Hacking dsi question

[Midna]

People judge the DSs ability to emulate by SNEmulDS. This in very inaccurate. if nintendo were to give it a shot like they did with n64 games on the cube, they would likely succeed. but it is much to early to tell.

 

[DanTheManMS]

I do get it. Nintendo is perfectly capable of making a gba emulator for ds.

This needs explaining. How do you justify this claim?

Because Nintendo know both systems inside out, far better than any homebrew coders can hope to. I can guarantee that the emulators used by Nintendo (and licensed devs) are far better than any of the homebrew emulators. It stands to reason that the people who designed the hardware would be far more capable to make a software emulator for it.

I think what I'm asking is more like this: even considering what you've said, does the DS have the horsepower to emulate the GBA effectively? Even if the emulator was written by Nintendo themselves? I'm not convinced, that's all.

If GBA games are to be made playable through the download service, I'd imagine that Rayder's idea is more likely.

 

[Hidekiadam]

Hihi

There will be certainly RAM in the 32MB of memory space used for the GBA slot normally.

The browser will require some and given the low cost of that ram I can't imagine they won't put the full 32MB in to sell you your own games again -.o

As another poster has stated, they can't remove the ARM7 because unlike the GBA and its Z80 the ARM7 is not used only for GBA games, it is used for DS games also, it's possible to use both processors simultaneously

Assuming they do include the 32MB of RAM (or even 16MB of RAM), it is very likely that nothing new will be needed to play GBA games in it, if they don't somehow break all the slot 1 cards then you'll be able to simply use the GBA Exploader (available in the homebrew section of this very site) to load and boot your GBA games on the DSi.

 

[DanTheManMS]

As another poster has stated, they can't remove the ARM7 because unlike the GBA and its Z80 the ARM7 is not used only for GBA games, it is used for DS games also, it's possible to use both processors simultaneously

This is being very nitpicky, but this statement isn't entirely accurate. The GBA actually did use parts of the GBC hardware while still in GBA mode, specifically the audio core. You can crash a GB Micro into the GBC BIOS even though the Micro lacks the rest of the hardware needed to boot actual cartridges (the Z80 actually remains in the Micro). The DS does contain this GBC sound core so that GBA games can still use it, though they finally removed the Z80 so it appears that's the only part that's survived.

The more you know...

 

[Lumstar]

Running GBA games on a DS is not emulation. This is something newbies out there need to understand. It should be stickied on the boards, as many topics about it come up.

The GBA hardware cannot be entirely removed from DS, for that matter. DS games need it to function. Much like how PS2 required the PS1 hardware.