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GBA saverams:
8 byte ID
4 bytes int32le: m
4 bytes int32le: n
m bytes raw data: flash or sram
n bytes raw data: eeprom
On reading, it will attempt to load non-headered files, and sometimes succeed.
Most of this is VBA's fault: since it uses fuzzy heuristics to determine saveram in many cases, the only way be 100% guaranteed is to save the whole durn thing.
NES saverams have no header, except for FDS (which is a whole special thing of its own), and maybe some oddball I've forgotten about. Bizhawk itself doesn't put any headers on saverams; it's only cores that do that.
Yeah, I was the one that was going to do linkup in vba next, but I got a job and have been rather busy, and MGBA came around which made linkup for vbanext seem kind of pointless.
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Yes, you could play a Famicom game on a NES with a simple adapter, and then press P2 start. But it's easier than that; the Famicom AV has the same controllers as a NES, but takes Famicom games.
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The vba core in bizhawk is different and probably overall inferior to the vba-rr one. Doesn't matter, both are awful compared to mgba, which bizhawk will have as soon as that slacker natt gets to work.
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That rom won't run on quicknes (VRC7), so it gets automagically redirected to neshawk. I wonder if we should show the user something in that case.
As far as the background goes, I can make it work by fudging up something, but I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do. The problem is that the ROM is a VRC7 with 40KB chr rom, which is a nonsense configuration; VRC7 didn't support dual chr roms (in fact, very few things did). If you guess what it wants correctly, you get the right thing.
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Smells like a fixed input frame timing going in and out of sync with when the game polls controllers and dispatches video frames. Does Dolphin do something like that?
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The QuickNES core won't emulate FDS at all. So when a FDS rom is loaded, NESHawk is automatically used regardless of that setting. This also happens with some mappers like MMC5
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I wrote the FDS audio code. I did it with the best information available and checked everything multiple times, but I missed something. If I have time to look back at it again (which may or may not happen, probably not any time soon), the thing that would help me would be a list of specific examples from specific games. Add it to the Bizhawk bugtracker. Please no "how it sounds in other emulators"; real hardware is the only thing worth comparing to.
Probably not worth your effort though, as I don't think I'll get back to FDS audio anytime soon.
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I designed it, and it barely fits on my monitor (1920x1080 with a fatty taskbar). The GBA PPU viewer has a mobile window setup because it has way too many things to fit on any screen (and to save on processing power, by allowing unused ones to be not rendered), but not sure if Genesis is worth the trouble.
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You must have exact hash matches for pokeymans gba rtc to work.
The exact list of all SHA1 for all RTC enabled games in bizhawk-gba is:
http://pastebin.com/tG5NwTbd
If you'd like to add to that list, you can edit the files in the gamedb/ folder with any text editor. Customarily, you'd add your new entries to the gamedb_user.txt, not gamedb_gba.txt, but that's not a requirement.
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I just tried it and there seems to be audio coming out of both channels on the title screen?
That being said, GB games can be weird at time with their stereo channel allocation because there was no stereo separation on the real hardware.
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gba has been discussed before; it was on my list of things to do but we have an actual gba core dev that may be interested in it, so i'm going to hold off on adding another of my hackjobs for now.
How many 4p gb games are there of interest?
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I've been long frustrated by the stagnation I've seen in GBA emulation scene from a prevalence of VBA. I'm glad to see someone with the dedication and time to sort things out. I've read reference to some of the blindingly obvious mosaic bugs in VBA in documents that are over 10 years old at this point, but they never get fixed...
Git-style fully branched rerecording sounds interesting; I don't do any rerecording myself though so I don't know how important that feature is to the community.
So yeah, this project looks pretty cool.