just be striped down to bare basics for the 3ds.
That's not accurate. The SoC contains the full GBA and DS/DSi hardware + a duct taped on top capture card. No emulation/hypervisor. Something like true widescreen is not possible because the hardware simply can't output more pixels but we can stretch the output destroying aspect ratio. DS and DSi games rendering in 3D can be modified to squash the output only to stretch it again on 3DS side to appear like it's widescreen but it's really not. You lose quite some detail horizontally due to the squashing.
A lot of mysterious problems often come down to the SD card starting to fail – in which case the best solution is to copy everything off the card (I suggest Roadkil's Unstoppable Copier rather than Windows Explorer) and test it with h2testw. (Or for a quick test, you can try an empty SD card with just boot.firm, boot.3dsx, and open_agb_fim.)
I didn't wanna leave you hanging but I also don't have a solution. I think there were other people having similar error messages and they (if memory serves) eventually worked out the reason why. Try looking at those posts and see if there's anything there to help you figure out the cause.
I've more or less given up on using the 3DS for GBA games and just ordered an RG351P since it has the correct resolution and aspect ratio for GBA, which is to say I am not likely to revisit that homebrew app. I think in the description for the app here on temp I credit the authors to the projects that make it possible, so if you think there's an actual bug in it (certainly possible), you can always take a look at the code and make your own fork.
For what it's worth (which is nothing), I tested it just now on my n3ds XL and it produced no errors. I hope you can figure out the root cause.
Sorry.
P.S.: https://gbatemp.net/threads/open_agb_firm-discussion-thread.570844/page-11#post-9285616
Last edited by Stellar,
, Reason: adding info
This is a brand new SD card I got via the Microcenter "free 32GB USB drive and microSD card" in-store coupon that they were running for the last 6 months or so on sponser-spots on various Tech-tuber videos (Linus, Jay, etc).
Hey man it's cool. Personally I'm not a big fan of using a 3DS for GBA games either for a variety of reasons (screen resolution being one of them), but the main idea was more for my not-so tech-savvy older sister who has an unmodded 2DS and I was looking to make it easy and streamlined for her to have Game Boy/Color, Game Boy Advance, and DS games all available on a single platform, so I was using my own 3DS as a sort of guinea pig to get me familiar with the process. Game Boy/Color and DS I can get set up in a very streamlined fashion via the CIAs for mGBA and TWiLight Menu++, but the requirement to hold "Start" while powering up to get to GBA games sounds like the sort of thing she'll forget how to do.
As it stands, we've historically had such a thing with her desired GB/C, GBA, and DS games rigged up on her laptop all in a single folder for the last...I dunno, almost a decade now? And I figured I'd simply rig things up in a way that the same SD card could be used on either on her PC or her 2DS in order to play the exact same games with the exact same save data - kind of in a sort of Super Game Boy / Game Boy Player sort of manner.
I will admit that the RG351P looks pretty nice, but I'd be annoyed with how the screen resolution is only ideal for the likes of 144p / 160p Game Boy games and not 224p / 240p home console games (a 480p screen would be better in that regard as it works well with both - something my old Xperia Pro could do as well as the Xperia Play...if only they had more CPU grunt).
Last edited by Nintendo Maniac,
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