Hacking Golden Sun on PSP?

[Storm101]

So I keep hearing that Golden Sun (GBA) doesn't work properly when emulated on a PSP and is unbeatable. Is this true? What exactly happens?

 

[Ericthegreat]

I don't know my brother got far in one of the turn based mega mans and it froze near the end (he was screwed cause he only used real time saves) but most games work fine.

Edit: 500th post lol

 

[felixsrg]

Well the lag is just unbearable (for me at least), and I have heard that in some part of the game it just freezes no matter what you do.

 

[pokefloote]

yeah, this one part with waterfalls and a mercury djinn always made me freeze way back when I tried playing it.

 

[Storm101]

So I guess all I would have to do is get past that point on another emulator and save?

 

[pokefloote]

I remember that being the recommended way to get around it, but I am not sure if there are other parts of the game that would need that too. It's just a problematic game.

 

[Rydian]

There's two or three branches of the GBA emulator, though (gpSP, gpSP-J and gpSP Kai), what doesn't work on one might work on another now.

 

[Ericthegreat]

I think gpsp kai is the best, test 9 or somthing like that.

 

[Deltaechoe]

I do remember discussing with exophase (the creator of gPSP) about those games in particular and we came to the conclusion that they are horribly kludgy. There are so many quick and dirty coding styles being used in that game that will easily cause a recompiler based emulator to fall out of sync pretty quick.

 

[EnigmaBlade]

Its been ages since i played GS on that particular emulator, IIRC it was pretty laggy. Not nearly as much as GS2 though lol.

 

[Nathan Drake]

Definitely try the different emulators, though, last I heard, the games were laggy no matter what build you used. I'm unsure of the freezes though. Those may be easily bypassed by just using the right emulator.

Makes me glad that I bought the GBA Golden Sun games way back when (well, The Lost Age was a Christmas present when I was like, 9 or 10, and I picked up Golden Sun later for about $15 used). I still have my double strategy guide (it's in rough shape with some inaccuracies and errors in terms of the text, but it still got me to every Djinn pretty well), and a DSlite to play the games with.

 

[Storm101]

Well then, does anyone know how well they work on the Wii emulator?

 

[nl255]

Well then, does anyone know how well they work on the Wii emulator?

Probably not very well. Apparently the game is incompatible with dynamic recompilation (JIT) which pretty much all emulators use because it is much faster. Basically, the emulator recompiles blocks of ARM (or whatever) code to native code while the game is running (with special handling for self modifying code) but that can cause problems depending on how the game is coded. If you have ever used Dosbox and had to set the CPU core to "normal" instead of "dynamic" or even just lower the CPU cycles to prevent a game from crashing then you know what I mean.

 

[redfalcon]

Most of Camelots GBA games (Golden Sun Series, Mario Golf, Mario Tennis) run pretty horribly on non-PC emulators. As long as nobody specifically fixes the Dynarec for that games, I guess they won't get any better. On option would be a DS/DS Lite with a Slot 2 card.

 

[nl255]

Most of Camelots GBA games (Golden Sun Series, Mario Golf, Mario Tennis) run pretty horribly on non-PC emulators. As long as nobody specifically fixes the Dynarec for that games, I guess they won't get any better. On option would be a DS/DS Lite with a Slot 2 card.

Does it work even halfway decently with dynarec even on the PC though? Presumably on PC emulators you can switch to a pure interprative CPU core which would fix it, assuming you have an insanely fast computer. After all, accurate non-dynarec SNES emulation takes a 3GHz dual core at a minimum so imagine what it would take for the GBA.

 

[redfalcon]

Does it work even halfway decently with dynarec even on the PC though? Presumably on PC emulators you can switch to a pure interprative CPU core which would fix it, assuming you have an insanely fast computer. After all, accurate non-dynarec SNES emulation takes a 3GHz dual core at a minimum so imagine what it would take for the GBA.

I just tried, works at fullspeed in VisualBoyAdvance on my Phenom II with 2,8 GHz. But I could imagine it works with (much) less power (the non-accurate approach). I'm not sure if there even is a 100% accurate GBA emu out there.

 

[Sloshy]

I think gpsp kai is the best, test 9 or somthing like that.

Last I checked, J was the most recently updated. It's what I use and it works wonderfully, though you have to wade through the Japanese options using a translation guide (assuming you don't speak Japanese) to set it to English. I just started it and it seems to run fine outside of battles. I haven't gotten to a battle but it's worth a shot to use gPSP-J.

 

[Ericthegreat]

I see never heard of that 1.