There's a very fast Super-Nintendo emulator for GP2X (which uses a similar CPU to the nokia tablets).

DrPocketSNES is a fullspeed SNES emulator. Reesy combined the current SquidgeSNES with the renderer of PocketSNES and now we've got an SNES Emulator that runs most games fullspeed (with some framskip) with sound at 250 MHz - INCLUDING transparencies and partial SuperFX chip support!

http://reesy.gp32x.de/DrPocketSnes.html
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/DrPocketSNES

AFAICT it should be possible to port, but it does need some work.

It writes to gp2x framebuffer directly, so this would need to be changed to render to SDL, or to framebuffer using the mplayer framebuffer hack.

A few other minor changes are also necessary. This would be the non-plus-ultra emulator for the N770 and N800, IMHO.

I've made some progress but it's ... it might be beyond me.

So this is a call to interested parties. I can share my partial results if anyone wants (it's a mess atm).

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(edit: links to other ARM-Optimized snes emulators, possibly slower)

http://notaz.atspace.com/snes9x_uiq.html
http://yoyofr92.free.fr/os9xgp/index.html
cheers

*Gives moral support*

Can't port for nuts, but i hope to see this work!

hmm.. no one wants picking this project up?

guess im gonna have to wait a long time before i get to play final fantasy on my IT.

You aren't going to get a full speed SNES emulator on the N800 regardless of optimizations or ports and even if you did, it would be damn near unplayable.

what makes you say that?

@arnimS - the screen res of the gp2x is only 320x240 - which might be good, because assuming we use the hardware x2 scaling to 640x480. that leaves us with 160x480 (if the screen really is 160 dpi, around an inch by 3 inches) of room for screen press buttons

random question: does the touch screen return X events? how do we get the touch screen input (you've probably already thought of this, i'm thinking of a background script similar to xmodmap that maps screen taps in certain areas to keypresses (like on your qwerty keyboard))

i'd really like to help, but other than being a casual gentoo user, i can't do much

yes, it's been done with fceu (nes emulator) already!

I have a GP2X, and I've been wondering if anyone was going to try to port the emulators to the N800. The nes, snes, genesis, neo-geo, and mame emulators are all excellent.

The GP2X has weaker hardware, so in theory, better performance is possible on the N800. Bluetooth controller, FTW?

i believe a port is long overdue now!

DrPocketsnes should yield playable RPGs on the 770 and action games on the 800. It is a *lot* faster than snes9x, which gives about 5 fps on the 770 for games that use transparencies and pallete-changes and the raster effects.

... To answer your questions yeah on-screen buttons are the answer - see tak's excellent work on FCEU.

Onscreen taps generate normal X and SDL mouse events (leftclick). So you just detect for taps within a rectangular region. This is not difficult.

Here are the buttons i drew for uqm.

You can see em in action in this demo game.
http://pupnik.de/aliens-1.0.2_Nokia.tgz

I did make some progress porting DrPocketsnes v6. If anyone wants to take a stab at it, I'd be glad to help. I've uploaded my work-in-progress (Codenamed "The Horror") to my site here.

http://pupnik.de/DrPocketSnes_Nokia_The_Horror.tgz

The basic idea was to substitute the gp2x specific stuff with snes9x code. You can get the original DrPocketSnes9x code at Reesy's site.