This forum is for discussion pertaining to homebrew and indie software for the Dreamcast, such as homebrew games, emulators/interpreters, and other homebrew software/applications. Porting requests and developmental ideas are not to be made here; you can make those here. If you need any help burning discs for homebrew software, this is the place to ask as well.
Here is a post about a SNES emulator for the GBA. They have screen shots and all. Does this guy live and breath binary code? I know it is somewhat off topic, but this Loopy guy would be a good person to let take a crack at the code once it goes open source or at least get some advice from. It just seems incredible to have full speen NES and SNES working at all on a GBA. If the DC can't handle SNES and the GBA ends up pulling it off I will have to hang my head in shame.....oh wait I have a GBA-SP. Just thought it was interesting. Doesn't the GBA have a ARM chip running at only 33 or so MHZ.
"I'm surprised no one posted anything about this yet. If you haven't heard yet Loopy (Made PocketNES) is currently working on a SNES emulator on the GBA called PocketSNES. (Big surprise for the name) Right now he has Super Mario World running at full speed with no sound. You can find some teaser screen shots here:
Currently Flubba (PCEadvance, PocketNES, Goomba) and Titney (Took over PocketNES) also have some connection to the project. Perhaps an official release isn't far away..."
OH MY GOD! I think I just made a mess in my underwear! I've dreamed of SNES on GBA. Yes, those guys are assembler freaks. I've seen the source of PocketNES... 95% assembler. I bow down to them. BOW DOWN!
I will hang my head in shame as well if this occurs. I'm telling you guys. This news makes me even more obessed with making Super Famicast full speed.
Well scherzo I bow down to you and grovel at Loopy's feet. I haven't done any serious programming since I was in college many moons ago and that was in Pascal and Basic. I did make some pretty cool games on my C128. I am still amazed that the GBA is capable of so much in the right hands. I took a crack at assembly programming years ago and it kicked my ass. That is why I became a chemist at least it?s a living.
Here is a post about a SNES emulator for the GBA. They have screen shots and all. Does this guy live and breath binary code? I know it is somewhat off topic, but this Loopy guy would be a good person to let take a crack at the code once it goes open source or at least get some advice from. It just seems incredible to have full speen NES and SNES working at all on a GBA. If the DC can't handle SNES and the GBA ends up pulling it off I will have to hang my head in shame.....oh wait I have a GBA-SP. Just thought it was interesting. Doesn't the GBA have a ARM chip running at only 33 or so MHZ.
Holy crap! SNES on GBA oh my, oh my. Thank you Loopy! *Tries to think of reasons to resist buying a flash cart* Dang, I need a job
Scherzo: Amazing first release. Many games look full speed without sound. Simply wonderful. I look forward to whatever your coding talent brings to the DC. Congrats on the release and good luck in the future.
Remember, the quickest way to a girl's bed is through her parents. Have sex with them and you're in.
Ok I promise no more GBA posts after this, but here are the specs for the GBA.
Game Boy Advance
LCD: Reflection (non-backlit) TFT Color Liquid crystal
SCREEN SIZE: 40.8mm x 61.2mm
RESOLUTION: 240x160 pixels
DISPLAY ABILITY: 32,000 colors
CPU: 16MHz 32bit RISC-CPU + 8bit CISC-CPU
MEMORY: 32KB WRAM+96KB VRAM 256KB WRAM
How in the hell did Loopy even get the NES emulation to work on a 16 MHZ processor let alone the SNES. The guy is literally a coding God or from another planet disguised as a human.
I would say after seeing this full speed on the DC should be possible. It will take a great deal of effort though.
TINY UPDATE:
Well, I got my Dreamcast Mouse that I ordered from ebay in the mail today. So I figured, why don't I take a break from optimizing to implement mouse support? So in a couple of hours, viola! I tested Mario Paint and it works great! Nice and fast too. I plan to add a means of tweaking the mouse sensitivity.
Also, it shouldn't be too much trouble to allow the mouse to control SuperScope input. That should be cool.
Other than that, various experiments continue in the optimization process.
nice to hear you have another feature already. Do you think it is possible to get light gun support for the super scope games or is that a lot of hassle?
erreth wrote:nice to hear you have another feature already. Do you think it is possible to get light gun support for the super scope games or is that a lot of hassle?
I have no idea how easy programming for the dc light gun is. We'll see. That would be another thing i'd have to buy.
jimbonater wrote:Ok I promise no more GBA posts after this, but here are the specs for the GBA.
Game Boy Advance
LCD: Reflection (non-backlit) TFT Color Liquid crystal
SCREEN SIZE: 40.8mm x 61.2mm
RESOLUTION: 240x160 pixels
DISPLAY ABILITY: 32,000 colors
CPU: 16MHz 32bit RISC-CPU + 8bit CISC-CPU
MEMORY: 32KB WRAM+96KB VRAM 256KB WRAM
How in the hell did Loopy even get the NES emulation to work on a 16 MHZ processor let alone the SNES. The guy is literally a coding God or from another planet disguised as a human.
I would say after seeing this full speed on the DC should be possible. It will take a great deal of effort though.
BTW, I'm on a dev team working on a Penny-arcade based GBA game, and from what I've heard, the GBA seems to share a lot of hardware functions with the SNES. Therefore, it's unlikely that as much of the SNES has to be emulated on the GBA as it does on the DC. Sound programming will likely be the true test of Loopy's capability - since the built in sound hardware of the GBA is the same as the mono GB - producing the SNES sound will have to be done in software. The most efficient sound engine I've heard of for the GBA acheived ~SNES-quality sample music playback with 20% CPU time. And that's not including Sfx.
Win95, noun: A 32 bit patch for a 16 bit GUI for an 8 bit OS running on a 4 bit processor, written by a 2 bit company that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
Thanks for the information I won't hang my head quite so low. I was curious if they were similar, because it would make sense with all the SNES ports Nintendo was planning.
On a completely different subject does anyone know what the heck the DC's V-Sync chip does. I posted it on the other thread and have gotten no responses. It was supposedly used to handle most of the phrase sorting in PSO. Just wondering if there are things that could be handled by other chips than the SH4.
ANOTHER LITTLE UPDATE:
Sound is syncronized with the video now. No more second long difference between the action and the sound. It turns out that the sound buffer used in the snd_stream api in KOS was huge. I just copied the snd_stream source files out of KOS, made my own local copies of the functions in question, and changed the buffer size from 0x10000 to 0x2000... huge difference. This is the same size sound buffer that NesterDC uses. Works great.
Rigor Mortis wrote:BTW, I'm on a dev team working on a Penny-arcade based GBA game, and from what I've heard, the GBA seems to share a lot of hardware functions with the SNES. Therefore, it's unlikely that as much of the SNES has to be emulated on the GBA as it does on the DC. Sound programming will likely be the true test of Loopy's capability - since the built in sound hardware of the GBA is the same as the mono GB - producing the SNES sound will have to be done in software. The most efficient sound engine I've heard of for the GBA acheived ~SNES-quality sample music playback with 20% CPU time. And that's not including Sfx.
Well, the video chip may be similar, certainly its a lot closer to SNES because it isn't a 3D chip using polys for everything, like the DC. The CPUs are very different, but they wrote it in ARM assembly. But the sound is going to push it over the edge... we're talking about emulating SNES sound. Not playing back samples that sound as good.
