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Rumour: GBA games finally coming to the Nintendo eshop?
- Thread starter JazzmanZ
- Start date
As far as we know, it's because their emulation is still shoddy and based on the DS retrocompatibility mode instead of being true emulation, what means they put the 3DS in the same limitations as DS and DSiWare games... even worse as they cannot be suspended closing the lid. More or less the same happened with the NES games, they didn't release them to the public until they had a complete emulation, as initial ambassador versions didn't have save states or propper instruction manuals implemented.
Ammount of games has never been a problem. In fact, I remember reading that WiiWare was the most populated DD service out of the 3 consoles without counting virtual console games.
Is that really an excuse? I don't think they have a full team of programmers (or even a single person) working on GBA emulation right now. If they did, I doubt it would take this long to get a good emulation going.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
Oh god please
The problem is that Nintendo doesn't aim for "good emulation". They aim for pixel perfect emulation and they build a different emu for each game to achieve this, which is explained by the Wii, where injecting different ROMs in the VC games give different results and some don't work.
Maybe the 3DS is not good enough for pixel perfect GBA emulation, as emulation in general mostly relies in raw clock speed of the processor, in the same fashion of the BSNES emu, which needs a 3GHz CPU to merely emulate a SNES. And you have to add that even though they're emulated, they must QA every game as it were new to verify nothing is broken.
Homebrew emus, in the other hand, rely in semi-accurate emulation to work even in the most spec-constrained machines. In fact, I could play SNES games full speed in my old Pentim II 300MHz... but that meant not a single game worked pixel-perfect and they needed an infinite ammount of hacks that would continously break other games in order to play the most famous titles.
The Elite
BOSS
The NES games in the Ambassador program had save states as I recall. Not sure about instruction manuals.
No, they don't. There are still some games unreleased (and therefore not updated) like Mario&Yoshi where the only options in the bottom screen are "Continue" and "Reboot". I just checked it.
They did have save states, but you couldn't create them manually. The games saved and resumed automatically when you quit and launch them (as all other VC games except GBA).
No, and there are no known plans for that happening.
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
Wait what? As a GBA cart or an eShop download?
lunchwithyuzo
Banned
They customize instructions, but they use the same base emulator for VC. In fact using WAV injection for other ROMs has really high compatibility with non-VC games. D4's NeoGeo/CD emulator for example has 100% compatibility with this method.
Is there an official statement on this? This line of defense always seemed like conjured malarkey.
Indeed, the 3DS should be able to handle GBA emulation even better: there's hardware support for the GBA 2D chip (due to DS BC), the 3DS CPU is a compatible ARM (so all the emulator would need to do is dynamically rewrite memory addresses and interrupt calls) and there is more than enough RAM to keep even the largest ROMs fully loaded in memory.
Thinking again, that's pretty much how the GBA VC games work, except Nintendo literally runs the GBA code in almost vanilla state via DS BC. If they make some more aggressive changes to the code and run it through a virtualizer, they should be able to implement save states and the home menu. After all, unlike DS games, the GBA games will be delivered via eShop and there are no security risks since saved games are system-encrypted and cannot be tampered with.
I believe the reason we don't have GBA yet is strategic: Nintendo insists on trickling out content and they probably believe GBA games would cannibalize other DD games too easily. It's also hard to know how they would price such games: GBA games are quite more modern than the current VC offerings and many of them have more content than the typical eShop game. Nintendo is probably waiting the eShop to mature in original content and for the situation with retail DD games to stabilize so GBA games can be safely offered without stirring things too much.
ColdBlooder
Banned
The DS was GBA compatible because it had the GBA chip. DS compatibility does not mean the hardware of the 3DS has gba support.
But it should easily be able to emulate the system!
Did you forget GBA games already exist on the 3DS? The DS didn't have the GBA hardware merely for BC purposes: DS games actively used it. The DS is a superset of the GBA, which means that anything that is DS compatible should be GBA compatible by proxy, just like e Wii U should be able to run Gamecube code almost directly, since the Wii is also a superset of the GC.
Cartridge. They even had games like Mario Tennis: Power Tour and Mario vs. Donkey Kong at one point, I remember.
Its NOTHING compared to how horrible the original GBA was to play games on with that unlit screen, probably my least used handheld from Nintendo EVER (and Ive had them all)
KojiKnight
Member
Not exactly true... That's like saying the GBA was a superset of the GBC (it wasn't). While the DS did share a processor (ARM7, though in DS it was 'super clocked') it had seperate hardware for RAM, sound, etc... Nintendo didn't simply just remove the GBA slot, they also removed the GBC sound chip, GBA ram, bios chip, etc.
There are certainly bits of hardware that should (in theory) be backwards compatible, but that doesn't guarantee it, it takes more than just having the same CPU to be 100% hardware BC. I can say for 100% certainty that GBA on the 3DS is emulated, NOT simply hardware BC. For starters, the 3DS completely lacks the GBC sound chip. Also, we know that SD cards lack the speed to load GBA games directly (access time is too high), so the entire game has to be loaded into 3DS memory (this is different from DS, which uses cheaper to make/slower cartridges, which is why some DS games have loading screens and all games make much more use of ram).
On top of that, since we know some components HAD to be emulated, it makes more sense to software emulate the entire system (at least when it comes to the GBA) versus trying to use some sort of hybrid hardware/software solution... it would be a pain in the ass to debug, and if timing was off, having to "pause" the hardware solution while waiting for the software solution to catch up could cause all sorts of weird problems.
That's not to say that such an emulator wouldn't use HLE (high level emulation) since the 3DS hardware should be capable of doing most of those instructions natively... it just won't run them as if it were native real time code. (I think I'm having a hard time getting this point across, it's not even making much sense to me as I type it <_<).