GBA Emu For DC Progress Report

[wraggster]

Ive got a hold of the latest beta given to me by GPF, heres my findings:

Well after 3 trys i finally got it burned, realised my CDrs werent compatible in the Dreamcast. but anyway loaded up the cd and it seemed quite fast going into the splash screen part, now onto try some games, im mostly going to try homebrew but ill chuck a few commercial in just to let you know whats the crack

First game just to help me make sure it was running i tryed Mario Kart for the GBA, it loaded but way too slow to be playble but has a tech achievement i did enjoy seeing mario again.

next game was another commercial game Super Mario World for the GBA, and while it loaded it was way too slow,ill move onto to the homebrew games.

gonna play with the settings too as i run through this:

Trying Dangerous Xmas with the sound off, oh and just so you know this version has Joypad support

Dangerous Xmas ran much faster than the last beta i tryed but still not playable with sound off, i will now try with sound on, hmm got to say on this game i noticed no real slowdown with sound on.

next game:

Wonkieguy was really slow, so slow its painful, not sure why such a massive difference in speed between this and dangerous Xmas.

Next up a games called 2origins which featured 4 games in it(an entry to GBAx 2004) this again loaded slow and played slow too, it worked fine but no luck as a playable game.

Now for a game called Carbie, this loaded fast, slow as hell to play and the noise called sound is killing me.

no more sound enabled for me :P

Tryed Dan Cotters Ebook with a great film i watched some time ago on it, obviously its a book but lets talk speed etc, hmm slow to load and not at all pleasent to read ahh well back to the real book.

Arkanoid Advance loaded at a slowish rate around 60% i think, and played too slow for my liking

Last game i played with was Jetpack and while it was slow it was just playable.

The Emu itself feels much better now with the great joypad support and with new splash screens it will be awesome but at this time i can say that only a very small amount of games and thats homebrew and certainly not commercial are going to be playable, of those that were playable it wasnt as fast as most of us would like. Now this beta is over a 10 days old but speed is the key area to be improved, im not sure how or if it can but it will need to be.

As a tech achievement its awesome to see GBA running on the Dreamcast.

Lets hope that GPF (Troy Davis ) can squeeze more speed

Thats all folks

[tinku]

If I were you I would get a big spade and bury this GBAemu before you get dissapointed.

Its never going to be full speed like so many other emulators before this on the DC.

looking back at the last year nothing has been brought up to full speed with sound with more than 50% compatability

I'll eat my words if proved wrong with this gba emu but i suspect im right.

im entitled to my say

tinku :-/

[wraggster]

well you may be right and you may be wrong but i would say that commercial games are never gonna play well on the emu but a lot of Homebrew will some homebrew plays great already

It will be a good emu but not one that will take away from owning a GBA but its the home brew scene thats the awesome bit

[marfans]

Everyone is entitled to your opinion, but why be so pessimistic, it's always fun to try new stuff. I should be pessimistic, I am an old Amiga user and fan, commodore can make anyone a pessimist :P

[vipor231]

nothing is full speed? nester dc i believe is full speed with great sound great compatibility too *i enjoy it.... *besides not every emulator will be perfect,you got to understand working on a 200mhz machine is probably hard.im not a coder so i do not know.... but the man hours these authors go thru to try to please... hey im just happy gpf could make a gba emulator period...

[guymelef]

either way, it's kick ass.

[Eric]

yeah i would love to see this emu work and vip you are kinda right with the nesterdc emu except for some minor things that will be fixed in the next release by scherzo Speed: 98%
Sound: 90% and of course some mappers need to be worked on

[pascal]

Dangerous Xmas is faster coz of a simple gba trick , i used at vsync, the function IntrWait (bios call) which pause the cpu while all the processing is done and waiting for the vsync. This gave me a huge boost in visualboy pc. rather than using a loop (while line==160)

[BlackAura]

[quote author=tinku link=board=dcemu;num=1089469140;start=0#1 date=07/10/04 at 11:27:37]looking back at the last year nothing has been brought up to full speed with sound with more than 50% compatability[/quote]

The thing is that there aren't that many emulators still in development. Nearly everything that can be emulated already has been emulated. That includes most 8-bit systems, a few 16-bit systems, and some arcade games. Some of the emulators are very close to the limits of what we can do with the DC, and some (like this GBA emulator, and the Saturn emulator) are probably way beyond.

As far as I know, there are only around six or seven emulators still being developed.

The NeoGeo CD emulator is pretty much full speed without sound emulation, on virtually every game it's been tested on. Runs from the original CDs, not many bugs, full speed, with a 16-bit system. Came out of nowhere this year, and got to where it is in a few months.

Genesis Plus using the hardware-accelerated renderer (as far as I know, the first of it's kind) is very close to full speed with sound, and is easily full speed without sound. It has graphical glitches (some of which can and will be fixed), but the majority of games are fully playable at full speed. This thing was running at around 50% at the beginning of the year.

There is some work still being done, but not a lot. It usually doesn't progress anywhere near as fast as the above two examples, but it's still there.

[GPF]

Wraggster, was the testing done with throttling or frameskip?

The GBC part works pretty good.

I only play Dangerous Xmas when testing the GBA cause I love that game and also cause its runs alot faster than the other homebrew I have tried.

For commercial I have only tested the Namco Museum, Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country but they are so slow its more fun to play on the PC or on the GBA itself

Troy