It would be hard to get it fullspeed, though. The GBA runs at 16mhz, and the nspire at 150mhz. A rule of thumb is you need 10-15x the power to emulate something. And then, the GBA has graphics hardware, which the nspire lacks. Then again, they both have ARM CPUs, which makes matters easier.

By that time, people will be asking for DS and N64 emulation on their calc.
EDIT: Autocorrect on my iPod switched calc to calf!

Prerecompilation may work-a computer program that changes a gBA rom into an nspire binary.

EDIT: 400th post!

There would be extra code to substitute for the BIOS and graphics routines, but the actual graphics, as in tiles and sprites, can be converted into 4lvl grayscale, cutting down their size fourfold. (GBA has 32,768 colors, so I'm assuming 16bpp

That stupid autocorrect tried to change sprites to spruces, but this time I caught it.

Yeah that too, the lower color depth would cut size down considerably. Btw are you on an iPhone/android or something? I think they got auto-correct and sometimes Eeems posts become weird when he doesn't check carefully. I have a spell-checker, but it doesn't auto-correct

Even better - an OS hook to run ROMs directly from the my documents screen.

This could be a feature request for Ndless. Ndless already puts an hook on the documents opening.
Ndless could manage a map of file extensions (.gb/.gbc in the case of gbc4nspire) to programs, updated by the programs when run from the first time, and pass the file name as an argument to the main() function of the program.

Most GBA graphics are already 4-bit. The actual colors are looked up from a palette. And I'm not sure how exactly you would locate the graphics data in a ROM automatically, anyway. Also, there are not "graphics routines", there is graphics hardware.

You don't need to locate graphics data in a ROM, you only need to block access to HW and emulate it in signal handler. Should be simple to do if Nspire's CPU includes proper MMU. The only question is if it'll be fast enough: context switch is slow business and Nspire is only 10 times faster then GBA...

In other words, before we get a calc powerful enough to run a GBA emu at full speed, emulating all effects, it may take years...

It's not a question of power: Nspire is more then capable enough. It's question of doing the actual work. Compare XBox (original, not XBox360) emulation with PS2 emulation. It's actually harder to emulate PS2 - but people want it so it works (not perfectly, but compatibility was over 50% two years ago, by now I think it's about 80-90%) while XBox... well, you can run one or two games - and that's all.

So ironically enough while I agree that "it may take years" I don't agree that we need new hardware: it'll take years, but the end result will probably be GBA emulator for Nspire, not for some exotic new platform.

Quote from: calc84maniac on November 16, 2010, 10:32:15 pm

Most GBA graphics are already 4-bit. The actual colors are looked up from a palette. And I'm not sure how exactly you would locate the graphics data in a ROM automatically, anyway. Also, there are not "graphics routines", there is graphics hardware.

You don't need to locate graphics data in a ROM, you only need to block access to HW and emulate it in signal handler. Should be simple to do if Nspire's CPU includes proper MMU. The only question is if it'll be fast enough: context switch is slow business and Nspire is only 10 times faster then GBA...

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on November 16, 2010, 09:59:08 pm

In other words, before we get a calc powerful enough to run a GBA emu at full speed, emulating all effects, it may take years...

It's not a question of power: Nspire is more then capable enough. It's question of doing the actual work. Compare XBox (original, not XBox360) emulation with PS2 emulation. It's actually harder to emulate PS2 - but people want it so it works (not perfectly, but compatibility was over 50% two years ago, by now I think it's about 80-90%) while XBox... well, you can run one or two games - and that's all.

So ironically enough while I agree that "it may take years" I don't agree that we need new hardware: it'll take years, but the end result will probably be GBA emulator for Nspire, not for some exotic new platform.

So I'll be able to play PS3 games on my computer soon!

Just kidding, but yeah GBA emulation was attempted on the Nspire before. The person who worked on it for a while told me a bit about it. It was about twice slower than the original GBA and most special effects did not work. That said, with the time, new tricks will be discovered to find faster ways to do stuff. After all, it took 8 years before a GB emu arrives on the 84+ and now a faster one is being written.