Hacking TempGBA: NDSGBA revival

Do GBA games make your nono parts happy?


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Deleted member 319809

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Get the plugin: http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/flashcart-files/latest-tempgba-f31839.html
as well as Aeter's merged v1.4 game_config.txt for more speed and compatibility in some European and Japanese games
and, if you like, download the Pokémon Platinum skin I made for April Fools as a standalone archive
or Aeter's LEDS2-Orange skin for TempGBA

View the source! http://github.com/Nebuleon/TempGBA
(with an issue tracker too)

Go to post #870 for the narrated history of TempGBA :D

Frequently asked questions
Q. Compatibility?
A. http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/TempGBA_Compatibility - please edit this list as you test your games!

Q. Cheats?
A. Exactly as in NDSGBA 1.21: rather broken, and with a rather broken interface too, apparently. If cheats for your game crashed back then with no explanation, they will still crash now (but may crash with a Guru Meditation screen). Nebuleon has absolutely no interest in cheats for the GBA; if you do, and can help out, feel free to fork and edit the source, and perhaps submit a pull request to Nebuleon/TempGBA/master when you're done.

Q. Saved states?
A. Saved states from NDSGBA 1.21 and 1.30 are incompatible with TempGBA (for the technical details, please see post #218 and post #371), but saved states from TempGBA beta 5 are forwards-compatible until beta 12. To load a save you had made in NDSGBA 1.21 or 1.30, use a .sav as an intermediate file.
  1. Load up NDSGBA 1.xx, the exact version you used in the first place.
  2. Load the game, then the state, save in-game, and exit NDSGBA.
  3. Using your computer, copy the .sav file from your card's /NDSGBA/GAMERTS directory into /TEMPGBA/SAVES. (You can do this for multiple games at once if you repeat steps 1 and 2 for all of your games before 4 and 5.)
  4. Load up TempGBA.
  5. Load the game, which will load the .sav from [2], then create a TempGBA saved state.
Q. Pokémon?
A. Yes! Emerald's clock is supported, and saves are good. ROM hacks should be supported if they don't change the ROM title and game code. If in doubt, ask whoever created your favourite ROM hack.

Q. LINK CABLE?!
A. No. The DSTwo SDK has no support for sending WiFi or NiFi protocol packets. TempGBA runs on the DSTwo itself and relies on the cart-to-DS communication to do things; we have no access to all the DS can offer. If you want to add WiFi packet support to the SDK, be my guest. You will rip your hair out trying to debug hardware communication.

Q. Golden Sun? Golden Sun 2?!
A. The Golden Sun games have become much better, with Golden Sun and Golden Sun 2 being perfect at auto frameskip and slight crackling at lower manual frameskips. See post #450 and post #499 for audio comparison tests by Rydian in Golden Sun. #450 is in beta 9, #499 is in beta 11.

Q. Classic NES?
A. No. Play them on nesDS. More technically: The ARM prefetch queue doesn't interact well with a recompiler. The recompiler would need to flush its code 2 instructions after a write, and the code to detect these writes and apply the logic of the ARM prefetch queue 2 instructions later retroactively would lower performance of all games that rewrite their code in GBA RAM by 200% or more. That means supporting Classic NES games would slow down a couple dozen, up to a hundred, other games.

Q. Is this NDSGBA? Is this better than NDSGBA? Is this worse than NDSGBA?
A. Yes. Nebuleon got the source code for NDSGBA 1.21 after the community helped ask for it.
It may be better or worse, depending on the game. Its GUI is definitely better, though! It supports game_config.txt, like gpSP from which it is derived. It may lack some cheat support.

Q. Why do we need the GBA BIOS now?
A. You always needed it. It was distributed inside NDSGBA but Nebuleon removed it from the code because its distribution is probably not allowed.

Q. Where does the GBA BIOS go?
A. See installation.txt.

Q. gbaemu4ds?
A. This is not gbaemu4ds. See ichfly's gbaemu4ds thread.

* 1.43: File selector improvements. Notably, directories with more than 511 files or 63 subdirectories will not crash TempGBA upon being displayed. Going to the last page with the R button also won't lock you to that page until you press Down, Up, Up.
* 1.43: The Screenshot slideshow function doesn't freeze with an exception if you have no screenshots.

Changes from NDSGBA 1.30

Emulator
* ARG support for loading the emulator using a file browser's associations. Thanks, BassAceGold!
* 16 saved state slots are available, and you can overwrite any state. You can also see the screenshot of a state you're about to overwrite or delete!
* Writes a .sav file to storage 10 frames (1/6 of a second) after it's done being written to the emulated GBA's save area (since beta 8).
* Button remapping is available globally and per-game for GBA buttons Start, Select, L and R. NDSGBA 1.30 has remapping per-game for A, B, rapid A and rapid B.
* Hotkeys! A rewind hotkey, L+Y, is user-definable globally and per game; there are also hotkeys to go to the main menu (since beta 4), to fast-forward, to mute (since beta 7) and to quickly load and save state #1 (since beta 8).
* CPU speeds imported from CATSFC. 360 MHz is selected by default.
* FPS counter! Now you can see how many frames you get per second (since beta 8)! Yay!
* Lower screen gaming and booting from the GBA logo (since 1.41).
* Cheat support may have deteriorated (as of beta 1).
* Add Guru Meditation screens for MIPS (DSTwo-side) and ARM7 (GBA-side) crashes (since beta 9). You may now report crashes that display these screens by taking photos of them, or reporting the top 2 lines and the registers accessed by the instruction ($NUMBER). See an example of this in post #451.
* Incorporate a fix for filesystem corruption by BassAceGold. Handles Short File Names (SFN) and Long File Names (LFN) more correctly and prevents duplicate aliases (two files named MARIO~01.RTS, for example) (since beta 14).

Game compatibility
* Patched Classic NES/Famicom Mini games may work.
* Doom, Doom II, Duke Nukem Advance, Golden Sun, Golden Sun 2, Mario Golf: Advance Tour, Mario Tennis: Power Tour run with much more framerate (in beta 12, beta 14, and 1.41 memory-access-3).
* Golden Sun 2 and Tales of Phantasia don't return oddly to the EOS Menu anymore (as of beta 12).
* game_config.txt support has been restored! This improves game compatibility and is required by some 128 KiB-save games to correctly save.
* game_config.txt translation gate support has been dropped (as of 1.41 memory-access-3). However, improvements in the recompiler made them unnecessary.

Emulator menu
* The 8 languages of CATSFC are in TempGBA. Some messages are still in English.
* All interfaces have 8 rows instead of 6.
* The rewind option was "Rewind enable" and "Rewind period". It is now only one option.
* The frame skipping option was "Frame skip type" and "Frame skip value". It is now only one option.
* The menu recognises button presses and releases more consistently, including rapid presses of the same key (since beta 6). Auto-repeating is set to fire 20 times per second so you can browse long lists more easily.

DS functionality
* The menu has touch screen support. Thanks for the CATSFC improvement, ShadauxCat!
* Close the lid of your DS and it shall sleep if it's in the menu (as of alpha 2) or emulating (as of beta 8).

Audio
* A core issue with the GBA sound is fixed by issuing sound at 88200 Hz and resampling it to 44100 Hz (since alpha 7, changed in betas 3-5). This fixes the sound in some GBA Video cartridges and Golden Sun - The Lost Age.
* Sound crackles/bubbles less in slower games (improved variously in alphas 3-7).
* Fast-forwarding can have sound (since alpha 2), and it is dampened to prevent loud pops (since beta 11); in NDSGBA it could not. You can mute it.

Menu/Extras
* The default skin, icon set and font are that of CATSFC, with a prettier GBA icon for game files and a GBA controller loading screen.
* The text colors are now loaded in TEMPGBA/SYSTEM/GUI/uicolors.txt for theming (since 1.41).
* A useful, Engrish-free README file is included.
* Fewer writes to settings files. Settings files are rewritten only once you exit a submenu, and only if you've changed a setting in that submenu. If you don't change settings from their defaults for a game, the game can now have no settings file at all. This also uses up fewer erase cycles on storage cards
* It has become impossible to set certain gpSP options by hex-editing ndsgba.cfg (since alpha 3).

Technical:
* Use high-level emulation (HLE) for some more GBA BIOS calls. (Variously trashed and re-instated in betas 5-9)
* ARM-to-MIPS (GBA-to-DSTwo) recompiler improvements (since beta 10, more in betas 11, 12, 13 and 15).
--> Self-modifying code is now reused instead of being constantly wasted, in case the game rewrites the same code at the same place again. Even more detailed statistics are present about this in /Tools/Debugging (in English only) (as of 1.41 memory-access-3).

Suggestions made by Boriar in post #237:
* (UI) [Submenu name] instead of Submenu name... in a list of options containing a submenu.
* (UI) Using <None> in unassigned hotkeys and button mappings.
 

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This post reserved for communications between GBAtemp and the Supercard Team, or corrections and additions to the first post.

This is a split from the CATSFC thread, specifically for wishes related to NDSGBA.

To anyone from the Supercard Team reading this, and to DarkChen:

You've held back the source for NDSGBA for too long, and now it's time to pass it to the community as a whole. It was a great step to publicly release the software development kit (SDK) and the source code for iReader and the Super Famicom emulator NDSSFC (thanks a lot for this!), but now there is one piece missing from the puzzle. That piece is NDSGBA.

NDSGBA is immediately derived from gpSP, a Free Software GBA emulator licensed under the GNU General Public License. Legally, you would be obligated to release that source code. But even if you choose to ignore that, having better software running on your hardware will boost your sales.

The community wishes for better game compatibility, less crashing and a more usable user interface (GUI). The community feels the following:
* There has been a huge step back after your updates, one of which removed or severely deteriorated the support for game_config.txt to provide more game compatibility. Many people are recommending an upgrade to an earlier version because of this. The most recommended version appears to be 1.21, not 1.30 which is the most recent.
* The GUI does not support the touch screen at all. It needs to do so in order to be more intuitive. DS users expect the Touch Screen to work if there are buttons on it.
* Remapping GBA keys is another often-requested feature. The GBA has fewer buttons than the DS, unlike the SNES. So there are a few buttons that the users want to move, for example to make them more reachable with their hands.

I already have a plan for NDSGBA, which is to:
* immediately put it on GitHub and name it TempGBA;
* copy improvements to the GUI from CATSFC into TempGBA, also copying the multitude of languages we have written for the interface;
* work with Exophase to get TempGBA recognised as a proper system port for the Supercard DSTwo, linking our updates so one gets improved as the other adds improvements;
* following all of these, make incremental improvements as the community sees fit.

To the readers of this thread:

If your wishes are echoed in this thread and you wish to show your support for getting the sources, please put your name down in the poll above - do not post just to put down your name. It is a one-option poll just to show your names.

Chinese speakers on GBAtemp, please try to contact the Supercard Team on the Chinese BBS on our behalf to get them to read this thread. It would be much appreciated.

2013-03-16 03:25 UTC, Nebuleon to Supercard Team:
尊敬的SuperCard团队:
我在此写信给你,是因为想要获取NDSGBA的代码,也就是你们为DSTWO发布的GBA模拟器,这样我和Gbatemp社区可以改进它。
我十分感谢你们发布SDK,同样十分感谢你们提供SFC模拟器NDSSFC的源码。不过现在我们还少NDSGBA的代码。
我们已经给NDSSFC带来了很多帮助。我们给他取名CATSFC。他现在有显著增强的可玩性、速度和游戏兼容性。同样他的GUI对于玩家也很方便。他可以自定义加速、快速存档以及其他很多功能的按键,DS按钮反应速度也有提高。
我们在Github上的NDSSFC页面是https://github.com/ShadauxCat/CATSFC。最近的一次提交更新是我Nebuleon做的。
在Gbatemp上至少有98个用户希望能够改进NDSGBA。我可以很快的用CATSFC给NDSGBA带来很多改进,而且实际上我已经在试着重构NDSGBA了。我想要的不是最新版的1.30,而是之前的1.21版代码。
可以在http://gbatemp.net/threads/tempgba-the-communitys-wishes.343210/看看用户的对话。
以下是对此感觉有意义的用户:

<List of 98 users at the time of sending>

尊敬你的人,
Nebuleon。
Dear SuperCard Team,

I am writing to you to request the source code for NDSGBA, the GBA emulator you have released for the DSTWO, so that the GBATemp community and I can improve on it.

The SDK (Software Development Kit) was a great release, which I am thankful for. I am also thankful for your release of the source code of NDSSFC, the SFC emulator. But now we are missing NDSGBA's source code.

We have done a lot for NDSSFC. We worked on it under the name CATSFC. It has greatly improved playability, speed and compatibility with games. The interface is also much nicer for players. It has key assignments for fast-forwarding, quick creation of game state files and much more. The DS buttons are much more responsive as well.

See our work on NDSSFC on GitHub: https://github.com/ShadauxCat/CATSFC . The last commits are made by me, Nebuleon.

At least 98 users on GBATemp would love to see improvements to NDSGBA. I can copy most changes very quickly. See the conversation here: http://gbatemp.net/threads/tempgba-the-communitys-wishes.343210/ As seen there, I have already started to recreate NDSGBA. The version I would want the source code for is 1.21, not the most recent, 1.30.

The list of interested users is as follows:

<List of 98 users at the time of sending>

Regards,
Nebuleon.

2013-03-16 08:07 UTC, Supercard Team to Nebuleon
Dear Nebuleon,

Thank you for you email. I guess you used google translate it into Chinese, thank you. I can fully understand what you wrote to me. I don't know why you want to get the 1.21? Actually, the 1.30 version fixed some bugs, change the UI, and use open source file system, but the 1.21 use ucos company file system, 1.21 file system support long file name no good, so we don't use it any more, and the ucos file system is comercial code, not public code, I am not sure it can be released as open source code.
SC team thank you very much for your support, we will support you too, if you really want the 1.21, I will send it to you without any problem. Hope you can make it better, and make more people happy. :)
please feel free contact me. thank you

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Best Regard.
Roman
SuperCard Team
www.SuperCard.SC.
2013-03-16

2013-03-16 21:26 UTC, Nebuleon to Supercard Team
Hello Roman,

Thanks for your reply. Indeed the GBATemp community decided it would be best to draft this email in simplified Chinese, because we thought it would be required or would get us a faster reply. We are all very interested in this source code, so I was able to draft an e-mail in English and get a translation from an interested user. Now that I know that's not necessary, I can continue the exchange in English with you.

2013-03-16 08:07 UTC Romman <[email protected]>:
I don't know why you want to get the 1.21? Actually, the 1.30 version fixed some bugs, change the UI, and use open source file system, but the 1.21 use ucos company file system, 1.21 file system support long file name no good, so we don't use it any more, and the ucos file system is comercial code, not public code, I am not sure it can be released as open source code.​
Not knowing that detail, I did not know I could not get 1.21. However, I wanted the code for 1.21 because the community feels 1.21 has better game compatibility than 1.30. They say version 1.30 dropped support for the game_config.txt file, which improves save file (.sav) support and the speed of certain games. It's also required for certain games to even work correctly, like Pokemon Emerald's .sav support.

With version 1.30's code, or the code of any version that can be open-sourced, maybe I can do something. I understand that this emulator is based on gpSP Kai, and if there is no support in 1.30, I can add it back using gpSP Kai again.

Regarding long file name support... I have a bug to report. One of my applications, DS2Compress, is experiencing problems with writing files that have no extension (like README or ChangeLog) from a .zip. The code [ fat_fopen("fat:/tests/README", "wb"); ] produces a file that can corrupt the microSD filesystem. Sometimes it doesn't produce a file at all. I am using a custom version of the DS2 SDK which was made by BassAceGold. He improved the filesystem code, but didn't fix that bug because he didn't know where to look. The bug happens even with the official SDK, version 0.13beta. If you know where I can report this bug, or can forward that for me to the right person, please do.

Files with extensions work very well, so that might not be an issue for NDSGBA and NDSSFC as much as it is for my unzipper application.
SC team thank you very much for your support, we will support you too, if you really want the 1.21, I will send it to you without any problem. Hope you can make it better, and make more people happy. :)
please feel free contact me. thank you​
I intend to post the source code online. That's so the community at large can make improvements even after I am done with the improvements I want to make. So if you can't release the source for 1.21, I would like 1.30, or any version you can open the source of.

Regards,
Nebuleon

2013-03-18 04:19 UTC, Supercard Team to Nebuleon
Dear Nebuleon,

Thank you very much, and thank ShadauxCat too for the CATSFC. Actually, I am also a emulator enthusiasts, I like all emulator, I still remember the first SFC emulator was made by a Japanese, it was about 15 years ago. It makes me inspire.


Thank you very much. I tested the CATSFC is much much better than the NDSSFC, I like it very very much. Can I put the CATSFC on the DSTWO official website? I hope more player can enjoy it. Off cause, I will declare it's third part plugin, and declare who made it to respect the programmer. For personal, I respect you and ShadauxCat.

I will forware your report to the SC team, thank you for your reporting. And, here is the 1.21 source code, you can release to public without any problem.

<A link to an archive that has been passworded is here>

At last, thank you very very much for what you have done for the people who love emulator.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Best Regard.
Roman
SuperCard Team
www.SuperCard.SC.
2013-03-18

2013-03-18 05:11 UTC, Nebuleon to Supercard Team
2013-03-18 04:19 UTC Romman <[email protected]>:
Dear Nebuleon,​
Thank you very much, and thank ShadauxCat too for the CATSFC. Actually, I am also a emulator enthusiasts, I like all emulator, I still remember the first SFC emulator was made by a Japanese, it was about 15 years ago. It makes me inspire.​
That's great! :) I especially like the Super Nintendo (or Super Famicom in Japan) because I played it a lot as a child. NDSSFC 1.06 was especially bad, so I looked for something better. At that time, it was CATSFC 1.1, but that also had a few flaws, so I tried to fix things and made a lot of progress, more than I expected.

My improvements for CATSFC have been requested for inclusion in NDSGBA on the official English Supercard forum and GBATemp alike. See here for example: http://forum.supercard.sc/thread-11194-1-1.html - the very first post was a request to put things into NDSGBA.
Thank you very much. I tested the CATSFC is much much better than the NDSSFC, I like it very very much. Can I put the CATSFC on the DSTWO official website? I hope more player can enjoy it. Off cause, I will declare it's third part plugin, and declare who made it to respect the programmer. For personal, I respect you and ShadauxCat.​
I was going to ask you to do exactly that in a later email.

Of course you can put CATSFC on the DSTwo official web site, I'm thrilled to share the community's effort with all future users who get the plug-ins from you. The programmers who improved this emulator are BassAceGold, ShadauxCat and myself, if you want the right list of names to include.

However I have a few things to say about it:
* The last release is 1.32, but after that, the user who translated my first email to Chinese also translated the interface text that I left in English. The source code change is here: https://github.com/ShadauxCat/CATSFC/commit/e35df7290cda59fa53660a335235dd9235d0e630 . Can you check this text a bit? I want to include it in a CATSFC 1.33 that the Chinese DSTwo users would enjoy. I noticed that CATSFC 1.32 is being discussed on the Chinese forum right now, and that's pretty encouraging :)
* Now, CATSFC's cheats system is able to modify other SNES memory banks than just the RAM (7E). It also supports Game Genie and Pro Action Replay codes which modify the ROM - a lot of cheats are impossible without ROM modification support. However! The cheats file format has changed to allow users to use these codes, and a pack of cheats in this new format is only in English. Do you think that would be a problem for the Chinese users? Should I include support for both the MightyMo cheat pack and the format used in NDSSFC 1.06?
I will forware your report to the SC team, thank you for your reporting.​
Thanks for that! :) I actually have one more bug to report, about button press/release latency when many images and audio are sent to the DS (more than 20 images per second). Do you have a bug tracker I could use to post more information?
And, here is the 1.21 source code, you can release to public without any problem.​
<A link to an archive that has been passworded is here>
At last, thank you very very much for what you have done for the people who love emulator.​
You're welcome. I also love emulators :D And thanks for the source package. I will release the source code after removing the uC/OS code if it's still there. But my goal is to make it an application of only the SDK.

I'll get in contact with you again once I'm satisfied with the improved NDSGBA. Feel free to contact me again if you need more information from me about CATSFC, my bug report or anything else.

Regards,
Nebuleon

2013-03-20 03:57 UTC, Supercard Team to Nebuleon
Dear Nebuleon,


Thanks for you reply. I will release the CATSFC on SuperCard offcial website in a special topic page, that people can more easy to share the happiness from you.
And CATSFC 1.32 version supprises me, there is include Chinese already, and I check your Chinese translation, it's very good, Chinese people can fully understand it. You are so smart.
By the way, if you can give me a comparson table between NDSSFC vs CATSFC, it's help me to make the special topic page better, thank you very much. And most of the Chinese who can play emulator on DS should understand some English, especially game English. :)
Best Regards.
romMan

2013-03-20 05:03 UTC, Nebuleon to Supercard Team
2013-03-20 03:58 UTC Romman <[email protected]>:
Dear Nebuleon,​
Thanks for you reply. I will release the CATSFC on SuperCard offcial website in a special topic page, that people can more easy to share the happiness from you.​
By the way, if you can give me a comparson table between NDSSFC vs CATSFC, it's help me to make the special topic page better, thank you very much. And most of the Chinese who can play emulator on DS should understand some English, especially game English. :)
I suppose the "game English" is a reply about the English cheats? If so, that's good :)

About the special page and the comparison table:

http://gbatemp.net/threads/ndssfc-catsfc-revival.339600/

The first post is a compact record of all the changes I made to the emulator, after ShadauxCat and BassAceGold. There are a lot of improvements, so to help users find the most important words and skip the rest, I bolded the important words. The changes are also in categories. That should give you a good summary and a large change log to work with! :D If you'd like me to list the more important changes, give me another e-mail and I'll try to help more.
And CATSFC 1.32 version supprises me, there is include Chinese already, and I check your Chinese translation, it's very good, Chinese people can fully understand it. You are so smart.​
I preserved the Chinese text that was already present in NDSSFC 1.06, BAGSFC and CATSFC 1.1 into CATSFC 1.32. Only the text for the options I added was still in English, so it gives you another idea about what I added into the emulator.

The same user who wrote the first e-mail also put forward the rest of the Chinese text after I asked him. Since you said the Chinese text was good, I've released CATSFC 1.33. You can find it here: http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/flashcart-files/download-catsfc-133-f31795.html

This version should be very good for all users to download, Chinese and English alike.

Sincerely,
Nebuleon
 

Mikesahhh

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Having your awesome CATSFC improving skills to the NDSGBA would be too good!
ARG() Support would be great too for Bagplug/iMenu users
 

The Catboy

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I am supporting the hell out of this!
I love your work with CATSFC and I know you will do an amazing job with NDSGBA!

Edit: I added a link to this thread in my signature!
 

lpchaim

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Well, this seriously needs to happen. A nicer GBA emu will make it almost perfect for me!
Ironically enough, GBA support is touted as one of the main features of the card...

EDIT: Wow, it came out a bit snarkier than I envisioned, sorry.
Bad thoughts aside, maybe I can help with brazilian portuguese translation if time permits.
I hope this project gets going forward soon!
 

Aeter

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I fully support this too.
I also have experience in programming in a variety of languages including C and C++, but I'm not very good at C/C++ though; I'm a lot better at Java and Python since those are my main languages.
So if I can be of any other help besides translating, I'm willing to participate if the source becomes available.
 

Deleted member 319809

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Well, this seriously needs to happen. A nicer GBA emu will make it almost perfect for me!
Ironically enough, GBA support is touted as one of the main features of the card...
[...]
[M]aybe I can help with brazilian portuguese translation if time permits.
I hope this project gets going forward soon!
Yeah; it's ironic that it's touted as one of the main features of the card but their game support is apparently deteriorating - and the application takes ages to load, which doesn't look too great.

Except for some features that would need to be coded anew for TempGBA, I'll already have a lot of the text I need in Brazilian Portuguese from CATSFC. :)

I fully support this too.
I also have experience in programming in a variety of languages including C and C++, but I'm not very good at C/C++ though; I'm a lot better at Java and Python since those are my main languages.
So if I can be of any other help besides translating, I'm willing to participate if the source becomes available.
Awesome! You can be one of the people who will look into the code when it's available, see where the CATSFC improvements would go and copy-paste them. And maybe learn a bit of C along the way. ^_^
 

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It appears that someone necro-bumped a thread about bad cheat support in NDSGBA on the Chinese BBS: Original (Translated). This problem has persisted since 2011-04-29 at the latest.

What does GBAtemp think of the cheat support in NDSGBA?

edit: Emulation bugs? as of 2013-02-19 Original (Translated)
And some kind of bug tracker? Because this appears to be a sticky from 2010 with stricken things... Original (Translated)
 

Canadacdn

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I'd like to see this happen, but I'm not too optimistic. Supercard has ignored every request for the source so far. Honestly, what else should you expect from Chinese software pirates? They've got your money already, they don't give a fuck. If they release the source, other flashcart manufacturers with GBA support will spring up overnight, and steal away the DSTWO's dominance in the 3ds-compatible flashcard market. Supercard doesn't want that. What they want is to get as much money as they can for as little work as possible, and you're helping them do that by improving their shitty emulators for free.
 

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No big deal. I'll just get my DS Lite and the carts out and play but it would be very cool to have it on my supercard.
 

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I'd like to see this happen, but I'm not too optimistic. Supercard has ignored every request for the source so far. Honestly, what else should you expect from Chinese software pirates? They've got your money already, they don't give a fuck. If they release the source, other flashcart manufacturers with GBA support will spring up overnight, and steal away the DSTWO's dominance in the market. Supercard doesn't want that.
There is one problem with your logic: they already released the source for the Super Famicom emulator, and a long time ago to boot. Perhaps that was because NDSSFC was considered highly imperfect, though...
 

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There is one problem with your logic: they already released the source for the Super Famicom emulator, and a long time ago to boot. Perhaps that was because NDSSFC was considered highly imperfect, though...

Yeah, the only reason they did that was likely because NDSSFC was vastly inferior to SNEmulDS at the time. Until a another GBA emulator comes along that can rival NDSGBA, I'd expect them to keep a tight lid on the source.
 

WiiUBricker

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I support this, but lets be honest here. Community wishes are worth nothing when it comes to the chinese flash cart market. People were trying to get the source for this for years, but there never was a slighest respond from the supercard team. They don't care about what people want. Oh and DarkChen is actually a member of the supercard team.
 

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I'd like to see this happen, but I'm not too optimistic. Supercard has ignored every request for the source so far. Honestly, what else should you expect from Chinese software pirates? They've got your money already, they don't give a fuck. If they release the source, other flashcart manufacturers with GBA support will spring up overnight, and steal away the DSTWO's dominance in the 3ds-compatible flashcard market. Supercard doesn't want that. What they want is to get as much money as they can for as little work as possible, and you're helping them do that by improving their shitty emulators for free.
Because we all know that the other flash carts have the onboard CPU to run this stuff, and if they don't it it's free to add, right?

And yeah, the SNES emulator is available, and sources for some SDK versions, and they sent free DSTwos to people like the DSx86 author to get more software developed, etc.

I support this, but lets be honest here. Community wishes are worth nothing when it comes to the chinese flash cart market. People were trying to get the source for this for years, but there never was a slighest respond from the supercard team. They don't care about what people want. Oh and DarkChen is actually a member of the supercard team.
Actually GBAtemp announcements have gotten flash cart makers to act a few times before, like it got the Cyclo team to start updating a cart or two again and some other historical stuff.

Yeah, the only reason they did that was likely because NDSSFC was vastly inferior to SNEmulDS at the time. Until a another GBA emulator comes along that can rival NDSGBA, I'd expect them to keep a tight lid on the source.
'Cause SNEMULDS ran Star Fox and shit out of the box, rite?

NDSSSFC's compatibility, even the base version, is way better than SNEMULDS. Yes SNEMULDS is faster at "playing" games, if the amalgamated bullshit displayed on the screen can be called "a game". And yes, this is about the constant and serious layering issues.
 

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People were trying to get the source for this for years, but there never was a slighest respond from the supercard team. They don't care about what people want. Oh and DarkChen is actually a member of the supercard team.
I believe even the dumbest companies with the slightest business sense will recognise that you have to make it work for the customer to want to buy your product. A few replies on the Chinese BBS already say "suggest not to buy this" in regards to playing GBA games.

As for the previous requests for the source, maybe that was just ignored because the person requesting was not considered capable enough. If someone points to my work on CATSFC, they may reconsider. That may mean that I need to send the email, or that whoever sends the email in Chinese needs to take the "business side" and the "this person is capable" angle into account more than the "community side". The community can look at the code when the source has been given to the capable person in it... at least for them. Right? ;)

Shall we start a draft email to be translated? Or are we giving up hope straight away?

EDIT: Or perhaps DarkChen/discuz2011 understands English and can be directed right to this thread via a PM and/or email?
 

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Actually GBAtemp announcements have gotten flash cart makers to act a few times before, like it got the Cyclo team to start updating a cart or two again and some other historical stuff.
That was Cyclo, who at least consisted of one non-chinese person. And Cyclo is dead. And they didn't do that because they care about a random brat being able to play his pirated rom of Golden Sun, they did it just to shut the bitching around here up.

Probably your best bet to get a response is posting a thread in the chinese forum, in chinese of course. But it's hard to find someone who can speak chinese here. I don't think gbatemp has any chinese speaking regular members, but don't quote me on that.
 

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