[pigeon]

Hi all.

I'm hoping I'm making sense here.

As GBA is actually an ARM machine itself, VBA emulates ARM instructions on x86 platform right? So what if VBA runs on an actual ARM platform (say Linux), is that possible to somehow hack/port it to run "natively" in a sense? What will have to be done if it's possible?

N.B. As a matter of interest, I have cross compiled VBA for ARM Linux, and as expected it's working rather slow, due to the fact that I imagine it is emulating ARM on an ARM, which is just... funny.

Thanks.

 

[Spacy]

I do not too much about gba emulation itself, but I think there's some difference between the ARM processors in a GBA and these in a PC. Moreover, the gba uses it's own memory adresses to output video, audio, etc.

Which ARM paltform do you have?

 

[Mad]

Maybe u could run some parts un-emulated, but others must be. Something like VMware. If you run both guest and host OS on the same architecture, it will not fully emulate the memory not the processor.
Am i right?

 

[pigeon]

I was trying it on an iPAQ, which has a StrongARM 206MHz processor, and I'm running Linux on it.

Yes I'd imagine there are things like video and audio memory will have to be emulated. I don't know how GBA and VBA work in terms of all the internals. I wonder if any GBA hackers of VBA developers would be able to give me some hints.

Thanks again.