Slashdot Mirror
Gameboy Emulator For PalmOS
isaac was the first of many to point out: "Gambit Studios has finally released Liberty, a Gameboy emulator for PalmOS."
Here's the
FAQ; there are reviews and comments on
PalmInfocenter
and
re-Visor.org.
Speed appears to be an issue and everyone keeps suggesting
Afterburner.
And for the impatient, here's the Liberty
download page.
Update 3 hours later:
Gambit says:
"It has come to our attention that Liberty is having some problems with a number of devices (and many devices NOT having problems). Due to this we have decided to stop the download of this application until the problem is fully investigated and a solution is found." Oh well; ref. the
first noble truth
of the Buddha. Update another 3 hours later: OK, it's available again.
Can we run this sucker on one of those Palm emulators, and if so, what's the performance hit, if any? I think it would be funny to get to the point where we could play Six Degrees of by writing emulators to run inside emulators.
Who is going to steal a mere 18 games?
I expect most would do that in their first day.
There are hundreds of gameboy games to download from the internet. You act a little differently when you can try something for free than when you have to cough up $25 every time you want a game.
I don't think it's right to rip off the game producers that way, but I don't think their distribution model is right either.
... does anybody know anything more specific about the problems user ran into?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Nintendo is not a big fan of emulators (neither is Sony or Sega), but there really isn't anything that they can do to stop them. With the recent settlements/injunctions between Sony and the , there is no way to say that creating an emulator is illegal. Of course, to play the games without the hardware, you need either a cart ripper or to download the ROM images from the 'net. The emulator doesn't do that, the users do that.
In fact, emulators are a great thing for the game market. It gives programmers an opportunity to work with an almost exact replica of the hardware for nothing. Console development was always a black art because nobody but official developers ever had access to the hardware; emulators change this and allows for an all new generation of programmers to learn like we all did with our C-64's and Apples.
But, I digress. Yes, coming out with an emulator right after a new console comes out would not be good for sales. Coming out after 4,5 or even 10 years later is not as big as an issue, at least with regards to future console development. Gameboy emulators have been around for years and that hasn't stopped them from developing the Gameboy Advanced (which isn't really a development, just a handheld version of the SNES hardware with a different processor).
In other words, emulators are a good thing, IMSHO.
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
http://palmgear.com/software/showsoftware.cfm?sid= 71221320000707193646&prodID=7928
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
Ardiri is a stand-up guy. I wouldn't be quick to ascribe ulterior motives.
Just my $0.02.
I didn't mean to imply that it's bad to avoid being slashdotted, I'm just curious as to why you'd want to take it down just because some people were having problems.
I mean, if it's a DEMO, what the heck. Just attach a note to it saying that it's beta or something. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think you'll adapt to the monumental 4-button interface. Humans can do that, these days.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
BECAAUASE CHMIPSKNWOOBO HWO TO ues teh PLAM PAIloT!!!1 MY HANDSD ARE TO BIGG FRO teh gamebaoy!!!1 TEHY SHUOLD MAEK A "GAMECHIMMP" TAHT SI SPECAILLY DESGNIED FOR CAHIMPS LIEK MEE!!!1
JIAMP TEAH CHIMP'S VARY SAMART!!!1 TEH ONALY NTE USIGN CHIMP IN TEH WOARRD!!!1
There's finally a reason to get a PocketPC over a Palm, here's an application that needs the speed.
and the real question is: can it play textmode quake?
The predecessor to Wolf3d (the predecessor to Doom (the predecessor to Quake)) is FaceBall for Game Boy. Buy the cartridge, download the ROM to your Palm device, and play away.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not really, when you think about it.
The gameboy was designed with - guess what - GAMES in mind. Palm was not designed for such. That's why todays middle-of-the-road car can still get it's rear-end kicked by a 60's hot-rod.
Game Gear is essentially a portable Sega Master System. Most GG emus also emulate SMS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Most of the time, I play FCI's Panel Action Bingo on my Game Boy. When I want Tetris, I play Tetanus on my laptop. When I want Dr. Mario, I play Vitamins for X or Windows.
Will I retire or break 10K?
NES emulator inside a Basic interpreter inside a Java VM inside a Bochs inside a Bochs inside a Bochs...
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The only games I've tried have been Bomb Jack and Tetris but they seem to play at a reasonable speed.
I think my main concern if I were to buy the thing would be how well the buttonf would hold up. The date book and address book buttons just don't seem robust enough to take a constant hammering like the Gameboy direction pad.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
One issue is that a GB Color can run at twice the speed and had considerable hardware changed. It already was a challenge to get a single speed BW Gameboy emulated on the Palm hardware -- pushing it further is almost impossible.
I know you were being funny, but the market here isn't people that don't have GameBoys, it people that have them and a library of games, but don't want to carry around an extra device. If this works well, I'll be able to leave my GB and carts behind when I go on business trips, but still have the games around...
Hmmm, this with a TRGPro and a 340MB microdrive... neat!
Ehh... I think the loss is negligable, actually.
It's pretty much a fact that if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive. (Unless you wait several years for technology to catch up.)
Am I really going to wait until 2004 to buy a Pentium-7/3000 so that I can download an emulator that simulates the PSX2 at a reasonable speed? Probably not. By the same token, the Gameboy has essentially reached market saturation by now. If you were going to buy a Gameboy, you probably would have already.
"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die!"
There has already been talk of a small joystick attachment that would plug into the serial port on the Palm III-series units, much like the modem attaches now.
It would really be news if someone ported Palm OS (or Linux) to a Gameboy. If someone ported FreeBSD, would it be called Flameboy?
July 7, 2000
// Aaron Ardiri
// Michael Ethetton
Stockholm, Sweden
It has come to our attention that Liberty is having some problems with a number of devices (and many devices NOT having problems). Due to this we have decided to stop the download of this application until the problem is fully investigated and a solution is found.
- the Liberty development team
- chris
- chris@unbeliever.netspam
- i hate capitals
- aim:arikel6000 / yahoo:blackrose91
1. Doesn't an equal amount of R&D go into developing an emulator and making it work on multiple platforms? 2. Couldn't they release their own GamingOS software as open source and make all their money off the games?
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Good point. It is a commercial enterprise, so maybe they're concerned about bad first impressions.
Read the article.. It's not a hardware clone, it's a software emulator. Besides, where would we be right now without the original PC cloners?
Perhaps paying Big Blue for a box that requires one to reinforce their desk (seriously.. I had to move an old IBM AT recently.. the Keyboard weighed 10 lbs, the monitor 75, the CPU 60..)
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
A) It only works with 32k ROMs(the demo version at least), which are pretty old.
B) Even 32k ROMs are so slow on it that they are unplayable, you get almost 1 fps.
C) They recommend AfterBurner, games are still unplayable with it.
And a few funnies from thier website:
In the compatibility section:
0 games tested
0 games playable
In the Known Problems section:
Problem: -blank-
Solution: Download latest version
It seems those suggestions to use Liberty with Afterburner resulted in Gambit Studios offering a "Special Bundle" with Afterburner for an extra six bucks, coming soon. hmm... maybe they read slashdot too... :)
Mr. Jaggers
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
At any rate, I snagged copies and posted 'em here. Get 'em while they're hot.
The only thing that is done on a gameboy cart is rumble. That's the only thing that nintendo provides other than added ram. I've never worked on older systems, but I think that adding functionality to the cart was a very special case and it cut a huge chunk into the profit margins for a given game. So unless you're totally in bed with Nintendo, such extras are *not* feasable for the average publisher.
Not to say that you're wrong, but could you point out any NES/SNES games that did use off system hardware?
--www.mp3.com/kruhft--
there is a reason it was taken down, we worked on it all afternoon, it would put devices into a reset loop, and require a non-confirmed hard reset, resulting in a loss of data, i hope you are happy, youve provided a link to thedestruction of palms.
At any rate, aaron and maven have reposted the newest really working version, so o get that at
www.palmgear.com
www.ardiri.com and
www.gambitstudios.com
delete the older versions. 1.0 1.0a 1.0b
you have been warned
Well, it's been a while I'm playing Zelda on my palm... in color too... wtih a real gamepad, sound and a better screen than the real gameboy color. No, wait, that is not on a wimpy Palm, that is on my Cassiopeia E105 :)
32 Meg of RAM, a 131 Mhz RISC, a large high-res color screen, stereo sound and an integrated gamepad helps a lot for console emulators !
Here's a link to some roms under 65k, so you can see how it performs with actual games.
http://www.nwnet.co.uk/syko/gb.html
and you can dig up a few here as well:
http://emulation.zone.ru/gbroms_e.html
From what I've heard, the smaller roms, usualy heavily action based, supposedly perform worse than many of the much larger roms like pokemon.
It's definately not quite there yet speed wise, but if it were just a *little* bit more optimized and if you could just clock the palm a *little* higher than 32... who knows
Why not write a Pokémon adventure for the Kyle's Quest engine instead? :-)
And it looks like they are trying to instill the same geek factor that made my friend get doom. not that I mind of course :)
-
As cunning as a fox, which has just been appointed professor of cunning at Oxford University. http://www.kinlan.co
Thers is some palm software that does take over the palm buttons. The game Subhunt uses the palm buttons to drop the depth charges and move the ship. I believe at least one adventure game also uses those buttons for directional movement.
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Well, anyone got a crack for this thing yet or what? I hate to have to play with a crippled program before I give up my money.
Catch me on AIM: SigningiS
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
Six Degrees of by writing emulators to run inside emulators.
Would we call that "six degrees of separation?"
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
pish posh. in actuality, windows ce has more reported bugs in one version then all releases of the palm os.
-John
Like I need more ways to not pay attention in meetings....
YouTube & Google Video -> podcast http://castcluster.blogspot.com/
Can it sync with a desktop version so I can play Mario on my desktop as well as my Palm? Possibly a good suggestion for down the road?
AF-Design, web development.
Any chance someone has a joystick imput for this?
Palm IIIc from buy.com: $449
Gameboy from buy.com: $70
Gameboy games from buy.com: $25 each
I only have to steal 17.96 games to make it worth it!!!
Then again, I've had a Game boy since 1997 and I only ever actually bought Tetris and Spider-Man anyway. And Tetris came with the thing. Hm.
I wouldn't think the Palm buttons could be a good substitute for the directional control buttons on a GameBoy. For me, at least, a good game of Tetris or Kirby needs a comfortable and reconizable controls set.
-- demiurge
You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!!
Score one for the downtrodden hacker!
With regard to point (a), remember that a Palm device is pretty slow to begin with, 'cause it's been optimized for longer battery life, not speed. The Liberty FAQ mentions that you may need an overclocker utility to get decent performance...and the faster you push the processor, the faster you're gonna wear out your batteries. You'd probably get better battery life out of a real GameBoy.
With regard to point (b), consider that GameBoys are currently going for something like $50 apiece, whereas the least expensive Palm devices (a IIIe or the base-model Visor) are three times that (and they only have about 2Mb of RAM at that, which won't fit very many of the newer games).
So this emulator is a possibly-interesting toy at best; if you want real GameBoy action, you should probably just cough up the dough for a real one anyway. Somehow I don't think Nintendo is going to lose a lot of sleep over this.
But I might download Liberty anyway and check it out, just for grins. (Hmm, I wonder if they've implemented, or are planning to implement, 2-player GameLink emulation using the IR port? That would be interesting...)
Eric
--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Okay, GameBoy came out in '89, making it 11 year old technology. And you have to speed up your Palm's processor to make it play GameBoy games? Granted, there is emulation overhead, but you'd think that in the intervening 10 years, the technological advances in handheld processing would make "overclocking" your Palm unnecessary. Did Nintendo design their hardware that much better?
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
More to the point:
This seems like funny timing to me. I wonder if it's just an attempt to avoid being slashdotted. I mean, just because it's having problems in some places doesn't mean that you don't want the other people to be able to demo it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ok, I don't like bad Microsoft products like Win98, MS' SQL server, IIS, etc... but if you guys want a great color gameboy emulator get a Cassiopeia E-115 PocketPC. It runs color gameboy games well, has a directional keypad on the pda and unlike wince 2.11, it actually works... REAL WELL! I can telnet from it, I can get compactflash ethernet cards, I have a 128megs of compactflash for my mp3s, i can voice record meetings, I can play movie files, and I can do everything the palm can do (as fast as the palm can do it now with ce3.0) I hate to say it, but MS is losing this battle with a better product just because of marketshare/marketing... talk about bizzaro-world.
Looks like Gambit has removed the demo from their web site citing incompatability with certain kinds of devices.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
Okay, I'm not just going to repeat the evidence and citations already posted equivocating that it is impossible to actually play anything with this because both a) the games aren't compatible and b) it's painfully slow. That would be (-1, redundant). I'm going to pose the question: "why?" Why are they doing this? The palm is obviously not suited to do this kind of crap. It wasn't made for this kind of load and can't handle it as an incidental. So give it up, guys.
Unless you're masochists. Then I aplaud you. Masochism's all cool, it's a hell of a lot prettier than taking your problems and wierdnesses out on other people. (picturing people with guns here) So keep at it, dudes, don't let me stop you.
Oh, and right now I'm thinking maybe it shoulda started with something like a TRS-80 emulator or Atari 2600 emulator, something where all the games are under 32k instead of just the crappy ones.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I get no sound. Tetris, Asteroids, and JPak are unplayable.
--
Marc A. Lepage (aka SEGV)
--
Marc A. Lepage
Software Developer
Just don't let it spread to the ti calcs. then we won't have /any/ way to beat back the whiny newbie flamers.
Newbie: Whaddya mean IT'S NOT A GAME BOY?!?! the web page said you could turn your TI-83+ into a GAME BOY!!! that's the whole reason I bought this PILE of LARD!!! now HELP ME, you lousy SACK of BOLOGNA!!!! I want GAMES, and I WANT them YESTERDAY!!!!
Me: Uhhhh, that's a TI-85--
Newbie: SHUT and DO AS I SAY, hear??
So much for the fallback of saying "you can't expect to turn them on and expect instant games, games games, they aren't gameboys" (unless you know wtf you're doing, hehe). We better not let that happen.
Ever get the impression that your life would make a good sitcom?
Ever follow this to its logical conclusion: that your life is a sitcom?
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
What kind of speed did you expect out of a Drangonball 30Mhz processor anyway? Those 85Mhz MIPS processors in Windows CE machines aren't even fast enough to emulate a Gameboy at full speed, seesh!
That's what I've been waitin' for. Now if they'd only get some classic NES, or Sega MS emulators, I'd buy a Palm in a heartbeat. But in the meantime, I'd rather just carry a Game Boy. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
*Redesigned, high in fiber, low in cholesterol*
someone goes and does something GREAT like this. No we have access to much much better ways that drug lords and tetris to waste time with our palms......(of course besides the old fashioned way to waste time with your palm.....that causes blindess)
-Superb0wl
-Superb0wl
It's not that I'm lazy....it's that I just don't care.
At that rate, buy a Gameboy of each color: 7*70 = $490!
Or just buy 2 Gameboy colors, the printer, a handful of multiplayer games, and 2 batterypacks, and you are *still* ahead of the game.
Sigh
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
I couldn't find it...did anyone see if there will be color for Palm IIIc just like for gameboy color?
I know that games only for gameboy color won't be supported.
I know this has been suggested before, but I still think the idea has a great deal of merit. Instead of emulating a GameBoy on a Palm, why not emulate a Palm on a GameBoy? These little machines are colorful, easy to use, have monster battery life, and the older versions are tanks. Those things could survive a bomb blast. Using blank cartridges for storage (or some nifty sorta storage device with that little i/o port usually used for multiplayer), you have infinite storage, and it's cheap. Sure, no graffiti, but I always thought it did more harm than good anyway (I seem to recall an article rendering people unable to write after extended use of graffiti.)
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Go to www.palmgear.com, they have the zip on their site. Now, to install this thing! --- "Thats it! This planet is HISTORY!" -- Vegeta : DBZ
Liberty at PalmGear
--SONET
http://www.hbcsd.12.ca.us/peterson/technology
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
I'm not saying that competition is a bad thing. Of course we want to be able to buy our hardware from different vendors and be able to get the best value for our dollar. But the availability of emulators sure makes it hard for companies to justify any kind of innovation, when they know that everything they do will become available for free anyway. Do you want to be stuck with the same game console for the next 20 years because Nintendo, Sega, et. al. can't justify the costs in developing in a new console?
Me neither.
Come on now, folks. Everybody knows that the only games anyone plays on the Gameboy anymore are Tetris and the various Pokemon incarnations. AFAIK, you can't get a pair of palms to link up and exchange data ala networked quake, can you?
My point is that is they can't play Pokemon, they won't be popular. Sick, isn't it?
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