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[invincible-fan]

HI there,
Is there any way to play GBC games on the supercard in color? I can transfer them over, no prob, and they play--but not in color.

I've searched here and on other sites, and there seems to be a program where you can convert the gbc rom into a gba rom before transferring it over--but I can't find the program name. And am I wrong about what it does?

I'd really like to be able to play some of my favourite GBCs in color....

thanks

[thaddius]

There is a GB on GBA emulator, Goomba, it's what the supercard uses aready to emulate GB and GB compatible GBC games, but for now, there is no emulator that emulates GBC games, in color.

You can go bug flubba, the guy who created it, but I imagine he gets a lot of those kinds of e-mails.

http://hem.passagen.se/flubba/gbadown.html

[m2pt5]

http://nintendo-ds.dcemu.co.uk/gbemuds.shtml

This one runs most color games, but has no sound.

[halcyonandoff]

I imagine it would not be too complicated to modify Goomba to support GBC as well. There are only a few additions to GBC:

A palette management system (including a palette RAM area)
A new general purpose VRAM  DMA
Twice as much VRAM which results in:
   *Background tile maps now have attributes (X/Y flipping, priority, palette, bank switching) (tile in bank 0, tile attr in bank 1)
   *Twice as much tile character data (256 in bank 0, 256 in bank 1)
A dual-speed CPU (You can switch the speed with an instruction)
More RAM, which is bank-switchable

Infrared capability (but don't need to implement that)
Modified serial link port capabilities (don't need to implement that)


The "hard" parts have already been done thanks to the hard work of Flubba. I would imagine that these additions are minor.

I'm going to start browsing through the source to see if there's any chance of me doing it.

[Koji]

Read the threads in the pocket heaven forum, It's not possible on the GBA. It could probably be done on the DS, but that would take porting the entire emulator to DS first.

[halcyonandoff]

OK, I've read through some of those posts... I'm still not convinced that GBC emulation is impossible (perhaps I've missed a critical discussion point, I read these:
http://boards.pocketheaven.com/viewtopic.php?t=2754
http://boards.pocketheaven.com/viewtopic.php?t=2299


). It seems like it's been discussed into the ground, though. I'll assume that people have tried hard at doing it.


I can see where the faster CPU could be a problem, but at worst, that should just cause slowdowns in some places where the full speed CPU mode is heavily used.

With 96k of VRAM in the GBA, the 16k VRAM of GBC shouldn't be an issue..

HBlank DMA might be implementable using the GBA HBlank interrupt. I haven't examined the exact HBlank interrupt timing details to see if that's the case. GBC execution halts during DMA tranfers, so there should not be slowdown issues...

The color 0 problem shouldn't be a problem if you just use, say,  palette items 1-4 in each palette (since there are 16 palettes of 16 colors, there's more than enough room). Perhaps I'm misunderstanding this issue.


I'd be interested in seeing if there is some sort of "Best effort" attempt (I'd assume someone's at lesat tried, given the state of the current discussions), and what the main stumbling points of it are. I'm going to jump into the discussion over on PocketHeaven tomorrow, then.