Notices

I don't have the knowledge to implement this by myself, but this certainly is an interesting feature. A few years ago there was an effort to add multiplayer in a fork of gpSP, but as far as I know, nothing came out of it. Maybe one distant day I'll sit down, learn GBA, and give it a try.


Strangely it works without sudo for me.


Finally I've got some free time for Maemo, but I had to send my laptop for repairs. However, I've managed to borrow another one for a while and do some work on the accelerometer. I am not sure if flipped axes and arbitrary buttons are worth the effort, so I've implemented only basic configurability for now.

This is the changelog for gpspm 3.1.6:

• Allow D-pad diagonals to cancel each other out.
• Fixed accelerometer input in portrait mode.
• More sophisticated accelerometer handling.
• Configurable accelerometer options.

...and the GUI:

• Added accelerometer calibration dialog.

With diagonals canceling each other out, it is possible to bind only the diagonal directions to keyboard keys (e.g. A, S, Z, X) and still have full control. This might come useful in games with a lot of D-pad spinning (e.g. later levels of Kuru Kuru Kururin).

There are a few changes behind "more sophisticated accelerometer handling":

• The deadzone is radial, which means it takes the same amount of tilt to trigger a diagonal direction as a main direction.
• Uniform direction areas make it possible to trigger a diagonal direction without triggering one of main directions first.
  
• All three acceleration vectors are taken into account during calculations to determine the real tilt rather than just an approximation along X and Y axes. Thanks to that it is possible to set the neutral pitch to 90 degrees, and another advantage is that the deadzone is not deformed at steeper angles. Unfortunately, there's also a possible downside to this approach: roll is measured relative to the ground rather than the device. However, uniform direction areas compensate it to some extent and perfect motion controls in every orientation are not possible without a gyro sensor anyway.

Thanks a lot for your super-fast implementing of my suggestion - I have grabbed it as soon as it got released, bu only now I had time to properly test new features and drop a comment here.

Making it short, it just works great Settings are intuitive, everything seems to works as "advertised", and after short while of setting up and determining best dead zone, we (me and my son) had super-fun using it in actual gaming.

Now, for sure, control in some titles is *much* better than in native GBA - while lack of analog imput is still some limitation (of GBA titles as whole), clever usage of uniform directions neutralized it to some degree. As a result, playing V-Rally 3 (and other racers, but it's most noteworthy in pinnacle of GBA driving games) with accelerometer was almost like having virtual steering wheel, not to mention how well Wings, Tomcat, or Wing Commander behave. Heck, I was even able to steer sensibly (and kill something!) in Wing Commander on hardest difficulty, and that says something

Overall, awesome work. Thanks.

Cheers,
/Estel

espero poder jugar ponekmon en mi n800 les comento que tal corre en mi tablet despues de probar

While I realize that this is no trivial task even if there is a source code to borrow from somewhere, if you ever decide to pick this idea, there is a FOSS vba-m project:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vbam/

...that have link through bluetooth and WiFi figured out. They're mainly windo$e thing, but are supporting SDL version too, and I even saw mentions of ARM-Thumb optimizations in their latest changelogs, so they code should be borrow'able. I think. Well, for sure, having GBA multiplayer between N900's (or N900's and desktops/notebooks/whatever!) would be awesome.

/Estel

gpspm 3.1.7 passed the autobuilder, should reach the repository soon.

• 100% battery-friendly pause. It no longer drains 50 mA or so.
• Improved autopause reliability.
• Fixed (or at least made VBA-like) day of week reporting in RTC. I tried to find a reliable specification of real time clock from GBA cartridges (without success) and I am not aware of any licensed games that differentiate between days of week, so I am not sure which way to return current time is correct. However, there is a certain Pokemon hack (Liquid Crystal) which had a problem with gpSP's implementation, so I have changed it to behave like Visual Boy Advance.