Homebrew GBA emulation on NDS

[smoothbwlr]

Is there a way to play GBA games on the ds without having the actual gba game? I play a couple like emerald and such on no$gba and want to know if I can play those games on my ds. Is there an emulator that I need besides an r4? can i play these on an r4?

 

[Wabsta]

You will need a slot2 expansion pack (ewin, Ezflash3in1 etc.)

 

[smoothbwlr]

I see, so there is no possible way to play them on the ds without buying additional hardware? I just want to make sure cause if i buy it and then the r4 allows for gba emulation....that would really suck lol

 

[Destructobot]

so there is no possible way to play them on the ds without buying additional hardware?

Correct.

 

[smoothbwlr]

actually...thanks for the info. I will just buy the card its pretty cheap...thanks again

 

[DanTheManMS]

Right, nobody's made a software GBA emulator for the DS because even if one was made, it would run horribly slow and with tons of glitches. Nobody's going to bother making one when the DS already has 99%-compatible hardware GBA emulation from the GBA slot.

 

[ben_not_benny]

I wished the DS had a slot for GBA link cable. You can only play single player GBA on the DS, that really kills me.

 

[Ferrariman]

I wished the DS had a slot for GBA link cable. You can only play single player GBA on the DS, that really kills me.

Me too. I can't do much anymore without a GBA SP...

 

[Mei-o]

I don't get why we still need expansion carts, isn't the DS already much powerful than the GBA? Why will it run slow? If we can convert DS games so that they can be played in Slot-2, why can't we do the same for GBA games to be converted to be played in Slot-1?

 

[Destructobot]

The DS cannot run GBA code in DS mode, the GBA cannot be emulated effectively in DS mode (read DanTheManMS's post above), and slot 1 is not accessible in GBA mode.

 

[Sir-Fritz]

I see, so there is no possible way to play them on the ds without buying additional hardware? I just want to make sure cause if i buy it and then the r4 allows for gba emulation....that would really suck lol

That made me

I once read that something needs to be approx. 8 times as powerful to emulate something well enough to be up with the original console.

 

[Lumstar]

Correct, the DS does not have enough processing power to emulate GBA.

Even PSP (at least twice as powerful) needs frameskip for parts of many games.

 

[jeronz]

I see, so there is no possible way to play them on the ds without buying additional hardware? I just want to make sure cause if i buy it and then the r4 allows for gba emulation....that would really suck lol

That made me

I once read that something needs to be approx. 8 times as powerful to emulate something well enough to be up with the original console.

Yeah numbers like that always get thrown around, ive heard 7x, 10x and now 8x (from you). You can't really say that to emulate something it needs to be x times more powerful. It also depends on the architecture (eg ARM, x86 etc - need to be more powerful if the two systems architectures are very different.) of the two systems, and how complicated the system being emulated is among other things (Eg N64 and sega saturn aren't very powerful but the hardware is very complicated). And what does one mean when you say x times more powerful, like in mhz? Take this example. The new atom 1.6ghz is much slower than a p4 1.6ghz, even though they are both x86. One of the reasons for this is that the atom processor is an 'in order' proc.

 

[fenthwick]

I've read that the 7x-10x powerful thing is just bullshit. It all comes down to how skilled the coder is. If he's good he can use almost the same hardware but most are just doing things the easiest way thus the steep req.

 

[Destructobot]

If he's good he can use almost the same hardware

No. If the programmer is good the requirements will be far lower, but you will still need a much faster processor than the ones you're emulating unless the instruction sets and registers are nearly identical.

Keep in mind that this sort of highly optimized emulation requires hardware acceleration for the graphics and sound so that the CPU doesn't have to emulate those as well, as well as speed hacks to get things running as fast as possible. Truly accurate emulation requires far more than 10x the total processing power of the original system.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Just to (hopefully) help finalize this thing, do you guys know who Dwedit is? He created Goomba Color, the GBC emulator for the GBA. It now runs nearly all games at full speed, but only because the hardware is similar enough that things like drawing to the screen and playing sound could be mapped directly to the GBA's 2D hardware and audio core, making it faster (tons of speedhacks also helped). Regardless, the point is that even Dwedit is convinced GBA emulation on the DS would not be faster than 1 fps, if that. I can't think of anyone more qualified to comment (except perhaps Exophase), as he did basically the same thing on the GBA. If he says it's not possible on the DS, I for one believe him.

His exact quote:

It's possible, if you don't mind such an emulator running at under 1 FPS. Nobody would bother, especially considering that the entire cartridge space needs to be directly addressable. You're much better off simply using the ability to enter GBA Mode on the NDS.