I do most of my NESdev on a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 laptop with a 10.1" inch screen. But Dell doesn't make those anymore, and I worry about what I'll use once it no longer boots or once replacement batteries stop being manufactured. With the decline of 10" laptops that run desktop operating systems in favor of convertible tablets that run Android and Chromebooks that run Chrome OS, it has become harder to find good hardware to do NESdev on the go. Someone recently managed to get ASM6 running on Android. But it'd be nice to have a decent emulator that runs on Android. I see three issues with the emulators out there.
First, we need an emulator that we know emulate the NES accurately enough that game logic, common mappers, and well-behaved raster effects run correctly. I imagine that at first, most people won't be working on projects using oddball mappers or trying to debug raster effects that require cycle accuracy while away from home. But a lot of the NES emulators on Android are paid applications, which makes it harder to evaluate their accuracy without buying them all. Or do paid NES emulators for Android include the developer's promise of best effort to get their behavior on particular ROMs to match the observed behavior of an NES running the same ROM?
Second, I tried a Mario style platformer for Android called Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7 tablet. It handled fine with a Bluetooth keyboard, but I kept missing jumps with the on-screen gamepad. So we need an emulator with a useful translation from touch to NES input so that game logic can be tested efficiently. This might involve mapping swipes (not presses of visible buttons) to keypresses, or treating the screen as a trackpad and emulating the Super NES Mouse, or exposing additional registers to reflect touch and accelerometer coordinates for Android debug builds, or some other method I haven't thought of.
Third, a developer's emulator should include saved states and a step debugger, possibly accepting FCEUX .nl files or symbol files from the popular assemblers.
What would be the best way to go about this? Or should one just accept the misfortune of having to carry a larger laptop?
First, we need an emulator that we know emulate the NES accurately enough that game logic, common mappers, and well-behaved raster effects run correctly. I imagine that at first, most people won't be working on projects using oddball mappers or trying to debug raster effects that require cycle accuracy while away from home. But a lot of the NES emulators on Android are paid applications, which makes it harder to evaluate their accuracy without buying them all. Or do paid NES emulators for Android include the developer's promise of best effort to get their behavior on particular ROMs to match the observed behavior of an NES running the same ROM?
Second, I tried a Mario style platformer for Android called Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my Nexus 7 tablet. It handled fine with a Bluetooth keyboard, but I kept missing jumps with the on-screen gamepad. So we need an emulator with a useful translation from touch to NES input so that game logic can be tested efficiently. This might involve mapping swipes (not presses of visible buttons) to keypresses, or treating the screen as a trackpad and emulating the Super NES Mouse, or exposing additional registers to reflect touch and accelerometer coordinates for Android debug builds, or some other method I haven't thought of.
Third, a developer's emulator should include saved states and a step debugger, possibly accepting FCEUX .nl files or symbol files from the popular assemblers.
What would be the best way to go about this? Or should one just accept the misfortune of having to carry a larger laptop?