Well, I am using pocketGBA (PG) since it's first public version, so I might post my experiences with it, eh? Take it as a PocketGBA test or review
First - It's the best GameBoy Advance emulator ever. I have morphgear and it's pretty fast, but in GBA module, ah it can't be measured against PG. I have got Axim x50v. With processor set to 624 (no overclocking, gents)With sound and 2-3 frame skipping, I can get 90-110 percent speed for nearly every game...no that's lie. For every game. I am also happy with PG's Sound - have you ever tried any GBA game in morphgear with sound? Aaargh it's horrible! Choppy and all... With PG, I get nearly clear sound with just a small lags and chops. (When it's too choppy or the sound's very strange, I switch loop funcion to "loop bidirection" and it's as good as new). Yeah it's true that enabling sound will decrease performance a lil' bit, but not too much - 10-15 % I think. I have also tried PG's full screen ability - yeah it's workin' , but I don't use it, since all buttons disappear from the screen so I can't use "save state" function and the video quality isn't good either - well, gameboy doesn't have VGA screen, does it
. I use horizontal screen, that's the best. Since the new version does have the ability to open 32MB cartridges, I tried it and voila it works
I've tried Pokemon Mysterious Dungeon Red - no problems, 105 percent with sound... So until Marat releases new morphmodules, PG remains the king of GBA emulation. Only thing that's better in Morphgear is that you can have 9 savestates instead of 2 in PG. And talking about saving the game - PG has one bad thing - if you accidentaly click on either save or load game, it'll overwrite you current save/load - I got pretty angry at one point - I was playing one game for over a hour and then I clicked wrong icon in PG and I loaded my previous save from 1 hour ago
. Another annoying thing about PG is that it does something with your screen when it's active - I'm using Battnav which displays the battery's level at the top of my screen - but PG makes the top of screen freeze when it's active, so all things displayed at the top of the screen (time, battery, and everything that displays in the top panel) just freezes - you don't see what time it is unless you turn PG off. (Well, Main Battery Low and Main Battery Critical messages still pops out even with PG active, so don't worry you're gonna drain your battery to zero). And the last annoying (not so much, but still) thing, PG turns off every single running application - ICQ, TCPMP, everything (yeah I can understand it - it's simply using too much ram) but it's pity that I can't listen to my favorite MP3's while playing GBA games... (on the other hand, it would decrease performance and speed). Well, anyway, if you minimize pocketGBA, be sure to save your progress, because if you run any application with PG minimized, or switch on/ofd wifi or anything, PG will turn off without warning and all your unsaved progress will be lost... Good thing is that you can turn whole PDA off and then turn it back on with PG still running - it won't crash unless you run other application. Yeah and I noticed strange bug - in Pokemon Emerald, in one gym, there is supposed to be fog all around so the floor can be barely visible. Okay, I can hande barely visible floor. But in PocketGBA, the floor is totaly invisible
I didn't know where to go in that gym (everything else works great). Fortunately, I found Gym Layouts somewhere on the internet so I got through. I've emailed trapung and I'm sure he'll fix it soon. Yeah and from the lastest release, you've got to download fmodce.dll separately as it's not included in main package.
_____________ Morphgear(v2.3.0.2)_____PocketGBA (v060418)
Emulation Speed____ 0 ___________________+
32MB cartridges_____ - ___________________+
Sound_____________ - __________________ +
Saving game_______ + __________________ 0
Stability____________+ __________________ 0
Price______________ - __________________ +
+ : great
0 : average
- : poor
Conclusion: Untill Marat releases announced version 3, PocketGBA has no competition.
Thanks folks, that's all. I hope you'll find it interesting
