I've spent some time trying to get some decent game emulation on my Axim X5 Advanced. I purchased my X5 last year so my starting point was Rom version A02 with pocket pc 2002.
My initial tests found that pocket snes and pocketgenesis were far too slow to be playable. Recently I tried Morphgear and I was impressed. Sonic Advance wasn't bad. Mario Kart was almost playable . I installed Turbo Tray 498 to overclock the Axim and this also improved performance. However the best thing I did was to upgrade the ROM to A04. Under pocket pc 2002, this gives a huge performance boost. Also have a look at some of the glyph cache hacks(regking makes it easy, registry editors give you more control) which allow more memory for graphics. There's lots of info if you do a search on overclocking in the X5 general forum (try
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread/t-5585.html for starters. By installing all the software to the built on storage, you can free up more memory for programs, which in my case let me configure the glyph cache up to 32k. don't bother with sound emulation though, it's slooow and choppy
Under 2002, the best GBA emulation performance I was able to achieve used the following steps:
- upgrade to A04 Rom release
- overclock the Axim (initally turbo tray works well, although I've since found XscaleCtrl to be even better
- install all the software to the built in storage to allow for glyph cache hacks to improve screen redraw.
This weekend however I've upgraded to wm2003. There is a lot of debate on these forums about whether it's worth it or not. My 2c is that Morphgear on my Axim emulates a lot faster now. I still can't emulate sound on Genesis or GBA games, but SNES games can. And with the CPU set to max performace the Genesis version of Sonic 1 is almost too fast. never thought I'd say that! The only issue after that is that the control system is a little fiddly and I'm a little wary of too much gameplay as I don't want to wear out the buttons / DPad.