Dear community,
Aximsite.com now features a sub-forum dedicated to the world of emulation on PDAs.
I. Rules
First of all, all the rules counting for the other forums are active here, too:
1. No sharing of illegal content like
- Commercial ROMs and ISOs, BIOS files, serials
- Unlocked/hacked commercial software of any kind
- Links related to illegal content
2. No abuse of your freedom of speech through
- flaming, spamming, molesting
II. Emulators FAQ
If you have no idea what emulators are, you may want to check
THIS.
In short, emulators allow us to "simulate" hardware on our handhelds and this hardware can be of any kind. You want to play SuperNintendo games on your PocketPC? Just use an emulator to "simulate" the SuperNintendo’s hardware together with it’s software and your game cartridges converted into a files called ROMs and you can enjoy tons of your beloved oldies right on your mobile device.
The amount of games you can emulate is so high, it not only simply beats the number of available PocketPC games, it also raises a high standard most PPC games never reached till now in graphics and storyline, giving you a very huge amount of genres to explore and adding unique features to the systems like e.g. a save-function for your NES/MAME games and so on.
However, the "simulation" of hardware is a complicated process, especially if the hardware is more advanced (e.g. with consoles etc. that have more complex GPUs to perform 3D games). This process depends mainly on your PDA’s hardware and especially on your CPU as the main work is done software-wise.
This means to emulate the SuperNintendo’s hardware full speed including the 3.58 MHz CPU, you need a device with around 300 to 500 MHz depending on other factors, too.
This gets even more complicated through the differences among all the PDAs out there, if you are interested in this, you might want to read my short article about that
HERE.
Every hardware has to be emulated differently so the developers of emulators have a very hard job and the limitations might not be visible to you if you are no coder. Often people ask why some newer hardware can be emulated but older can't but it's a matter of the architecture, the experiences of the developers and the hardware you want to emulate on.
We can emulate a PlayStation but we can not emulate a N64 (yet) due to it's architecture and missing Plugins to handle the graphical output.
How to?
Emulators usually come either as Setup which you have to execute and that installs over ActivSync; as .CAB file that has to be placed in the storage of your PDA and extracts there if you click on it or as simple files in a folder you have to place somewhere on your storage as it does not need any further installation. You have to be aware which CPU type is supported by the emulator though if you have no XScale processor (they can run software made for PPC's with ARM, SH3 or MIPS CPU, too but the other CPUs can not).
Another thing you also should know is that some emulators support or are especially made for the 2700G Co-CPU of the Dell Axim x50/51v series and might not work with your device if you don't have a 2700G.
Third thing to keep in mind is the incompatiblity among the different WindowsCE versions. Again, I refer to
My Article about that.
As resource for all these information/files, you may want to use
My Database
You might also need one or more of the following things:
I. BIOS
Some machines/emulators need a BIOS file to handle the starting routines if the developer can not use own code to perform this (like GBA emulators do now, in the past, they needed a BIOS). If the emulator depends on a BIOS it can happen that this is still copyright protected by the company who created it (e.g. Sony PlayStation BIOS). If that's the case, sharing such a file is illegal, you have to own the machine and use a method to transform the BIOS software into a file readable by the emulator (e.g. with the action replay module and a link cable for PlayStation BIOS).
II. ROMs
Just like the ROM in your PDA, a ROM in emulation scene basically refers to a medium where data is stored, only that it's not hardware but made into a file (software). For example, the game cartridges of your GameBoy Advance save the content of the game on a ROM. You can use hardware modules to save this software from these ROMs and therewith the game as a file on your computer and then place it in your PDA's storage so the emulator can read it and play the game. These saved games are called ROMs and usually are copyright protected if they are not made as freeware (so called homebrew). That's why sharing them is illegal.
In some cases, ROM can also refer to the internal ROM of a machine if it saves it's operating software there (e.g. when emulating calculators).
Some emulators support compressed ROMs in .zip files or the like to save storage. However, this only works cause the ROM's content gets loaded or streamed into your RAM. The later might cause slowdowns if ROM is compressed, the first only takes longer to load. The compression of a ROM does not mean that you need less program RAM to emulate it!
III. ISOs
ISOs are copies of the game's CD content that are transferred into a file (so called images) that is readable by the emulator. Usually, you use a CD burning software to create such images of a CD (don't get confused here, images are called ISOs cause of their "inner" ISO format but they not necessarily have to end with ".iso" as every burning software uses an other name to identify their formats like ".nrg", ".bin" etc).
As you are only allowed to make a security copy of games you own, sharing them is illegal as long as they are not hombrew (none-commercial).
Since CD based games are often very big in size, the so called "ripping" was invented, a method to lower the size by eliminating content. This can mean deleting or overwriting ("dumping") e.g. videos or music to make them unplayable and/or use compression techniques to lower the space the image needs. However, streaming data out of compressed files can cause slowdowns.
