Homebrew About to work on porting a popular PC emulator to the 3DS. Before I do, I want some feedback

[V3NUS_M1NER]

Hello GBATemp!
As you can see from the title, I'm about to begin porting an emulator for PC/Mac/Linux, titled MAME, to the 3DS. I need some feedback from you guys, though.

For the devs:

If I do successfully port this, how limited would I be on features?


Planned for it:

It will be called [insert name I have here but don't want to share in case someone decides to do it and finishes before me here]
It will, eventually, support MultiROM selection via a customizable, themable, menu on the touch screen
It will take advantage of both screens in the 3DS. The top screen will be used for the actual game, the bottom will have a nice Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the user. Some of the options:
Settings - You can change a few options within the emulator
Exit - Exits the homebrew
Load new ROM - opens the ROM selection menu
Save States - opens/creates save sates for the user for that ROM.
Load Save - loads the selected save state
Fast Forward - speeds up the ROM. Changes to Normal Speed when selected.

Planned features I don't know that I can implement:

Save states
Load save
FF/NS (Fast Forward/Normal Speed)

Feedback is appreciated!

Yes, I know that you may be skeptical about this, being my first HB attempt, but I'm willing to try

 

[MarkDarkness]

The source for blargSnes is open. You should start by dissecting that code, which should give you a fair idea of how to structure 3DS code.

 

[plasma]

After the surprise progress of KARL3DS (where everyone thought they'd never make progress on it and it was a superficial idea, and now they are making progress etc etc) then if you know what your doing, this could be possible

 

[LumInvader]

Good luck with your project, but one question:

Is this a port of MAME4ALL or MAME itself? If it's the former, just be aware that despite MAME4ALL's popularity on portable devices, it's actually a subpar port of MAME that originated on the Dreamcast.

 

[lPolarisl]

I would be pretty satisfied with a dosbox port first

 

[FAST6191]

Though perhaps not the extent of BSNES doesn't MAME focus a lot on hardware accuracy? To that end surely it is not the best thing to go on the rather resource limited 3ds. We have already seen the PSP go through the phases of porting PC emulators and the end result was not ideal -- you make some nice short term gains as you tend to be able to run things very quickly (you get to skip a lot of the tedium of emulator writing after all), however they tend to always remain ports of emulators rather than emulators that play to the strengths of the console in question, as was done in a lot of cases for the DS and especially for the GBA.

On the other hand if you reckon the CPU can handle it and are willing to sacrifice some of the higher end options I guess there are worse ideas for projects.

 

[DarkFlare69]

I would be pretty satisfied with a dosbox port first

^
Then I can play Duke Nukem 3d.

 

[SLiV3R]

Sounds cool. Good luck with the project!

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Porting MAME4All is possible, and should run full speed. It ran quite well on the original GP2X, which is nowhere near as powerful and doesn't even have hardware accelerated graphics.
The full MAME probably won't though, it's slower.
MAME4All isn't compatible with nearly as many games, but there are a lot of great classics that it does run. And it's a lot faster, which is important in this case

 

[wheezyNoiZe]

Awesome if you do but it sounds like a massive undertaking as noted above, MAME is about accuracy. Personally, I would suggest something like a port of a CPS2 emulator like kawaks or final burn.. surely one of them is open source. If you think you can achieve a MAME port, more power to you!

 

[lPolarisl]

Pardon my ignorance, but isn't MAME an arcade emulator ?

 

[reprep]

FBA might be an alternative. It needs less cpu power than MAME.

 

[TecXero]

I think it would be easier to port from something that uses a similar architecture, like Android. Either way, it's probably very possible.

 

[WeedZ]

Should support 3d

*fuckin runs*

 

[shinyquagsire23]

Should support 3d

*fuckin runs*

Might be difficult depending on how the game works. If it has multiple layers which can actually be done in 3D, maybe.

 

[dubbz82]

Is it possible? Yeah. You'll be limited as to what you can run on it though. A lot of stuff, especially the more "recent" games will require more than what the 3ds can supply. I'd expect a lot of the 80's and 90's stuff to run okay (after everything's optimized properly) but it would likely struggle with anything newer than that.

 

[ody81]

as FAST6191 said, pc mame takes it's pride in hardware level accuracy. That needs a fuck tonne of processor power sometimes.

On the other hand as jdbye said, mame4all's out there already on a bunch of portables, there was even a DS port called MarcoDS that ran golden age games just fine (Defender, Joust, Donkey Kong).

So I'd second mame4all, it's a lot easier on the hardware and the only issue end users will really notice is the need for an older romset (0.31b?), that's still a crap load of awesome games though

Edit: gp2x was great back in the day XD Never got that openpandora I was looking at after I sold it either :\