Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Hey there, just wondering if anyone got VBA installed and working? I'm itching to play a bit of advance wars or even load up a final fantasy or 2 on my 770, I successfully installed the application, then put a GBA rom on my memory card, but have found it impossible to

a) open the rom

or

b) find visual boy anywhere in the list of applications


Am I monumentally stupid? ;)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

OK maybe I am! I installed xmaeme and things seem to be working now :))

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

You need to intall xmaeme as well.
http://downloads.maemo.org/product/xmaeme/

Open your legally purchased roms from xmaeme.

Although, seems like you won't be playing anything on it for quite a while, as the emulator seems to be quite a hasty port.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

ups. sorry. tok my sweet time writing th reply. didn't notice you had solved it yourself.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Thanks! Yeah it does seem excrutiatingly slow... do you think it will improve? or are my dreams of playing endless games on the 770 doomed to be fruitless?

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Well, considering that n-gage ran snes games at full speed, I see no problem in the theoretical aspect. n-gage had 114 MHz ARM, while 770 has 25 and N800 330. So, there should be plenty of speed to run SNES, Genesis, GBA. But code needs to be ARM optimized.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

thanks for the info! I'll uninstall it now, but keep an eye out for future updates. Good to know that it is up to the task!

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Not pretending to have any experience in writing emulators, but VBA emulates an ARM processor. Both the GBA and the 770/N800 have one, so this step is quite useless, slowing the program down (quite a lot).
If you want to bypass this step, I think you have to rewrite most of the program (~15% of the VBA code is ARM emulation).
Then again, I could of course be completely wrong and it's actually a trivial task.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Considering that the folks at gp2x development haven't been able to do the arm re-write, I'd think that your initial assumption is correct. If you ask, me, I'd focus on snes emulation myself. Or maybe genesis/megadrive. Maybe first on genesis, as there is already a full ARM emulation of 68000 (cyclone) and full emulator port for s60 handsets (picodrive) and their sources should be pretty quickly converted to aloow full fps playback of genesis games. I have picodrive on my n-gage and it totally rocked. I would love to see in ported to IT. OTOH d-pad still sucks so bad, you probably can't play anything on it. But, OTOH, porting it might convince Nokia to improve for the next generation.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

vba doesn't perform well, but gambatte might be an improvement in that area.

Anyone wanna try porting gambatte?

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

sorry if its not allowed, but seeing as theres a psp emu thread up on the front page, i thought i'd give this one a quick
"bump"
also, if anyone has a link for this, i'd love to get it if i could

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Gambatte works, you can grab it here:
http://maemobox.org/dblank/gambatte.zip

unzip and run from command line like this:
gambatte_sdl -i enter f4 f7 f8 up down left right -s 2 -r 44100 file.gb

key mappings:
dpad center = start
menu button = select
- = B
+ = A
with up/down/left/right as normal

Someone who isn't me should make a frontend :)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

I'd be happy to do such a thing, once I get my N800. Unfortunately, that means not until Christmas.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

can xmame be set to work as the frontend?

I'd love to do the frontend, but I don't have the time.

If anyone is interested in doing it, uktube is really easy to convert to work for that. (just modify it to list all .gb files instead of .flv files and make the view video button to execute the aforementioned command instead of mplayer command. Then just modify the texts, drop unnecessary buttons and that's it. Should take no more than few hours if even that.

is gambatte running in full speed? (or close to)?

Oh, and please make it so that dpad center doesn't do anything. Believe me n810 dpad middle is best served as a non-action button.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

HOLY CRAP *dies*

Gambatte IS AMAZING!

Three time the size at a decent speed!

Great job dblank! Thank you!

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Hmm i can't get any ROM to work. (I just get a white square in the upper left and nothing happens) Can anyone send me a ROM that does work ?

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Gambatte is a GB/GBC emulator, no GBA.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Ahhhhh :) Ok works great now. All that's missing is onscreen buttons, a bigger screen and savegames :)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

I think it could run faster, some games seemed pretty slow, and it didn't try to use the whole CPU.

I'm no developer, maybe someone could take a look at the code and tweak it a bit for the tablets.

Key mapping can easily be changed, just use something else on the command line instead of "enter", f6 is probably your best bet if you still want a start button.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

You could change -s 2 to -s 3 for 3x scaling, and add -f for fullscreen, this is at the expense of speed though.

It supports normal saving, just no save states yet.

Hopefully a proper developer will improve the code for our tablets :)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Hi, what is a _sdl file? I downloaded this and am not sure how to install. Any help is appreciated for this noob. The file is gambatte_sdl when I unzip it.
thanks.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

The _sdl is just part of the filename. You have to start it from xterm, by typing in the line suggested above.

I'm in the process of integrating this with the Hildon Games Wrapper so that it has an interface just like many of the standard games.

I hope to have some installer packages that people can try out in a week, maybe two.

Incidentally, for those of you who have usb gamepads, and have gotten USB host mode working, gambatte_sdl (posted above) and MaemoBoy (my project) both support the gamepad.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

it's worth experimenting with sound rate 22050 or 11024 speed up the emulation speed considerably. It was possible to run pacman with full speed and sound in full screen with 3x scaler. Strange enough it does not seem to work each time. Sometimes it's fast and at other times audio skips with exactly the same commandline switches and roms. Perhaps it is a memory issue. Hard to say. Anyway, great work porting it over to the maemo platform. Congratulations and Thank You.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Here's a bit of a front-end for Gambatte :)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Hey, Aisu. Any chance you have some C/C++ experience and would be willing to help me with MaemoBoy?

I basically packaged up libgambatte into its own package, and am taking the gambatte_sdl source code and wrapping in in GTK/hildon to give it a nice little UI.

I even made icons and a logo screen for it.

If I get any responses from experienced programmers, I'll take the work I've done so far and make a maemo-garage project for it.

Otherwise, I'll continue on and post the debs when I get something functional.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

I've been messing around with gambatte also, as you can see I posted a .deb in here, it's not gtk/hildonized at all, but has some improvements. However, on a whim, I compiled gnuboy, and I have to say it works a lot better than gambatte. Less CPU usage and runs better. It also based on SDL, and works much the same as gambatte. I might have a .deb similar to my other one out shortly with gnuboy.

However at the moment I am stuck trying to get the YUV overlay to work decently. It is terribly slow. I don't suppose you got anywhere with the YUV mode of gambatte? They seem to work pretty much the same, and both give absolutely terrible performance, even though the N800 is supposed to have hardware YUV scaling. I have been poring over the quetoo and ur-quan masters source looking for differences with their YUV overlay modes, but haven't had any luck speeding it up.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

DataPath, I have used C++ before, but not graphically on Linux, I'm afraid.

Oh, and, a Nokia guy kindly informed me that I could be sued for using the word "Maemo" in the name of an application (Was gonna be iMaemo, not iTablet).

Good luck on that!

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Gambatte would likely be slower just because it's more accurate.

A better reason for choosing gambatte is there is still active core development going on, and we can benefit from those improvements.

Actually, once this GTK interface done, my intention was to make it build for non-hildon and use it on regular linux. Then benchmarking and optimizing would be a snap.

I haven't toyed with YUV yet. I'm rather anxious to get a pleasant interface up and running, and so I haven't been playing many games :(.

That said, once I get the UI pretty much wrapped up, I intend to move on to the next emulator, probably SNES. I might lean more toward GBA, except that VisualBoyAdvance is under some heavy development right now, with a complete overhaul going on, so it's a bit of a moving target.

Mudlord and Spacy have been overhauling EVERY subsystem of VBA lately, simplifying, optimizing, improving. Once that development settles down, it might have a shot at running well on the N8x0 tablets. And there are active devs who might be able to give us some hints on how we could improve performance, maybe trading compatibility to do so.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

True, but on the other hand, gambatte doesn't seem to support things like savestates at the moment (going by gambatte-qt and the source) , I personally am probably not skilled enough to add them. Compatibility wise I believe it is quite good.

Again I'm probably not good enough to optimize gambatte but if you are that sounds reasonable.

Perhaps I'll just add a few more features to GnuboySDL to tide everyone over until you get something out :)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

I see no reason not to have two first-class emulators. Don't think of it as a stopgap, but as an alternative.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Sounds good to me.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Any news on either of the emulators (or progress for a GBA emu?)

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

Life got busy, here, but hopefully things will clear up in a week or two and I can get back to my gambatte emu.

Mostly what's taking so much time is working out the code for setting your own keybindings and saving them in gconf. And even that wouldn't be so bad if I weren't trying to make it gamepad-friendly.

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

we shoudl get this working and optimized
it works well on the iTouch, it should work well on the 800/810

Re: Anyone got visualboyadvance working??
 

The iPod touch has some nice 3D acceleration, something the N8X0 is lacking. It won't run well without some decent graphics hardware.