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Using Hard Drives Or CD-ROMs On The GBA?

Posted by simoniker on from the 128,000-marios dept.

Black_Logic writes "A couple of Swedish university students have made a Gameboy Advance interface for hard discs and CD-ROMs. This will extend the GBA's maximum cartridge memory beyond 32MB, which could be quite useful for those who'd like to use the GBA for large space-requiring graphical projects, or maybe even movies."

18 comments

  1. Also by neostorm · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are a number of other system emulators (NES, Master System, TG16) that run on the GBA through use of the flash ROM cartridges.
    I could see those being adapted to this and used to carrying around a small laptop hardrive full of old NES roms strapped to the back of your GBA. Much fun.

  2. Movies? TV tuner and VCD Player by Echnin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can already play movies on the GBA, with a GBA TV Tuner and a VCD player. Just connect the VCD player to the TV Tuner, and there you have your VCDs playing... Not very good quality, but it works.

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    Lalala
    1. Re:Movies? TV tuner and VCD Player by Destoo · · Score: 1

      This is something I'm really looking for. The AM3 movie player for Gameboy.

      "The Adapter is supposed to play 24 minutes of animation (movies) on a standard 32MByte Smart Media card, a 256MByte Smart Media Card could hold up to 192 minutes. The compression technology used is provided by IMAGICA, which are also known for the HDCAM video compression."

      And it doesn't look too expensive either.

      Basically, you re-encode a movie in their format and dump it on a compacflash or cart for the GBA.

      Of course, the 240 x 160 pixels resolution is a bummer, but I can already see myself watching some South Park episodes on that.

      Damn.. I'm drooling already.

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      Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
  3. What i would KILL for... by dimator · · Score: 0

    What I would kill for is a similar adaptor for NES/SNES systems. No emulator is perfect, so I would like to be able to play my ROM backups from a CD on the actual hardware it was intended to run on.

    I wish I was a hardware hacker....

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    python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
    1. Re:What i would KILL for... by neostorm · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually there *is* hardware that allows you to do it. It's been around nearly as long as the systems themselves. The ones I've seen the most are called the "Super Pro Fighter" and "Super Wild Card DX", and they still run about $200.
      It's basically an extension of your NES/SNES/N64 that sits on top of the console. It has it's own cartridge slot, as well as a floppy or CDRom on top where you load your discs. You can rip your own games to the RAM to copy to disc later, or pop in an existing disc, load your game and play.
      I'm not entirely certain of the differences between the adapters ROM format and PC emulators ROM formats, but it's worth checking out if you're interested.

    2. Re:What i would KILL for... by Dreetje · · Score: 1

      Check out some of the more known sites about Emulating and roms like zophar's domain and cherryroms. On ebay you might be able to get such a backup tool.

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      Dre
  4. uhh ok.. by Squarewav · · Score: 1

    this thing reminds me of that 3d party cdrom drive for the n64, the idea was that you could make your own games or download freeware games and play them on your n64 without making your own cart, as if no one was going to just download and burn warez with it. as far as movies go i dont think so, the little snes style chip in the gba is not near powerfull enough to play even the smallest divx at anything greater then a few fps. Just like the cd drive for the n64 nintendo will just keep suing them till they dont have the money to defend themselfs

    1. Re:uhh ok.. by SuperCal · · Score: 1, Insightful

      The GBA has an arm processor simular to the one in my Zaurus, which can play Divx with no problem. I don't claim my Zaurus could decode a 1024 x 768 file, but once a movie is run though Virtualdub and resized to fit the screen files run quite nicely. I would bet the GBA would have a simular expirance.

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      Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
    2. Re:uhh ok.. by GoRK · · Score: 3, Informative

      Except that the ARM chip in the GBA is the ARM7, and it has no MMU. Plus, it runs at about 16MHz. It could play video but would probably choke trying to do anything with Divx.

    3. Re:uhh ok.. by Bagels · · Score: 1

      Interestingly enough, no, it doesn't choke on DivX. I saw an old freeware demo of DivX running on a GBA emulator; the video quality was fairly poor, but it *did* work (the video in question was of the original Zelda demo for the 'Cube).

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      --- Bwah?
    4. Re:uhh ok.. by GoRK · · Score: 1

      Cool that someone wrote something that actually decodes it! I imagine that the graphics chips are scaling up a very low resolution decoded image though.

      Still, there are other promising video codecs that (while maybe not as highly compressed as divx) would function much better in the fixed-point low speed world of the GBA and provide full resolution video with processing power to spare!

      I'll try to find the demo you were talking about and see how it runs on the actual hardware. Will be fun to see...

      ~GoRK

  5. Backup units by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Such backup units do/did exist. You can make a backup of all your games and restore them also. ucon64 is the tool you need for such tasks.

  6. Hmmm by Zuph · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    How terribly useless. Why don't they make a CD-Rom thing for PDAs? I would love to have hours of music, or video, or what not, right there, without have to buy a laptop. Portable CD Players have been battery powered forever, so it wouldn't even need to draw power from the PDA. I'd think such a device would be more popular than a CD rom for a GBA.

    1. Re:Hmmm by Descartes · · Score: 1

      Uh, yeah, they do already make them. PCMCIA

    2. Re:Hmmm by Zuph · · Score: 1

      I'm willing to bet that a good 85-90% of PDAs don't have a PCMCIA slot. Sure, the Ipaq does, but the PCMCIA thing makes it massive (not that it's too much an issue, you're going to be carying around a CD rom too), and I've not seen a battery powered PCMCIA CD-Rom. Not to say there isn't one, i've just not seen it.

  7. How about... by Kris_J · · Score: 1

    I'd rather someone worked out a sync system so my contacts and appointments on my desktop were available on my GBA. There's even a nice suspend mode available.