Omnimaga
Calculator Community => Other Calc-Related Projects and Ideas => TI-Nspire => Topic started by: fb39ca4 on July 07, 2010, 06:16:07 pm
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Would it be possible to emulate a GBA on the nspire?
If speed is an issue, instead of emulating the GBA, could a recompiler be made? GBAs have ARM7 processors, which I believe are backwards compatible with ARM9s. On a computer, the ROM could have all its memory addresses changed to work on the nspire, and include extra code to convert the display image to grayscale.
I don't know much about ASM, this is just an idea I'm putting out.
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calc84 said it was possible, and it seems very possible hardware-wise, but nobody has tried to make it yet
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If I recall correctly, Calc84 told me if such thing happened, it would be the TI-Boy SE of the Nspire. What he meant by that is that like TI-Boy SE, it would only emulate a bunch of games and games using some special effects would not work properly. Some effects would just be beyond the Nspire capabilities, like some GB effects on the 83+SE/84+ calcs.
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If it was just the ARM CPU code in the ROM we had to worry about, it might not be a very big deal. But there's also all of the other hardware that needs to be dealt with at the same time, that the ROM expects to work in a certain way. Also, the graphics hardware is quite complicated -- most of the time we're not just dealing with a bitmap that has to be converted to grayscale, it is also possible to display 4 tilemaps at the same time, a ton of sprites, and even scaled/rotated maps and sprites are supported.
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gah I can't imagine how hard it must be to emulate all that stuff x.x, especially if, for example, you wanted to emulate Doom or 007 Nightfire x.x
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Now that exists the CX, wouldn't it be easier to do the GBA for this new nspire?
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I heard that cx hardware is good enough to emulate gba. :D
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The only thing that would be easier on the CX would be not having to convert the color into grayscale. It still requires a lot of power, as I detailed a few posts above this one.
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You also have to emulate the GB/GBC's modified z80 core as the secondary processor.
Also, the graphics hardware is quite complicated
Yes, it is.
It's not impossible, but the people who are willing to make the emulator probably already had the idea anyway. Most of these emulator requests turn into, "this is the hardware you have to emulate, but nobody has done it yet," type topics.
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You also have to emulate the GB/GBC's modified z80 core as the secondary processor.
That processor can't be accessed by games running in GBA mode as far as I know. The only way for games to use it is to be a GB/GBC game, and we already have an emu for that.
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You also have to emulate the GB/GBC's modified z80 core as the secondary processor.
That processor can't be accessed by games running in GBA mode as far as I know. The only way for games to use it is to be a GB/GBC game, and we already have an emu for that.
I heard that you're able to use it as a sound controller, but I'm not entirely sure.
Wait, that wouldn't make sense.
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You also have to emulate the GB/GBC's modified z80 core as the secondary processor.
That processor can't be accessed by games running in GBA mode as far as I know. The only way for games to use it is to be a GB/GBC game, and we already have an emu for that.
Yes, this is true. The only part of the GBC hardware that the GBA could be said to use would be the sound chip.
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Basically, as I said once before, GBA emulation on the Nspire series would be like GB emulation from the first version of TI-Boy SE on the 84+ (the one that required extra RAM pages): lots of glitches and unsupported graphical effects. I think for now the best thing would be to try Sega Genesis/Megadrive emulation and maybe SNES, although it might be problematic for games like Star Ocean or Star Fox that uses special chips.
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Even my nintendo DS can emulate a snes :P The nspire runs at almost 3 times higher clock frequencies.
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But doesn't the DS have the hardware to emulate those games? Calcs probably lacks any video card or chip that are required for such intensive tasks. Of course A SNES emu on the Nspire would be doable and could even have speed up functions, though.
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I always thought that SNES and GBA graphics are almost same?
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I don't know much about the SNES graphics capabilities in comparison to GBA, but I do know that the SNES has a much slower CPU, which I think is only effectively 2.68 MHz. The GBA, on the other hand, has a 16.78MHz processor.
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The graphics are very similar looking, but the hardware is different as are the capabilities. For one thing, the SNES and GBA have the same color range (65535 colors IIRC) but the SNES can only use a 256-color pallete at any time, a choice from that color range, where the GBA can use them all simultaneously.
Also, GBA emulation is not really possible on the DS without certain allowances. Note that the only GBA games run on the DS not to use extra hardware (google DSTWO flash cart) were actual games run through Slot 2. This is because it runs the actual GBA hardware inside, making the job significantly easier. The DSTWO adds a 500mhz cpu contained in the cart which helps even more. The DS can't really emulate the GBA by itself, as far as I've seen. The hardware isn't up to snuff.
Note that accessing the GBA hardware is (supposedly, I'm not going to stick my neck out here in case someone came up with new stuff) technically incapable of running the GBA hardware form from the DS card slot, which would be more akin to emulation.
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I always thought that SNES and GBA graphics are almost same?
SNES is a 16-bit system
GBA is a 32-bit system
So, GBA is technically capable of better graphics
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That's not technically true, since the GBA screen is limited to 32,768 colors. The Hardware is theoretically capable of addressing more, but the screen isn't, so the GBA is limited to the same overall color pallete as the SNES, with the exception of the pallete limitation.
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so.... it's not possible to emulate GBA with cx?
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so.... it's not possible to emulate GBA with cx?
Sure it's possible, but nobody knows what performance it will have until somebody writes one.
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I wasn't trying to make a point on nspire capability of emulating the GBA. Calc84 would be a far superior source for that than me. I was just saying that the DS, while capable of SNES emulation, is not capable of true GBA emulation as we've seen thus far. Heck, it might even be capable of a TI-Boy style emulation, although no one has tried.