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Handhelds Hardware

Gameboy on your PalmPilot? 42

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-gotta-be-kidding dept.
@tomic212 writes "Ever wish you could play Gameboy games on your PalmPilot? This article on the Palm Infocenter discusses a gameboy emulator being developed for the PalmOS. With an interview with Maven who is building the emulator from scratch in assembly. "
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Gameboy on your PalmPilot? More

Gameboy on your PalmPilot?

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  • Nope. TI-85: ~6 MHz 8-bit z80 processor, 128 x 64 pixel monochrome screen. Also, you only get 28k of user memory--probably NOT enough to support assembly on the calulator AND install a ROM. Someone might be able to build hardware to pump the ROM straight from the cart or from the GRAPHLINK, but you still have the issue of the screen being wrong.

    ---
    brittany peery is a goddess
  • I think part of it is that it's one less thing to carry around with you. I have a hard enough time juggling my PalmIII, cell phone, and pager...and I'm waiting for the Qualcomm pdq like everyone else... (cellular PPP...*drool*)
  • > Who needs a contact manager -- I'm just after the Universal Remote Control program!

    The range isn't that great 2m. Not sufficient to change channels from my couch.

    Of course you can buy a high powered IR port that plugs into the serial port.
  • It's my understanding that the legal issues with the N64 emulator came from copying the firmware from the N64 directly. This shouldn't be an issue with the gameboy, because the internal code is (relatively) easy to figure out. There ought to be a gameboy SDK somewhere that tells you all the things you need to know about the internal functionality.

    Besides, people have been emulating Z80's for years on all sorts of platforms. The Gameboy isn't much more than a z80 with some near-off-the-shelf parts. :) Emulating the *proprietary* multi-RISC-processor (graphics, sound, cpu) 100mhz-bus system of the N64 requires a bit more knowledge of the "secrets" nintendo used. THAT's why they get mad about people emulating.

    -Chris

    (Hey, if I got the n64 hardware wrong, don't flame. People get the idea. :> )
  • Perhaps the touchpad could be modified to control the up-down-left-right action?
    -----------
  • huh?? the LCD is one of the least-power-consuming parts of the whole thing... I'd like to see some technical data indicating that the "refresh" was killing the batteries. I've *never* seen a Palm drain batteries that quickly.

    Hell my PalmPro running a coms app to do reconaissance for an embedded industrial computer I'd designed wouldn't drain after three hours of continuous tx/rx at 57600bps.
  • From Yahoo! [yahoo.com], a Gameboy costs ~$60, and from Yahoo! [yahoo.com] again, the price for a PalmV is $450.

    For that price, why not just buy both? Wait a minute, I forgot one thing-- having a PalmV that plays videogames lets someone pretend to be doing very important business while at a meeting, right? :)
  • Posted by OGL:

    ...Dude...that would make an awesome beowulf cluster! ;)

    -W.W.
  • >Wow, with any luck, I can avoid ever having to do any actual work for the rest of my life.

    Could you sue them later and claim that it is their fault?? :)

    c.
  • Plus the Palm V occupies about 1/4 the volume of a Gameboy.
  • Posted by the order of His Majesty:

    I've been playing GB Zelda on my Casiopea for almost a year... I just want Color GB compatability. (:
  • How big is a gameboy game rom anyway? I think the rom for Super Mario World (or whatever came out with the SNES) was just over 1 meg, the roms for my old Vectrex system were at most like 8k, so how many Gameboy games can I fit on the 6 free megs on my TRG board? I'll never have to use my P3 for anything useful again!
  • Does anyone else besides me see this as a potential problem? We've seen Nintendo's (over)reactions to emulation, such as their suit against the authors of UltraHLE (that is, if it's actually still happening & wasn't just an empty threat). Anyway, I can't imagine Nintendo would react any more favorably to emulation of Game Boy than they did to N64.


    -mike kania
  • yet another reason why a Palm III is top of my shopping list! Who needs a contact manager -- I'm just after the Universal Remote Control program!

    --

  • Someone at my company made a Gameboy emulator for the Pilot almost as soon as the PalmPilot Professional came out. It worked pretty well, too, but unfortuantely the refresh requirements were high enough that it would drain your battery in a matter of minutes. I don't know if the new screen on the Palm V has lower power requirements, but if it doesn't then I predict that Gameboy emulation isn't really feasible...
  • Well... I can only think of one word, cool. Just the thought the PalmPilot acting as an emulator is well...cool.

    I'm sure Nintendo will step in and say something, but I doubt will stop the movement. If there are enough people (as am I) interested in emulating the Gameboy on my pilot, then it will be done.

    We just might have to stop from posting on Slashdot to keep attention low... :)

    ---

  • Some of the new games are 8mbit. Warioland 2 for example.
    A few new color games are 16mbit ... I think...not quite sure...

  • I see you've never had to tell a six-year old to put the damned thing down and come to dinner...

    Of course, I'm not likely to buy my son a Palm Pilot for his birthday. His mom, however, probably shouldn't be told about the Palm Gameboy emulator, or we may never see her at supper again!
  • Posted by the order of His Majesty:

    Zelda is 4Mbit = 512K
    Ditto for Mario...
  • Well, I don't think so- various emulators of Nintendo systems have been around for years. The first SNES emulators started development some time back in '93-'94. There are already many game boy/NES/SNES emulators out there, I don't see why they would care about one more. Go look here [komkon.org] for info about Virtual GameBoy, the first (and one of the best) gameboy emulators out there.
  • Posted by the order of His Majesty:

    Actually, I replace the batteries (one pair of AA) about every month and a half.
    As much as I dislike Win9x & WinNT, WinCE seems to be a fairly decent system. I've yet to get any error messages other than an out of memory message when I was trying to crash it.
    I would be interested in running Linux on it however...
  • Tetris in class an at meetings? Wow, with any luck, I can avoid ever having to do any actual work for the rest of my life. Better living through technology, indeed.

    Maybe we can talk Palm into repositioning their keys into a better "gamepad" type layout...

    ----

  • Who needs a contact manager -- I'm just after the Universal Remote Control program!
    The range isn't that great 2m. Not sufficient to change channels from my couch.

    That's where those pyramid shaped IR repeaters come in handy.. (The ones that take the IR signal, convert it to RF, transmit to another device that converts back to IR to change the channel) If you could hack one of those devices to be just a straight repeater (IR in, amplified IR out) you could have it sit on the coffee table (or even embed it into the table) and solve the distance problem.
  • Heh, 3com will adapt the Palm hardware to Gaming apps as soon as the GameBoy runs PalmOS. :P

    -- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

  • ... but I don't think this is going to work. I mean, emulation of course does work, but I think this thing will need a fairly large frameskip, such that it will make games practically unplayable.

    Take a look at the GameBoy emulators for the Amiga. Also written in 68xxx assembly, only these for the higher-end 68020s and such. Being a big fan of the Z80 (as anyone who has ever run ZShell would know) as well as my Pilot, I myself wanted to undertake this project, but I decided to do some research first. I inquired the author of one emulator and he told me that running his (honed) engine on a 16 mhz 68000 clone wouldn't be feasible. It was already pretty slow on a 68020. (Of course, even if it had been feasible, knowing me, I wouldn't have gotten very far anyway.)

    Finally, realize that the processor, for the most part, is the easy part of the emulation. It's all that evil custom hardware, all that sprite stuff and scrolling stuff and such, that will be the real cycle-chewer. So, the author might have some false confidence; the Z80 engine may seem fast, but it uses only a fraction of the processor. And on top of everything, apparently this guy has barely started on the hardware, so don't expect this emulator to come out soon.

    I think the only way to emulate the GameBoy effectively on the PalmPilot would be to use dynamic recompilation; that is, translate all of the Z80 instructions to 68000 instructions in the beginning, in one fell swoop. (Perhaps they could be translated by the same utility that converts the binary ROM images to the Pilot's PDB format, making it seamless and preventing any "load time.") And even then, it would be a long shot.

    But, of course, I could be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. I would love for this thing to work well. I just wouldn't bet my box on it.
  • The URL would be: http://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/uClinux/ [ryerson.ca]

    Though it doesn't have any apps written for it (yet).
    -----------
  • Plugging those cute liddle Gameboy carts into your Palm Pilot?????

    Not thinking of a little bit of high seas freebooting are we.......

    Remember kids - Just say no to men with parrots on their shoulders, eye-patches and wooden legs.....

    YoHoHo

  • Does anyone else think the limiting factor is the control of the actual gameboy games? There's no great way to emulate the GameBoy directional pad with the current hardware buttons. Sure, it's a neat trick to get the games working on PalmOS, but getting to play them is an entirely different story.

    Hopefully Handspring will add a directional pad to their units, as they are supposedly going after the consumer market.

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