Homebrew 3dsgba

[Deleted User]

Oh, I didn't mean 'hardware rendering' as in 'use the GPU to draw the final framebuffer rather than writing to framebuffer directly', but more in the sense of 'use the GPU to draw individual tiles, sprites, etc'. That's how I do it in blargSNES, and it gives a nice speed boost.

Ahh, makes sense. If I can figure out GPU rendering with ctrulib, I'll see if i can try that out.

 

[DarkFlare69]

A quick question - How long do you think it'll be before it gets running at (almost) full speed? Or at least a bearable speed?

 

[shinyquagsire23]

A quick question - How long do you think it'll be before it gets running at (almost) full speed? Or at least a bearable speed?

A long, long while. Or never. At the moment it'll take quite a bit of optimization to get there though.

 

[DarkFlare69]

A long, long while. Or never. At the moment it'll take quite a bit of optimization to get there though.

Is the 3DS capable of running GBA at full speed? How about N64?

 

[loco365]

Once I finish looking at why Fire Red is broken, I'll take a look and pull it. Thanks!

That'd explain why Fire Red-based fangames are broken lol.

 

[ChrisRX]

I was getting a good speed up by passing -DTILED_RENDERING to g++ in the makefile to an almost playable speed, but it seems to be broken with the latest commits.

EDIT: It doesn't seem to play nice with hasAudio != 0. With hasAudio still set to 0 the tiled rendering works for me on Zelda Minish cap.

 

[Deleted User]

I was getting a good speed up by passing -DTILED_RENDERING to g++ in the makefile to an almost playable speed, but it seems to be broken with the latest commits.

Interesting, I'll take a look at it.

 

[ChrisRX]

Interesting, I'll take a look at it.

Just for reference, here's a post about it http://www.libretro.com/index.php/retroarch-0-9-9-7-upcoming-progress/

 

[Helper]

Is the 3DS capable of running GBA at full speed? How about N64?

Here's the useless opinion of some unqualified random user

I think the 3DS could be capable of emulating (certain) N64 games. For a "playable" experience (>20 fps, graphics which are at least somewhat intelligible), I'd expect game-specific optimizations to be required. I could imagine a N3DS (and access to both cores and the extended RAM) being required to play many or all (supported) games. Further RE'ing of the PICA200 would be instrumental in any attempt at an N64 emulator, as would the ability to map executable pages.

Everything I just said is probably wrong, though

 

[c4655362]

After installing this I had all the files from my SD Card deleted, not sure if it's related (Probably not)
I have a 3 week old back up of my SD card so I didn't lose much

EDIT: False alert I used the wrong SD card. Just a reminder though to back up your SD cards!

 

[DarkFlare69]

After installing this I had all the files from my SD Card deleted, not sure if it's related (Probably not)
I have a 3 week old back up of my SD card so I didn't lose much

EDIT: False alert I used the wrong SD card. Just a reminder though to back up your SD cards!

I don't think that was due to this. It only writes stuff to options.txt and to \snes\

the creator, does it even have the ability to delete stuff?

EDIT: Okay, thats good then.

 

[Nemix77]

While I greatly appreciate a SNES emulator on the 3DS in the form of blargSNES ATM, in my opinion an almost perfectly GBA emulator should be higher on the priority list since it ties in with the 3DS being a handheld console and the fact GBA backwards compatibility was removed from the DSi onwards.

Aside from the SNES was more powerful than the GBA and thus will never be close to perfect if a GBA emulator cannot achieve close to perfection on the 3DS.

I'm willing to start up a donation pool for any developers willing to take the up the task of porting an almost perfect GBA emulator to the 3DS and I'm pretty sure some others on this forum feel the same just as long as the project is clearly achievable with the goal of having a GBA emulator that runs as good if not better than the one on the PSP.

 

[Deleted User]

While I greatly appreciate a SNES emulator on the 3DS in the form of blargSNES ATM, in my opinion an almost perfectly GBA emulator should be higher on the priority list since it ties in with the 3DS being a handheld console and the fact GBA backwards compatibility was removed from the DSi onwards.

I'm willing to start up a donation pool for any developers willing to take the up the task of porting an almost perfect GBA emulator to the 3DS and I'm pretty sure some others on this forum feel the same.

High performance GBA emulating is mostly a matter of being able to set RAM pages as executable, something which can't be done yet with ninjhax. All we can really do for now is optimize what we've got.

 

[Nemix77]

Just wanted to throw it out there so it becomes a higher priority on the emulators list for the 3DS, next to a GBA emulator I feel a Genesis emulator is the next best achievable goal.

 

[ChrisRX]

Just wanted to throw it out there so it becomes a higher priority on the emulators list for the 3DS, next to a GBA emulator I feel a Genesis emulator is the next best achievable goal.

Well the source code to Gens is freely available. Feel free to make a start

 

[Nemix77]

I can't, I have no skills only good with brain storming achievable suggestions and make a donation if needed for the project to get more attention and effort put into it.

 

[NyaakoXD]

We can only hope for the best. I really want to play GBA games in near perfection with some lovely emulator features like save states, audio quality settings, cheats, etc.

 

[MyJoyConRunsHot]

The new 3DS doesn't have a faster CPU than the original, it just has more cores. For emulation, raw clock speed is a lot better than more cores. While there are definitely improvements that can be made using the extra cores, it's not as simple as 2x cores = 2x clock speed. Multiple cores just aren't too helpful for emulation.

Some emulators have seen improvements from more cores, case in point PCSX2. Its not a rule and I'm not exactly sure what ways GBA would benefit from it but increased performance does sometimes occur from increased cores.

 

[signz]

Well, this is pretty amazing. True, it might not run that fast yet but I'm really sure it will and very much looking forward to that day.

 

[Arisotura]

The thing is that emulation tends to be a serial process. For modern consoles, running the system components out of sync is generally more feasible because games are more lenient on timings (and yet, take a look at Dolphin-- there are games that push the GC/Wii a bit and require accurate timings).

I'm no GBA expert so I can't speak for sure, but given the console it is, I think you are more likely to run into games that require tight timing to work correctly. The GBA also has only one processor. Something like audio generation could be run on a separate core, though.

But I know that for example, DeSmuME features things like 'advanced bus-level timing' which, from what I get, emulates ARM9/ARM7 contention over the main RAM. There are actually DS games that require such a level of accuracy, apparently.


Oh well, time will tell how this will turn out. I'm looking forward to it, keep up the good work.