GBA emulator in C#

[gladius]

I was playing around with C# 2.0 a year or so ago and put together a GBA emulator in it to see what kind of speed it could get. It runs full speed w/ sound on my Athlon 64 3200, but much less than that and it will probably not be 60 fps . All graphics functionality is emulated, but there is no gb sound channel emulation, only direct sound. The cpu core is pretty good, but there are still a few bugs lurking.

The source is released, which is why I post it here as I hope it's a relatively clean example of how to build an emulator for a decently powerful system (16Mhz Arm7, up to 4 backgrounds with alpha blending and 256 rot/scale sprites).

Check it out here:
http://www.forwardcoding.com/projects/gbaemu.html.

You will need to install managed directx runtime as well, just download the newest directx runtime and run it with: dxsetup /installmanageddx.



Edit: old webpage went down (it stayed up for 6 years!)

[ShizZy]

Wow awesome - very nice work! How long did this project take you?

[synch]

Nice! As a detail, one of the versions of my gameboy mono emulator runs on C++ managed, and is really slower than the unmanaged one, even if the latter is not optimized for my cpu, and the managed should

[Doomulation]

And microsoft actually thinks the .NET Framework can beat unmanaged code, as they state? What nonsense! The framework can't produce better code than if written unmanaged it appears!

[gladius]

Wow awesome - very nice work! How long did this project take you?

Thanks, it took me about 3 months working on&off on it.

As for the managed vs. unmanaged speed differential, well emulators are one place where unmanaged can *really* take advantage of it's benefits. Bounds checking on the array access for my register store&memory is actually a significant cost for example.

It's doable though, which is basically all I was trying to find out .

[Falcon4ever]

Looks awesome gladius (sweet debugger btw )

You might wanna post it (and your expiriences) in this topic:
http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=20521

Damn, now shizzy will start nagging about my gb emu ;(

[ShizZy]

Maybe you should get your act together you lazy sob

[zAlbee]

Haha, hey Gary. As soon as I saw GBA and C# I knew it was you. Glad to see you completed it, congrats.

By the way, I think your site just recently went down. Getting a 404 now.

[gladius]

Hey Albert! Didn't know you were interested in the emulation scene, cool stuff .

Yeah, my old webpage seems to have gone down. Apparently I was ad-blocking (without even knowing it). Anyhow, this is the impetus for me to register my own domain, but until that's all set up the code is stored temporarily on the pocketspc page.

Edit: okay, new domain is up and running now.

[refraction]

well done! maybe you should announce this on some emulation sites if you think its good enough for release, you can never have enough emus well, maybe N64 has enough