[Calling any Symbian homebrew developers, or anyone who knows someone who is]

[Exophase]

Vampent is currently about to release a GBA emulator for Symbian v3 phones called vBag. It is a very impressive performer for the target hardware it is being ran on. Videos prove that on a 220MHz OMAP 1710 phone (Nokia E60) it can run full speed or in that neighborhood (no sound + bad youtube quality makes it difficult to tell). I don't know if it's frameskipping or not - again, too difficult to tell. This is running a strictly time locked (5 minute) demo with no sound. There have been reports that internal betas are running very well with sound.

Given the nature of the demo it should be painfully obvious that they intend to sell vBag just like every other emulator they've done, including the somewhat mediocre SNES emulator vSun. And as usual they will probably make piles of money too because there's no competition - somehow people seem deathly afraid to even port anything to Symbian. Right now the homebrew scene, FREE emulation in particular, is pretty pathetic. And yet tons of people are willing to play actual game consoles on cell phones (heaven knows why) to the extent where they'll fork out money for it, real money, like $20 a pop.

And I don't exactly like that they have this amazing GBA emulator and they're keeping all of the information surrounding it to themselves and locking it to this crappy platform. I don't like it at all. I'm the author of a GBA emulator called gpSP - I developed it for PSP, but have since been heavily focusing on optimizing it for ARM platforms, a platform which includes Symbian phones. I believe that in the best case scenario it will perform about neck and neck with vBag as it is now, and I am still improving it (believe me, because this is my life's obsession).

It doesn't actually have to be faster than vBag in all ways just yet, the kicker is that it'd be free. It's definitely good enough to be very competitive, and I think it'd be a crying shame to deprive people of a free alternative when it's relatively simple to manage it. gpSP is pretty portable, and so far runs on PCs, PSP, GP2X, Zaurus, Motorola I600/I1200 phones, iPod, and Dreamcast, and all of these have dynamic recompilation running except Dreamcast.

But I don't have a Symbian phone, and I'll be damned if I end up spending even more money just to dev for people. So I'm looking for someone with experience porting to the platform, or at least an eager developer who has one of the phones. I will work with you as closely as I possibly can every step of the way to port this - I'm dead serious about seeing this happen. And if we're very lucky, we might even strike a truce with Vampent to tell us some of their secrets about vBag to help make GBA emulation better for everyone. Or we can see if such a thing is even necessary.

I'm probably going to post this to as many places as I can until I get a taker. viva la GBA emulation ~_~

[-Xandu-]

Double click on the thread title outside the thread and you can edit it ;).

I have a Symbian phone if you'd like to test stuff. But the fact is, phones aren't made for emulation, vBag plays slow as hell :(.

[Exophase]

Double click on the thread title outside the thread and you can edit it ;).

I have a Symbian phone if you'd like to test stuff. But the fact is, phones aren't made for emulation, vBag plays slow as hell :(.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AYXV6JwRSM

The version of vBag you are referring to is a couple years old and is merely a port of VBA, so of course will be very slow. The version I am referring to is new and presumably highly optimized. As I said, it is proven to run well by that video alone.

[-Xandu-]

Hmm yeah, just tried it now with Kirby : Nightmare in Dreamland. The intro is full speed(no sound), although the game doesn't load.

EDIT: Tried out Wario Ware now and works full speed.