PlayStation Portable

King Kool writes: "Apparently, some guy decided it would be cool to try to take apart his PSX and make it portable - and it worked. It has about 2 hours of batterylife (with screen and everything) and runs on a Sony Lithium battery. Pictures and documentation are included. Cool."

Comments

GBA .GT. SNES

[yerricde]

Sorry for the Fortran; Slashcode strips > and escapes & producing >.

The GBA is supposedly equal to SNES power.

No. Super NES had a 2.8/3.6 MHz 65816 processor (essentially a 65c02 with 16-bit registers, 8-bit data bus, little pipelining) connected to the graphics chip and a 2 MHz SPC700 processor (incompatible variant of 6502 core with some instructions able to treat registers X and Y as a single 16-bit integer) connected to the sound chip. The two CPUs were connected through four slow 8-bit ports; most of the "loading" on Super NES games was actually copying 64 KB worth of sound data from the 65C816 side (which could see the cart) to the SPC700 (which could see only its 64 KB of RAM and its 64-byte BIOS).

GBA, on the other hand, has a 16.8 MHz ARM processor (32-bit registers, 32-bit bus to internal RAM, 16-bit external data bus, no hardware divide, lots of pipelining, C-friendly) connected to both the sound and graphics chips, making it much easier to code for. Its graphics chip also features hardware matrix transformation of sprite coordinates (allowing for 2D scaling and rotation of sprites) as well as four layers of straight background (vs. Super NES's 3) or two layers of "mode 7" 2 1/2-D transformation (vs. Super NES's 1), and a linear bitmap mode (allowing for easier porting of Wolf3d or Doom engines).