Notices

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?

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

Anyone wanna try porting gambatte?