VisualBoyAdvance-M

This is a shout out to the developers of VBA-M - I've been working on a Wii port of VBA-M. The project page is: http://code.google.com/p/vba-wii. It's fully functional at the moment (with the exception of the new sound core, I'm using 1.7.2's because for some reason I can't get the new one to work). I wanted to thank you for the improvements you've made to VBA - they're definitely noticed and appreciated.

 

The primary problem I'm having with this port is speed - it's decent, but not always 100%. Any help or suggestions here would be very much appreciated. This is a powerpc architecture so it's currently set to use the C core. The latest source is on SVN if anyone wants to look. Is there anything that might give a speed boost? Also, for those times it has to frameskip - it currently experiences speed-ups and slow-downs rather than fluid frameskipping - could making some changes to system10Frames help? Is it possible I'll get a speed boost from the new sound core?

 

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

You'd have to talk with blargg about the new sound core. It's his work.

 

Sorry, I can't personally offer any help. >.<

Nice work !

 

There is a PPC ASM core you could try to enable. You could probably reuse some tricks from the PSP port to get a speed boost.

Argh, too bad I sold my Wii after 2 weeks. I still have a GC lying around, but I doubt I can run homebrew on this one.

 

After a short look at the current VBA-M code, I saw the following conditions to enable the PPC assembler code:

 

#ifndef C_CORE

#ifdef GNUC

#ifdef POWERPC

 

There is also a #if 0, so you have to take a deeper look into that affair.

 

 

I hope Nintendo does not care too much about a GBA emulator on their Wii console, considering they sell games for the Virtual Console (which might get GBA support in the future).

Argh, too bad I sold my Wii after 2 weeks. I still have a GC lying around, but I doubt I can run homebrew on this one.

 

After a short look at the current VBA-M code, I saw the following conditions to enable the PPC assembler code:

 

#ifndef C_CORE

#ifdef GNUC

#ifdef POWERPC

 

There is also a #if 0, so you have to take a deeper look into that affair.

 

 

I hope Nintendo does not care too much about a GBA emulator on their Wii console, considering they sell games for the Virtual Console (which might get GBA support in the future).

 

I did have a look at enabling this, but I get assembler errors at compile time (unless I'm doing something wrong) - 'Error: unsupported relocation against xer'. I'm assuming this code has been inactive for a long long time and needs to be updated. That, or the ppc 'xer' instruction in question isn't supported. Making whatever asm changes that're required is a little out of my depth...

 

You can run VBA (and other homebrew) on GC, but yeah it's easier to set up on the Wii. As for Nintendo...well they've been quiet about all the SNES/NES/GBA/etc emulators on the GameCube/Wii, just as they've been quiet about VBA in general. I think they're probably more concerned about Virtual Console piracy, if anything at all.