Is support for the Gameboy Player planned?

[mbc07]

AFAIK various GBA games have rumble support and different control schemes (generally taking advantage of the extra buttons from a GC Controller) when being played through GameBoy Player (right now I remember of Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga)...

[Shonumi]

The GBP is literally a GBA stuck underneath a GC. That's why it doesn't have any SGB capability because the GBA never did that (would have been awesome if the GBA had the resolution to do that though). It basically just pipes A/V generated by the GBA hardware to buffers the GC periodically reads. In that regard, it's boring in that it doesn't do anything fancy, no super hidden tricks that only happen on the Player and nowhere else. The only thing I can think of is that like the original SGB, the video timing is slightly off, so a GBA and GBP would technically give different TAS runs or something like that. The GBP also has some pretty borders you can use during gameplay, a timer, and some games (Mario & Luigi: Super Star Saga) feature rumble. There is probably some amount of color correction going on as well. Other than that, it's much less interesting that the SGB or the SGB2 (you could technically link together two SNES, kinda like GC LAN).

I'm just interested in getting it to work for the sake of completeness. Even if it is boring, it's boring history that needs to be preserved. I still want to know how exactly the GBP transfers video and audio and how the GC handles that whole process. Additionally, I want to see some games emulated on the GBP that would have been impossible to play in real-life. For example, Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble, WarioWare: Twisted, and Yoshi: Topsy Turvy are all pretty much no good on the GBP (unless you want to hold up your GC and spin it around). The GBA video series were explicitly incompatible with the GBP as well (probably because the video quality sucked more than anything else ) The only way to get those games working on the GBP is through emulation, so where emulation exceeds the limitations of the original hardware is another point of my fascination.

Guess I'm rambling again...

[JosJuice]

(11-05-2016, 02:26 AM)Shonumi Wrote: The GBA video series were explicitly incompatible with the GBP as well (probably because the video quality sucked more than anything else )

More likely because they wanted to avoid people copying the videos to e.g. VHS tapes.

[Shonumi]

Yeah, I know that's the real reason in all likelihood (I wasn't being serious btw, never am when I use one of these ). But if you've ever enlarged a GBA video in an emulator, your eyes kinda burn. Filters don't help much, the compression is horrible. Looks fine at the intended resolution, but anything else is pixel-soup.

[mbc07]

Well, you could try to buy a copy of the GameBoy Player Start-up Disc in a retro video game store or something similar (nowadays it should be pretty cheap), trowing it at Dolphin's debugger should probably reveal something useful to you...

[Shonumi]

(11-05-2016, 01:51 PM)Jhonn Wrote: Well, you could try to buy a copy of the GameBoy Player Start-up Disc in a retro video game store or something similar (nowadays it should be pretty cheap), trowing it at Dolphin's debugger should probably reveal something useful to you...

This is something I have actually already done some years ago. I still have my GBP and the disc from when I bought it (waaaay back when). I don't remember seeing anything interesting in Dolphin, though I'm not a GC expert. Ideally, I should have just inserted my own print/output statements into Dolphin's source code to watch ARAM DMAs more closely. However, I suspect most of this stuff was already figured out by the people behind the Game Boy Interface. They probably know exactly how the GBP works (since they made replacement software). However, I don't think the source code for the Game Boy Interface is available...

[PapermanZero]

It makes more sense to add Gameboy Player support in mGBA.
The Gameboy Player is actually a GBA.

[ExtremeDude2]

(11-05-2016, 01:51 PM)Jhonn Wrote: Well, you could try to buy a copy of the GameBoy Player Start-up Disc in a retro video game store or something similar (nowadays it should be pretty cheap), trowing it at Dolphin's debugger should probably reveal something useful to you...

Those discs are expensive ($50+), they cost more than a base which is dirt cheap.

[Smashbro29]

I get wanting to do it for completion and the challenge but the reality is the GBP is blurry, has weird frameskips and adds a lot of input lag.

[Shonumi]

(11-07-2016, 12:31 AM)Smashbro29 Wrote: I get wanting to do it for completion and the challenge but the reality is the GBP is blurry, has weird frameskips and adds a lot of input lag.

Most of that stuff is fixed when you don't use Nintendo's Startup disc. The Game Boy Interface was made specifically to correct that stuff. The GBP itself doesn't cause those problems, just Nintendo didn't code things as well as they could have.

@PapermanZero - The only thing mGBA (or any GBA emulator) would have to do is add rumble. And disable GBA Video from playing.