GBA Emulator Released For the DSi

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GBA Emulator Released For the DSi

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday September 20, 2009 @03:38AM from the what's-old-is-new dept.

Busshy writes "Darkchen has released a Gameboy Advance emulator for the Nintendo DS/DSi that plays full speed with frameskip. This can only be played with the homebrew dev cart, the DS iPlayer. The emulator adds save states, cheats and tools to GBA games, and for DSi Fans the ability to finally get over the loss of the GBA Slot on the DSi."

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nitpick by Anonymous Coward · 2009-09-20 03:40 · Score: 5, Insightful

If it has to skip frames to play at "full speed" then that means it's not really playing at full speed.
1. Re:nitpick by ZosX · 2009-09-20 05:30 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  From the looks of the video its frameskipping like hell. Emulation doesn't get good until it is as smooth as the original.
  The core they are running this on is an arm9. I'd be willing to bet they could get it up to 100% with some optimization. The original GBA was only a 33mhz arm. The music doesn't seem quite right tho.....
  
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2. Re:nitpick by Spatial · 2009-09-20 07:08 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  It takes a surprising amount of computational power to emulate the GBA (and the SNES for that matter). Even the PSP emulators for them don't run at full speed 100% of the time.
Not for the DSi by rvalles · 2009-09-20 03:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

Wrong heading. Should say "For the iPlayer" and not "for DSi".
About DSi, once DSi mode is properly cracked, it should give access to 133MHz ARM9 (up from 66MHz) and 16MB of RAM (up from 4MB), which might make this iPlayer device not needed.
It's actually very interesting..... by Anonymous Coward · 2009-09-20 04:22 · Score: 3, Informative

As the iplayer has one of these in it:
http://focus.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tms320dm6441.pdf
As the DS isn't quite powerful enough to play video (2 cpu's 100MHz, 4MB of RAM), they put a decoder chip on board a flash cart. This is decoded into the 16MB included in the cart and then displayed on the DS screen. I had previously assumed that it wouldn't be that useful for much else due to traffic being one way only.
As a developer of the Linux port to the DS (http://www.dslinux.org) I am very interested to see if an X server or similar could be run on the iplayer cpu, leaving the DS cpu to handle wifi/touchscreens etc.
It's important to note that this is an unofficial development (darkchen admits to acquiring the SDK through not the normal methods). The iPlayer team are quite proud of the fact that their cartridge is one of the few that doesn't allow piracy. Having a GBA emulator goes against this.
I'd rather have a GBC emulator for the DS by NotSoHeavyD3 · 2009-09-20 04:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

Mostly because I still have some old GB/GBC games that do not play in the DS at all.(I'm a little surprised NoA didn't put out a DS card that would let me play those titles.)

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1. Re:I'd rather have a GBC emulator for the DS by TSPhoenix · 2009-09-20 04:44 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Lameboy DS seems to work fine.
2. Re:I'd rather have a GBC emulator for the DS by bmecoli · 2009-09-20 04:46 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Lameboy seems to work pretty well. I played it with Link's Awakening DX and it runs at a solid 60FPS.
3. Re:I'd rather have a GBC emulator for the DS by tepples · 2009-09-20 06:08 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  (I'm a little surprised NoA didn't put out a DS card that would let me play those titles.)
  Nintendo probably plans to sell emulators or enhanced remakes of GBC games on DSi Shop, just as it has done with NES games on Wii Shop.
Re:How does a DS play GBA games? by tepples · 2009-09-20 06:31 · Score: 2, Informative

If the DS can natively play GBA games, is the DSi any different, besides the lack of the GBA slot?
For one thing, GBA games expect 0x08000000-0x09FFFFFF to be the Game Pak ROM. DSi appears not to have anything in that address space. Instead, as I understand it, DSi has extra RAM in 0x02400000-0x02FFFFFF and an SD card slot.
Re:Homebrew without piracy? by Anonymous Coward · 2009-09-20 10:40 · Score: 3, Insightful

*psst* He needs to work in an angle so he can link to his tetris clone