What would be better than playing your MSX games when your are:

- on a bus, train, metro
- in a waiting room
- on your lunch break
- in bed
- in a toilet
- walking on the chinese wall
and on and on and on......

You guessed it. I would be great to play your games on a handheld.
MSX games are best played on the real thing, but taking your MSX on vacation (or into a toilet ) is a bit of a burden.

I know you can already play MSX-games on the Park32 thing. But I don't want to buy one of those.

Are there more people who would like an emulator for GBA (GameBoy Advance)
Or even better anyone who can port/build one?

Oh, that's a wonderful idea.

I had my own MSX resurrection last month. I dug out my old SVI and Hit Bit only to play Salamander and Nemesis with my friend. Then I installed an emulator on my PC and tried Nemesis 2 ++.

So when I saw Gradius Advance for the GBA I was sold and had to have one.

MSX emulation on the GBA would bevery cool! It would be great to play the original MSX games on the bus and so on!

=)

Today it's a bit difficult found RAM cartridges for GBA (i've seen something by purchasing on internet etc...). Despite this, a fMSX's port for GBA will be great! (userfriendly please... )

GBA's CPU is more than 6 times weaker than the GP32 CPU. It will be very hard to emulate an MSX1 at decent speed on GBA, even when using 100% optimized assembly language. MSX2 is out of the question anyway, because of GBA RAM shortage.
There is a Colecovision emulator for GBA if I'm not mistaken. I haven't checked it out, so I don't know the speed. But Colecovision is 95% MSX, so if that runs well, you might be able to get an MSX1 emulator to run some Konami ROMs.

Yes, and there is some NES and turbografx (!) emulators for GBA... I think if a GBA can do this then could emulate a MSX1, perhaps with a few sound leaks, but i'm not a specialist

I know for a fact that the Turbographx (PC-Engine) emulator is very slow. And NES can hardly be compared to MSX1, its CPU is so simple compared to Z80, and PocketNES is written in pure GBA assembly language.
An fMSX port is definitely out of the question, writing a new emulator is not trivial.

Hmmm,

I did not know that the NES cpu was a lot weaker then the MSX processor.
To bad because the NES emulator works great. But i have no nostalgic feelings with NES games.

I would be quite satisfied with an MSX1 only emulator. (Penguin adventure, Qbert and Kingsvalley II will do) .

Another obstacle would be screen size. The resolution of the GBA is lower than the MSX. In pocketNes they scale the image in a clever way. But it wil lower the emulation speed i'm afraid.


I just found an image on the internet that said BR-MSX running on a GBA. I did see a gba but couldn't see what was on the display. Does anybody have more info on that?

This could be so great

But hey! I know, If I really want one. I should make it myself eh? I just hope somebody is as enthausiastic as me (and CAN code it).

Ok, ok here's an image:
www.msxsite.hpg.ig.com.br/msxrio2002/msxrio2002_20.jpg

and another one:
lsturaro.sites.uol.com.br/photos/msxrio2002/slotman/rj2k2-12.jpg

Quote:

Another obstacle would be screen size. The resolution of the GBA is lower than the MSX. In pocketNes they scale the image in a clever way. But it wil lower the emulation speed i'm afraid.

Depends on the technique. Scaling an image is pretty much free on the GBA. I know all bitmap modes can scale but that'll only help to make things smaller since bitmap modes are 240x160 or 128x160. Certain tile layers in certain modes can scale too... but rendering a 256x212 (or 256x256 for that matter) APA image might be tough... You can have 256 unique tiles in those modes without splits while 32*32 tiles (256x256 pixels APA) = 1024 tiles. Didn't even mention screen 7 which is 512x212.

(btw: APA means All Pixels Addressable)

[quote]>>>Ok, ok here's an image:
www.msxsite.hpg.ig.com.br/msxrio2002/msxrio2002_20.jpg<<<

O_o impressive ! is this a emulator or a direct conversion of Antartic Adv.? ... it seems there is some graphic leaks (only appears 1/2 Pentaro)...

Quote:

O_o impressive ! is this a emulator or a direct conversion of Antartic Adv.? ... it seems there is some graphic leaks (only appears 1/2 Pentaro)...

Well i'm not sure. It could be the br-MSX running on the GBA but it could also be the NES emulator running the game. I'll try the NES version on my GBA (tonight) and check if i can see differences between the MSX en NES version. Just to make sure it is the MSX version running on it.

I think Br-MSX just doesn't scale down the image to fit the GBA screen.

Quote:

I think Br-MSX just doesn't scale down the image to fit the GBA screen.

Like I said before that's pretty much impossible on GBA without using splits (read: smart programming). Or some framebuffer VDP emulator (those could be software blitted to the VRAM framebuffer, but that costs CPU%).

I bet they use one of the tile modes, 16c tiles. That's something the GBA can handler very easily (making any screen 1 or screen 4 emulator would be really easy as a matter of fact).

Arjan said Br-MSX is NOT scaling the image, which is why it looks cropped on the screenshots.

Ofcourse you don't need to really scale anything. You can just skip every 5th line and every 16th pixel during rendering.

Quote:

Arjan said Br-MSX is NOT scaling the image, which is why it looks cropped on the screenshots.

I know he said that. And I thought he was wondering why when posting that.