Notices

This is not a complaint but rather a question about the current state of emulation the nokia tablets. Why does there seem to be a lack of interest on emulation and a lack of good emulation on the NITs? I know there is a thread about compiling snes9x and a gba and nes emulator available but no one seems to ever talk about them, update them, or encourage the development of such emulators on these devices. With the hardware keypad of the N810 there should be a decent button scheme that could exist and the 400 mhz processor and 128 megs of ram I would think would be adequate enough to do some decent emulation of the 8 bit and 16 bit systems with the help of frameskip etc.

I'm sure I'm probably over simplifying it a bit and outside of PHP and some other scrripting languages I don't have a whole lot of experience with programming but if it's possible on the gp32 and gp2x then I assume the n8x0 could work out. I'm thinking about getting a wiz or the pandora when they come out but if the emu scene picked up in the slightest then I might stick with the n810 (yes I know.. who cares, right?). I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this though. If anyone has some decent insight into this or maybe even some links to an emulation scene that has escaped my eyes it would be be greatly appreciated.

Erm, what?

Pupnik's been porting stuff left and right since the 770 days, ukki has his own set of stuff, and fms has ported most of his own stuff (for free, no less). I think the issue here is less that there's an actual issue, and more that you're really not paying much attention.

I think that's an unfair statement to say there are no good emulators for the IT. I don't use them, but both VGBA and iNES are both in the Maemo Download - and most software in that repository are of good quality. In addition, there is DOSBOX (for DOS games), a MAC emulator and even a commodore emulator out there. I'm sure their are more in various states of development. I think if you do a bit more searching, you'll find emulators well support on the ITs

Apparently I haven't because I didn't know that 3.6 was available for the VGBA emu. When I checked VGBA 3.5 though it was hardly at 'playable' speeds and I've been to the snes page several times that you linked to but if you look at it, it looks like a dead project and more of an idea of his to try and port Dr. Pocket SNES than it is a working product. This still reiterates that even though it exists it's not really in a working/playable state.

Well, the n810 is the only one out of the three devices that is halfway usable for gaming controls, and not everyone has one. Another other problem is one of image, these are seen as more professional or only for internet browsing, whereas the GP2X is seen as a gaming platform. Another problem may be the default configuration of the OS. On the old Sharp Zarus SL-5500 I had, the default ROM was incapable of emulating GameBoy (orginal) at full speed, but flashing it to TKC allowed SNES emulation at an astonishing speed (nearly full speed on a 206MHz StrongArm). There is only a small amount of OS hacking going on, but that seems to be picking up.

Games/emulators will likely continue leaking in, and eventually, pending the updates don't keep breaking previous releases, the ITs will have a fair bit of emulators that run at decent speeds. The Pocket PC/Windows Mobile platform has a fairly professional image as well, but the shear backward compatibility (I have emulators intended for Palm-sized PC on my Windows Mobile 2003 PPC) puts it's library of emulators almost on par with the GP2X's library.

also the devices arent really targeted at gamers

also there arent a lot of talented people around with the time to work on emus

2008 will be a bust for me (how time flies!) but i'll be back liek ahnold...

but fms is awesome.... drop him some paypal eh...

tttyl

I just want a good SNES emulator and I'll be happy.