Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I wasn't quite sure where to post this, so i thought general would be fine. If mods disagree please move it to the appropriate location rather than deleting it if possible.

So I've been thinking that dolphin needs to emulate GBA h ardware, and I've finally been arsed to make a forum account and request it. Before you shoot me down I'm aware of VBA support, and I've made it work with Megaman X: Command Mission. However, this is not the case for all games, a chief example being TLoZ: Wind Waker. The game is playable from start to finish, but the tingle tuner is completely broken, making the nintendo gallery impossible to complete. I understand that dolphin is a gamecube and wii emulator, but the addition of a proper GBA integration would impact a significant enough number of games to justify it.

Here's some arguments for it's addition:

• The current situation of using VBA is tedious and requires users to obtain their own GBA BIOS, which can be extremely hard to obtain the fair way.
  
• For some games the emulated GBA will just hang anyway.
  
• I'm selfish and really want to play four swords adventures on netplay.
  
• Emulating GBA hardware would make Gameboy player support possible.
  

Now a couple of arguments against the idea and my responses.

• Dolphin is not a GBA emulator
      Several great gamecube games incorporate GBA functionality in small and big ways. By emulating the GBA it would make a significant positive impact on the playability of said games.
  
• Emulating additional hardware would be a slippery slope, for example, DS hardware is not emulated despite the functionality added to Wii titles
      The GBA was much more closely related to the gamecube than the DS was with the wii, to the extent of the gamecube having the gameboy player addition to emulate it.
  

My fatal flaw in proposing this change is that i don't know about coding, and therefore cant really help with the addition, but if my two cents is worth anything, i think the best way to do it would be to start with gameboy player support, then using instances of the gameboy player as emulated GBA's to link with games.

Thank you for reading. I'd love to hear your responses to this idea.

We won't emulate a GBA. Sorry. Dolphin is not a GBA emulator. Your argument against that doesn't really help when the games are perfectly playable without the value add that GBA functionality brings, excluding 4 swords.

But we've wanted better integration with other GBA emulators for a very long time now. The problem is that nobody has cared enough to put in the effort to make it better. Unpaid OSS.

Wind Waker's Tingle Tuner should work. It'll be a bit slower than not using it, but it should definitely work.

Don't get me wrong, our current support is bad, but, there isn't much to do. We need a GBA dev to do a majority of the work on this end.

Isn't endrift working on mGBA to be the answer to this issue with proper a Dolphin/Joybus integration?

endrift is also working on like a dozen other things in mGBA. She's only one person, after all. You'd have to ask directly, but I suspect it's not currently a priority. Higan had a bunch of work on the GBA<->GCN connection some years ago, but byuu hasn't touched it recently iirc. And I haven't even started my own efforts with GBE+.

I don't think Dolphin should have a GBA emulator inside it. That's a great deal of maintenance for a single, rarely used feature. Don't get me wrong, I loved connecting to the GC with my GBA as a kid, and not properly emulating that is a sore point for me. But throwing in more code like that isn't a smart, long-term move for a software project.

@JMC47 - Know any specific stuff on either end that needs work?

But the GameCube has the GameBoy player, so not supporting it means you aren't fully supporting the GameCube when you clearly support the other expansion adapters like the BBA adapter /s

Seriously though, Joybus is one of those low-priority features that's hard to implement from what I read up on it a few years ago on GBATEK

The GB Player is basically just a GBA with a connector for the GC. You can't really say that the hardware is part of the GC.

It's a similar situation with the Super GB. A lot of SNES emulators ignore it because a GB emulator can handle SGB enhanced games just fine (for the most part). Only a handful of games uploaded code to the SNES' CPU and APU, which would require properly emulating the SNES itself, so most GB emulators don't even consider going that far. Only higan takes it all the way and emulates both systems. But no one seriously complains that an SNES emulator is incomplete without SGB support. That may be true in the strictest sense, however, most people shrug it off.

Having said that, getting the GB Player working in Dolphin would probably best be done by having a separate emulator communicate with Dolphin much like VBA-M and JoyBus. All the other emulator has to do is push sound and video. Input would have to be transferred from Dolphin.

Do current GBA emulators handle the advanced capabilities from the GB Player, aka the rumble feature? (for like the 1 or 2 games that use it)

Yeah, it's not that hard to support the GB Player rumble feature. It's a super simple protocol sent via Serial I/O, so it's really no harder than emulating something like the GB Printer (it's easier in fact).