Notices

Hello, All!

I have just released the official, non-beta version of VGBA-Maemo 3.5. You can get it from

http://fms.komkon.org/VGBA/

or from this post, but further updates will be published at the above web site. The new version moves directional "buttons" to the left of the touch screen and the fire buttons to the right of the touch screen (enable display cues to see the layout). I have also rewritten image scaling and scanline simulation code in pure ARM assembly for speed. Finally, VGBA-Maemo should now automatically open any .gba or gba.gz file when you click on it in the File Manager.

Anyway, give it a try and report any bugs here or here:

http://groups.google.com/group/emul8/

PS: VGBA-Maemo is currently free, but the best way to contribute to its development would be to buy a Symbian or Windows version. You will have an additional advantage of being able to play VGBA on your smartphone or desktop. See the above web site for details.

Thank you so much! It works great. Please continue the hard work!

I'd be interested to know what compiler you used for the C version and what's the amount of the speedup by using assembly.

Standard GCC toolchain that installs as part of MaemoSDK+. Usual optimizations (-O2 or -O3).

This majorly depends on what scaling factor is being used. I have not measured it specifically with graphics on Maemo, but rewriting ARM7TDMI emulation in ARM assembly sped things up by ~80% on Symbian/S60. Most of the speed benefit comes from optimizing memory accesses: ARM-based chipsets have notoriously slow SDRAM access times and GCC does not know how to optimize these well.

This is really impressive. And fms is to be thanked (and supported) as the only real emu developer to have ever visited these forums.

The worst part about the emulator is not the emulator but the brain-damaged maemo file-browser. Opening a directory with subdirectories containing a couple thousand files will lock up the file browser as it indexes each subdirectory. Boo Nokia. We can't even turn that behavior off!

To work around this, it'd be preferable if vgba remembered the last directory visited.

Sound still doesn't work with VGBA emus right?

Sound works; it just isn't stunning.

Sounds is there, but there is barely enough CPU power to emulate it, so it is far from being top quality.

Cheers fms, great to see you working on maemo!

This is clearly a bug though: the browser should only scan contents of subdirectories that are shown. Are you sure it is scanning the whole tree? In this case, opening my external memory card would take forever, but it opens just fine.

Well, if the actual FM bug is with thousands of files in the current directory (not subdirectories), then remembering that directory name will not help. Just place files into multiple subdirectories in this case. Having said that, I intend to add saving current directory and other settings, just not right now: need to release a few other emulators and the EMULib-Maemo library suite.