Best things gaming companies have done?

I guess it would require emulation then. Maybe a custom emulator could be made that only emulates the missing components. Then again, I barely know enough about this and I'm just throwing things out there.

 

You can play GBA games via an emulator on RPi just fine, no need to try and fudge any native code execution ;-)

 

The DS has an ARM7, which allows it to play GBA games (but not the Z80, which is why it can't play GBC and GB games). It's a secondary chip on the DS, and I guess that Nintendo programmed around it for playing DS games on the 3DS.

 

So it seems that the GBA-compatible chipset theory might have been bogus. I'm going to look into this quickly. I'm really curious now. Maybe an Nintendo hardware designer has/could shed some light on this. Do the GBA VC titles on 3DS use standard VC features like save states?

 

No. GBA games on 3DS do not have save state and they do not support sleep function either so it's always full on even if you close the shell. I checked both Metroid Fusion and Minish Cap.

 

Do early 3DS VC titles support save states and sleep function? If they do, then it is quite possible the GBA games aren't running in an emulator. It could be a custom emulator too.

 

A PS2 with an IDE hard drive (and network adapter, Open PS2 Loader, and Free McBoot) is brilliant! It really transforms the PS2.


Edit: Sorry, wrong thread! (Basically, I was (avoiding) writing a report for work, and half of my (tiny!) brain was elsewhere when posting).

 

Good things I know of that gaming companies have done:
1.Epic Games giving away the full source code to Unreal Engine 4 for free (you only have to pay them money if you want to sell your game)
2.ID Software making their older engines (including most recently Doom 3) 100% open source and for being so mod friendly.
3.Bethesda being so friendly to modders of their games (including not caring that people are pulling the games apart, writing tools, writing extention patches that actually touch the game itself etc)
4.Other games companies that have released their source code in various forms.

Oh and Aaron "Apoc" Kaufman (community manager for the C&C franchise at the time) giving me (and various others who ran C&C websites at the time) free copies of a few C&C games (I have a physical copy of RA3 that is one of the coolest things I own plus I also got free digital copies of RA3: Uprising and C&C4). That was pretty good for a games company
If only the current EA management/legal dept was more friendly to the community (e.g. being willing to share source code or technical stuff about older games under NDA or something as an aid to the mod community for those games)

 

Serious Sam's source code has just been released, too:

http://www.croteam.com/serious-sam-source-code-released

It's also the engine for Serious Sam 2 (the Second Encounter), as well.