Are there any plans for Lynx to be playable on GBA SP?

[Godzilla]

The GBA now has a movie player, so it must have a fair wack to run these?

 

Yea.... that's a good indicator :-)

 

Full speed NES seems to be it's limit, which is no where near the lofty heights of the Lynx :-)

 

But I still have faith in clever coders...

[rockman_x_2002]

Well I'm no professional programmer and only have worked on a little PC programming in my college career as of yet, but instead of developing an emulator that may/may not run Lynx games at 100% on a GBA, wouldn't it just be easier to convert those Lynx titles to the GBA?

 

Of course there's the legal issue regarding some (if not all) Lynx games. But that aside, wouldn't it be entirely possible to make a pixel-perfect port of Chip's Challenge to the GBA without the use of emulation? I wouldn't think it would be hardly as taxing on the hardware that way either. Seems that a port to the GBA of those Lynx games would be more feasible than a Lynx emulator.

 

Of course I'm only a college student, so what do I know? Then again I did stay at a Holiday Inn while on vacation last week.

[+karri]

There is a technique for doing genuine ports as opposed to emulations.

 

I have used this technique to convert code from one language to another. Basically you need to run the source code through a compiler that will build an object representation of the entire program.

 

It is not enough to make an object representation of only the instructions the CPU will execute. You also need to model the display, I/O, sounds etc. for the port to work.

 

Then you need to do some very clever optimisation steps that will simplify the source code to as high level representation as possible. You have to deal with variables and forget about registers and memory addresses.

 

After this you need to create the sources for all these high-level representation in the target hardware.

 

The final step is then to compile the source code for the GBA.

 

In reality it would take about 6 months full time work to create a cross-compiler that could do this. The Southampton Portable compiler could do this if someone just had the time to work on it.

 

The good thing is that once this tool would exist. You could port anything in a few seconds from the source to the target system with no manual work at all.

 

lynx2gba Lemmings.lnx

 

 

--

Karri

- Dreaming? - Not.

[wapchimp]

mmm sounds good. Just need some1 to do it now

[TailChao]

That would work wonderfully, the only problem is converting code used to make graphical tricks on the lynx (Rasters/Scanline palette changes) work properly on GBA. Although the end result would be nice, as I doubt anyone could resist using an LCD that doesn't wash out images or leave blurry trails from fast moving sprites Although that would thwart my fake transparencies method, D'oh

[raindog]

There's always the DS, assuming anyone figures out how to make homebrew stuff for it.