Homebrew Development for a gba Emu on DSi only

[xxsodapopxx5]

So I am a developer myself and i have just recently purchased a dsi only to find out that(by my own lack of research) gba roms or homebrew wont run on it.

I am just wondering if there is currently someone developing a gba emulator for the DSi
It has more processing power and 4 times as much ram.

Perfect emulation might not be possible for some of the larger gba games, but there has to be some way of getting them to run pretty decently.

Would it be possible to start a community project?

If anyone know of where to find the source code of some of the currently working gba emu's for PC that would be a huge start.

This would be a massive undertaking, but one that would improve the community drastically.

Thanks for listening!

 

[Deleted User]

Since current flashcarts only use the DS mode of the DSi, which can't access the extra cpu-power/ram, you'll have to wait (at least) until DSi mode is hacked.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Right, we're still limited to exactly what the DS has, which is not nearly enough to emulate the GBA at any reasonable speed.

 

[xxsodapopxx5]

yeah i know with the ds its not possible... I was unaware though that when i used my acekard it only used the ds capabilities and not the dsi's.... oh well, it will just be a matter of time before someone gets into the dsi's fully. then hopefully it will be possible.

 

[N-TG]

has the gba been emulated in the ds...at any speed any colors any size at all?

I know it's not possible but I just wonder about that...

 

[AuthorX]

Now I'm curious as well... does anyone know if it is, hypothetically, possible to make a GBA emulator on the DSi? Because I don't want to get my hopes up, if simply having more RAM won't cut it.

I always suspected that if someone were to really hack the S*** out of the firmware, they could get the get the GBA BIOS to load GBA ROMs from the slot-1, translate the ROM's calls to slot-2 to local memory, or whatever needs to be done but a) it would be FAR more complex than writing homebrew that runs on the existing architecture (requiring either a hacked BIOS, or some serious GBA ROM patching or some other fantastical cleverness running parallel on the ARM9), and b) it was low-priority because anyone that wanted to run GBA ROMs that badly could get a slot-2 card (not saying it's a matter of laziness, it's just not worth it for those capable, who could be doing something more useful). So, maybe if someone can really crack the DSi firmware, there'd be more motivation to get GBA games working. Aside from the fact that they're still in the gulf between "games made for this hardware, that people want to play because they're new" and "games made for hardware so old it needs a tiny fraction of this available power, that people want to play because they're nostalgic"

Sorry... somehow my hypothetical question led into teal-dear speculation. I really just want to be able to play the original Rhythm Tengoku on something other than my PC. It sounds like our best is the Nintendo makes a portable Virtual Console, and the DSi OS gets hacked (or they could localize RT for DSiWare, and I'd buy a DSi and forget about this whole thing in a heartbeat...)

 

[Xeijin]

has the gba been emulated in the ds...at any speed any colors any size at all?

I know it's not possible but I just wonder about that...

I doubt it because previously there was no need to. All the GBA Solutions were relatively cheap/could be carried over from the original GBA (such as the EZ series carts) and then you had the advent of ultra-cheap GBA Gaming with the EZ-Flash V 3-in-1 Expansion.