Hacking It’s possible or Not? GBA emulator running on iPlayer

[darkchen]

iPlayer, a multi-media player on DS has been released for several days. A lot of people consider whether iPlayer could run a GBA emulator on DS. It is well know that running a GBA emulator on DS which is hard to be imaged before iPlayer release. Before iPlayer release people wish DS CPU is powerful enough to do that, but the CPU is not powerful enough to simulate GBA. Of course, Nintendo official have its solution, it is really not difficult to run GBA game on DS for official itself, but so far, it does not release any games fee paying downloading service yet, what is promised formerly. Further more, even though Nintendo official release GBA games downloading service, there will not be much too functions, such as screen shot, realtime save, frame skip, cheat and so on, what is included on common console emulators. PC emulator player should know these functions well.


Above all, I would like to introduce myself. I am not a professional programmer, but I am interested in programming.

I pay a lot of attention on iPlayer news recently, and sent a mail to iPlayer official site to ask the possibility if GBA emulator could be launched by iPlayer, but unfortunately, according their reply, due to the copyright problems, iPlayer official will not provide GBA emulator. Yet, iPlayer really attract me, so I have bought one for researching.


In fact, simulating GBA is not very difficult. The principle is simple, using powered arithmetic capability to simulate a console circumstance, is similar to PC paltform console simulators. So to simulate GBA by iPlayer, the onboard CPU is indispensable. For a better effect of GBA simulating, the frequency of iPlayer onboard CPU have to be 20 times to GBA CPU, at least. Analyzing the ability of hardware decoding such high resolution videos, I suppose the onboard CPU’s frequency is not lower than PSP’s at least, even higher. Unfortunately, I have no detailed data about iPlayer, so these are just my hypothesize.


Logical analyzing:


The hardware of GBA includes two CPUs, one is a 32bit RISC instruction sets CPU (ARM7TDMI), which frequency is 16.78MHz, another one is 8bit CISC instruction sets CPU, a 130KB RAM, a 2D graphics card, six channel sound card, four channel DMA, four timers and so on. If count the GBA game card 256KB RAM on, the GBA system totally have 386KB RAM.


Then what we need to do is to simulate the hardware mentioned before. We must use our own instruction to simulate the ARM7 instruction system. On average, to simulate one instruction, need ten operations. In a word, iPlayer’s CPU frequency must be ten times to GBA’s, besides other hardware of GBA, there need to be another ten times. So totally twenty times, the iPlayer’s frequency must be 340MHZ or higher, and there must be enough RAM. According to the ability of hardware decoding AVI video, I believe iPlayer’s frequency will not be lower than PSP’s CPU which is 330MHZ, and iPlayer’s SDRAM should be 16MB or more, so running GBA emulator by iPlayer becomes possible.


Before writing, I mailed iPlayer official site again, wanting a SDK. I hope official will notice my post.

 

[Jakob95]

Wow you wrote all this... You know you won't get a good answer or sullotion to anything here on Gbatemp.net. No one here cares anymore they won't want to read all that. I read it, nice ideas. And it definetly does not have a 340Mhz cpu inside that little cart.

 

[hyun]

well jakob95 the reason why people are not giving you a good sollution (you spelled it wrong)for your questions are because its really dumb..
For example, like how long do i have to wait for my acekard 2 i to get to my home from realhotstuff...
CANT YOU WAIT???
THEY ARE NOT GONNA SCAM YOU SO BE PATIENT!
SOME PEOPLE ARE WAITING LIKE A MONTH FOR THEIR M3I ZERO SO YOU BETTER BE THANKFUL YOU GOT IT BY TODAY.
And all of your questions are stupid..

 

[Jakob95]

and ur an idiot that should shut up. And lets see if he does he a decent answer to his question if it possible..

 

[darkchen]

Wow you wrote all this... You know you won't get a good answer or sullotion to anything here on Gbatemp.net. No one here cares anymore they won't want to read all that. I read it, nice ideas. And it definetly does not have a 340Mhz cpu inside that little cart.

Actually I do trust iplayer has 340Mhz CPU or even higher, because of high resolution video playing. PSP has 330Mhz, but PSP can not playing the video formats what iplayer can play. We will see in future

 

[Da-Bomb1]

If it did, in fact, have a 340Mhz CPU, the the heat produced would probably be way too much for such a small, enclosed space. There's also the fact that it'd probably reduce the battery life by about 2/3. I kind of doubt the processor has such a high clockrate. It's probably a specially modified one made specifically for video decoding.

 

[Ryukouki]

and ur an idiot that should shut up. And lets see if he does he a decent answer to his question if it possible..

dude. Stop trying to be a tough asshole and why don't you be quiet. I've seen a lot of your posts, and that dude is right. You are really impatient and acting really immature. From what I see, that guy did some research and there's not really anything wrong with posting since he did his research, and knows what he is talking about. you, on the other hand, make pointless posts that can be easily searched and answered. do us a favor and grow up.

 

[Normmatt]

iPlayer, a multi-media player on DS has been released for several days. A lot of people consider whether iPlayer could run a GBA emulator on DS. It is well know that running a GBA emulator on DS which is hard to be imaged before iPlayer release. Before iPlayer release people wish DS CPU is powerful enough to do that, but the CPU is not powerful enough to simulate GBA. Of course, Nintendo official have its solution, it is really not difficult to run GBA game on DS for official itself, but so far, it does not release any games fee paying downloading service yet, what is promised formerly. Further more, even though Nintendo official release GBA games downloading service, there will not be much too functions, such as screen shot, realtime save, frame skip, cheat and so on, what is included on common console emulators. PC emulator player should know these functions well.


Above all, I would like to introduce myself. I am not a professional programmer, but I am interested in programming.

I pay a lot of attention on iPlayer news recently, and sent a mail to iPlayer official site to ask the possibility if GBA emulator could be launched by iPlayer, but unfortunately, according their reply, due to the copyright problems, iPlayer official will not provide GBA emulator. Yet, iPlayer really attract me, so I have bought one for researching.


In fact, simulating GBA is not very difficult. The principle is simple, using powered arithmetic capability to simulate a console circumstance, is similar to PC paltform console simulators. So to simulate GBA by iPlayer, the onboard CPU is indispensable. For a better effect of GBA simulating, the frequency of iPlayer onboard CPU have to be 20 times to GBA CPU, at least. Analyzing the ability of hardware decoding such high resolution videos, I suppose the onboard CPU’s frequency is not lower than PSP’s at least, even higher. Unfortunately, I have no detailed data about iPlayer, so these are just my hypothesize.


Logical analyzing:


The hardware of GBA includes two CPUs, one is a 32bit RISC instruction sets CPU (ARM7TDMI), which frequency is 16.78MHz, another one is 8bit CISC instruction sets CPU, a 130KB RAM, a 2D graphics card, six channel sound card, four channel DMA, four timers and so on. If count the GBA game card 256KB RAM on, the GBA system totally have 386KB RAM.


Then what we need to do is to simulate the hardware mentioned before. We must use our own instruction to simulate the ARM7 instruction system. On average, to simulate one instruction, need ten operations. In a word, iPlayer’s CPU frequency must be ten times to GBA’s, besides other hardware of GBA, there need to be another ten times. So totally twenty times, the iPlayer’s frequency must be 340MHZ or higher, and there must be enough RAM. According to the ability of hardware decoding AVI video, I believe iPlayer’s frequency will not be lower than PSP’s CPU which is 330MHZ, and iPlayer’s SDRAM should be 16MB or more, so running GBA emulator by iPlayer becomes possible.


Before writing, I mailed iPlayer official site again, wanting a SDK. I hope official will notice my post.

You seem to know very very little about the GBA or the NDS for that matter. GBA only has a 16mhz ARM7 which si backwards compatible on the NDS ARM9 so you can use the NDS' MPU (Memory Protection Unit) to throw exceptions on any reads to registers/cartrom/etc and act accordingly on it. thus you simply run native gba arm7 code on the arm9 redirecting the gba hardware calls to the nds hardware.

 

[Normmatt]

Which reminds me Normmatt, are you really planning to make that commercial rom loader for the iPlayer?

Off topic but no, i asked them why they didn't make a rom loader and they said they didn't want the iPlayer to be classified as a piracy device. I'm going to do as they wish and not make a rom loader for it.

 

[darkchen]

Which reminds me Normmatt, are you really planning to make that commercial rom loader for the iPlayer?

Off topic but no, i asked them why they didn't make a rom loader and they said they didn't want the iPlayer to be classified as a piracy device. I'm going to do as they wish and not make a rom loader for it.

Hi,Normmatt
you give up to make rom loader, but are not you interested in making a GBA emulator for iplayer? now I got you know GBA well, and do you think if it is possible to make GBA emulator for iplayer?

 

[Fatboy12345236]

Look firstly I dont think thats possible all everyone has to do is buy Slot-2 card!!!
+1 u wrote all that?

 

[naglaro00]

Look firstly I dont think thats possible all everyone has to do is buy Slot-2 card!!!
+1 u wrote all that?

There's a small chance it is possible. And do you know how hard it is to find slot-2 cards?

 

[darkchen]

Look firstly I dont think thats possible all everyone has to do is buy Slot-2 card!!!
+1 u wrote all that?

yes, I wrote all this

QUOTE(PharaohsVizier @ Jul 10 2009, 09:40 AM) What about for a DSi?

In either case, GBA emulator would still make the iPlayer a piracy device, so I'm guessing Normmatt's answer is a big no?

OK, I got it, what a pity....

 

[eSquire]

I thought that the main problem behind GBA emulation was the required speed at which you need to read the rom, which is mainly a storage medium problem. In that case, the iPlayer's CPU wouldn't really help, would it?

 

[Dizzy Doom]

You've got to remember that the iPlayer CPU it's most likely designed specifically for video decoding. Also, remember that DS is more than capable of emulating GBA on it's own (if you have programed for both systems before without PAlib or HAMlib, you know what I'm talking about. 2D on both systems is almost identical)
The matter has never been about CPU speed, but rather about RAM. My point, where do you intend to emulate a 16MB ROM, for example, if you only got 4MB of RAM?. The SNES emulator has this problem too, but it gets around it by loading different parts of the ROM on the RAM as they're needed (and SNES roms over 3MB arent that common). Something similar with the GBA would make GBA emulation rather frustrating.

 

[darkchen]

You've got to remember that the iPlayer CPU it's most likely designed specifically for video decoding. Also, remember that DS is more than capable of emulating GBA on it's own (if you have programed for both systems before without PAlib or HAMlib, you know what I'm talking about. 2D on both systems is almost identical)
The matter has never been about CPU speed, but rather about RAM. My point, where do you intend to emulate a 16MB ROM, for example, if you only got 4MB of RAM?. The SNES emulator has this problem too, but it gets around it by loading different parts of the ROM on the RAM as they're needed (and SNES roms over 3MB arent that common). Something similar with the GBA would make GBA emulation rather frustrating.

As far as I know, there is a 32MB SDRAM in iplayer. To emulate GBA, DS itself's 4MB RAM is not utilized, but the iplayer's 32MB RAM. And with the high speed CPU of iplayer, I think loading GBA rom is possible.

 

[Da-Bomb1]

You've got to remember that the iPlayer CPU it's most likely designed specifically for video decoding. Also, remember that DS is more than capable of emulating GBA on it's own (if you have programed for both systems before without PAlib or HAMlib, you know what I'm talking about. 2D on both systems is almost identical)
The matter has never been about CPU speed, but rather about RAM. My point, where do you intend to emulate a 16MB ROM, for example, if you only got 4MB of RAM?. The SNES emulator has this problem too, but it gets around it by loading different parts of the ROM on the RAM as they're needed (and SNES roms over 3MB arent that common). Something similar with the GBA would make GBA emulation rather frustrating.

As far as I know, there is a 32MB SDRAM in iplayer. To emulate GBA, DS itself's 4MB RAM is not utilized, but the iplayer's 32MB RAM. And with the high speed CPU of iplayer, I think loading GBA rom is possible.

But it still remains to be seen what kind of CPU it is. Chances are that the architecture is so much different that it won't be much better than the DS's CPU. The DS is similar to the GBA in architecture, so it wouldn't be too bad on that. And the DS still has the GBA's hardware.

 

[Crass]

Where is he getting all these iPlayer specs from?


And I dont mean to sound like a dick, but if you purchased a cheap slot-1flashcard with a 2gb microsd as well as an ezflash 3in1 not only would you have access to way more shit, but it would also cost less than the iPlayer by itself.

But judging by you're first post and all subsequent posts darkchen seems like a troll, either that or hes just some young kid who doesnt really understand things. First of all there is absolutely no need to emulator (or "simulate" as he eloquently calls it) the gba on the DS, because the hardware is so similar. Secondly he quotes the megahertz myth as though its fact, and proves once again he knows little about console emulation.

 

[Da-Bomb1]

Where is he getting all these iPlayer specs from?


And I dont mean to sound like a dick, but if you purchased a cheap slot-1flashcard with a 2gb microsd as well as an ezflash 3in1 not only would you have access to way more shit, but it would also cost less than the iPlayer by itself.

Well, can't do that on a DSi though. And the iPlayer can still decode videos...but either way, I still think it's kinda stupid; it just costs way too much to really be worth it. And it still remains to be seen whether or not they'll open the card's features to developers.

 

[Crass]

I'm not sure why everyone has this idea that it is way too expensive. If the CycloDS Evolution could sell for $50, the iPlayer should definitely be able to sell at $40. I can't wait until mine arrives.

I think its overpriced because you can basically buy a proper flashcard with a big microSD card for cheaper than the price of the iPlayer by itself, along with a 3in1. The iPlayer from what I understand does'nt even have all that good of homebrew compatibility (DieForIt is reviewing it for ds-scene.net right now and hes been having some issues with some homebrews). Yeah it might be able to play a few movie formats without having to be converted to .dpg, but how often are you guys seriously planning on watching stuff on the DS's tiny screen. So with crippled homebrew compatibility, no commercial rom support, and a high price tag, this is basically a glorified chinese knock-off of a Datel Games 'N Music, and I am sure anyone worth their salt would agree you wouldnt want to be caught dead with one of thoes devices.