Slashdot Mirror
Using Hard Drives Or CD-ROMs On The GBA?
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."
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.
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.
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.