Just a thought I had, would it be possible in any way shape or form to create something that would convert .gba roms to .nds roms which the DS would then think were ds games and play as such (just with one screen blacked out the entire time), thus allowing people without slot-2 cards to play gba games?
I'm sure there are tons of holes in the concept, but I'd like your opinions or explanations as to why it wouldn't work.
Afraid not. I have the SDK for the Game Boy Advance, which came with books on developing for the GBA, and source code for a demo program.
The games are written specifically for the device. Some of the source code uses machine code, some of it uses memory addresses. I only briefly looked at the stuff. I was thinking about doing some homebrew for the system, but its not as simple to program for as I thought it would be.
A lot of that kind of stuff can not be standardized. What I mean by that is this:
Think of each game as a jigsaw puzzle. Each puzzle is cut into unique shaped pieces. The first puzzle is "Sonic Advance". Lets say this puzzle has ten pieces at the top right for " character art", bottom right has 20 pieces for "game physics".
Well in "Golden Sun", the top right portion of the puzzle might be 30 pieces dedicated to an array of items the character can have in his or her inventory, and maybe the entire bottom of the puzzle is dedicated to "game mechanics".
A piece of software can not be written to convert games from the gba to another consoles format. The process simply can not be automated.
There are two ways that it COULD be done, but totally not worth it. A person COULD write a program per gba game to translate the binary into a binary that will work on the nds. But, that would be more work for the programmer than it would be to just translate each of the games themselves.
The other way to do it, is to use artificial intelligence. The a.i. would have to have the gba emulator, and the nds emulator. It would have to have the emulators running in debugging mode, and it would have to already have some underatanding of the ds. That a.i software would be harder to write, than it was to write the a.i. software for googles self driving vehicles.
Another alternative is to write a program that basically tells the system that "this_game is in gba_reader, open gba_system". But then that kind of thing would mess up the 3DS.