So out of curiosity I tried a slot-1 GBA dumper on my DSi, thinking nothing would happen. I was apparently wrong though, because once it loaded it recognized a 1MB ROM from somewhere. The resulting ROM was called "_____FF.GBA". I tried to run it in VisualBoy Advance, but all I got was "Unsupported ARM mode 00". So my question is, what did I dump? EDIT: Just opened it with a hex editor and there's nothing in, it's completely blank. EDIT2: Did the same thing in my DS with no cart in. Maybe it's just part of the program. Either way nothing interesting is going to come out of this after the hex editor discovery, mods feel free to delete.
I'm not 100% sure myself but it would seem the DS/DSL/DSi/DSi XL all posses both the ARM7TDMI and ARM946E-S, the former being what was dedicated to GBA processing. Being they removed the GBA cart slot and the Z-80 present in the DS and DSL it's unlikely they would have left much in the firmware itself to boot GBA titles. Not impossible, but very unlikely. You can get the GBA Micro to crash into GB mode but it's implementation is missing so much that you really can't do much with it beyond ooo and ahh at something interesting. Disclaimer: I'm by no means an expert on DS hardware.
I don't think the DS had a z-80 to my knowledge. GB/GBC compatibility was removed on DS. -edit- Also the arm7 wasn't there only for GBA compatibility. It was used in DS mode to offload some OS level stuff off the main cpu (like touch screen, wifi, etc). It is possible they offloaded this on the 3DS to something else since (as far as I know) devs where never allowed to write custom arm7 code (at least when I worked on the DS they weren't). Only the OS/Nin libs could use it.
100% correct, the ARM7 was used by the SDK libs for touch screen processing and audio - there were other hardware enablers that were removed from subsequent DS designs when they dropped the GBA from that platform. Also, speaking from experience, a GBA emulator on the DSx would not be feasible (even with HLE) - the platform is too underpowered.
Eh? Arm processors are compatible with legacy code and the DS gfx hardware is ripped straight from a GBA. There wouldn't be much to emulate. GBA on a DS/3DS would be rather simple compared to other systems.
The DSi has quite a bit of power over a DS/DSL that is only accessible right now through one flash cart. The DStwo has a CPU built into it IIRC solely for the purposes of GBA emulation.
