GameCube/GBA on the Thor!
This is something I'd wanted to try out as soon as I got my Thor and I finally got it (mostly) working! Long story short, it's actually streaming from my PC running Dolphin, with Steam Link for the top screen (GCN) and Apollo/Artemis for the bottom screen (GBA). There's more than 60 games that support this feature, though most just give some small content unlock. At least two pretty much require multiplayer, with two different people on GCN/GBA (Pacman Vs. and Rayman 3), so wouldn't be well suited for this. There are several games that use the GBA as a minimap or for other game info, though, which would be great for the Thor.
The three I tested here are probably the best use cases:
- The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures
- Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
The first two work great for single player and you could probably get a second (or up to 4) player(s) hooked up too by streaming to other devices. Also, the Japanese version of FSA had an exclusive "Tetra Tracker" minigame, which now has an English translation if you'd like to try it out. I'll have to tinker with the controls for Wind Waker more, because it needs inputs for BOTH the GCN controller and GBA to work properly (the others only use the GBA for button inputs, so have much simpler controls). Is it possible to set-up a touch overlay for Artemis, to put touch buttons over the A/B icons on the GBA screen?
Finally, just to note, I DID try running it directly on the Thor but ran into a number of problems. The Android build of Dolphin doesn't support GBA connectivity. I think it'd be possible to do if anyone could get Desktop Dolphin running, but when I tried through GameNative, GameHub Lite, or Winlator, it would just crash or not even load. If any of those programs could be modified to use BOTH screens, it'd be extremely simple to set-up, using the mGBA emulator integrated into Dolphin for this purpose. If not, there's still a potential work-around by running a separate instance of mGBA or VBA-M (I assume Desktop version as well, but not 100%) on the bottom screen, which can communicate with Dolphin over TCP, as described in great detail here.