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#1 2012-09-22 17:56:49

cteeto
Member
Registered: 2012-01-08
Posts: 23

cairo and vba-m

I have an Acer Aspire One (tiny netbook), which has this stupid intel gma 3600 graphics card. Since there is no usable 3d drivers for this card, I am using the frame buffer driver (fbdev) and its working quite well.

I was looking to see if I could play some game boy advance games using VBA-M. I notice VBA-M has an option to use cairo instead of opengl. However after choosing cairo to display, nothing really changes, upon running a game I see a jargled screen and then black, however, the emulation still seems to continue.

Is this even possible to do without 3d acceleration? I wouldn't think I would need it to play a GBA game. I am not exactly sure what cairo is and if it needs 3d acceleration either. XFCE4's composition manager does seem to work though.

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#2 2012-09-23 17:37:12

DoctorSamulus
Member
Registered: 2010-11-04
Posts: 53

Re: cairo and vba-m

Here is everything I know about emulation on netbooks: You should try mednafen instead, I tried VBA-M and it was super slow on my netbook. Mednafen plays all my genesis and gba games perfectly smooth at native res after configuration using the fbdev driver. If you just want to play GBA games you should just download it from the community repo so you don't have to wait forever compiling it, if you want snes (the snes module uses bsnes though so its super slow on netbooks, try snes9x-gtk), psx (using the pvr driver its almost playable on  your card) and genesis (smooth!) support you can get mednafen-wip  from the aur but it takes a bit to compile. If you aren't comfortable with manually configuring mednafen via file there is a gtk frontend called mfe also in the aur you could try.
HTH!

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#3 2012-09-28 16:12:13

DullOnion
Member
Registered: 2011-10-14
Posts: 8

Re: cairo and vba-m

I'm also rocking an acer aspire one.  I recommend using the windows port of vba-m under wine instead of running it natively.  For whatever reason, emulation is much smoother in the windows port, and the GUI has many more options.  It might be that there have been regressions in performance since that particular subversion (1097), since I seem to remember performance being decent until recently.

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#4 2012-10-18 00:08:40

cteeto
Member
Registered: 2012-01-08
Posts: 23

Re: cairo and vba-m

Thanks for the tip Doc,

mednafen is the bomb. I have spent a few days figuring all its ins and outs and it is wonderful. It plays gba games perfectly, I only wish snes emulation was better so i dont have to use 2 programs!

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#5 2012-10-18 02:37:58

Jristz
Member
From: America/Santiago
Registered: 2011-06-11
Posts: 1,022

Re: cairo and vba-m

for experience is possible run zsnes too, but you need almos 1Ghz of ... Hz
run well but I recommend fullscren ,the max for fbdev and xf86-video-modesetting is 640x480


Well, I suppose that this is somekind of signature, no?

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