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Overclocking your Gameboy Advance
An anonymous reader writes "The guys over at Ahead Games are working on an overclock mod for the GBA. They've been able to run it at up to 2x the regular operating speed without any major heat or battery life problems. Now, you're probably asking yourself "Why the hell would anyone want to overclock their Gameboy?" Answer: Super Nintendo emulation. There's already a working beta of a SNES emulator out for the GBA called SNES Advance. The big problem is there's just not enough horsepower under the GBA's hood to emulate the SNES sound chip. This mod will hopefully remedy that."
Have they gotten past the timing issues involved with overclocking the clock speed?
Of course, by the time you add liquid cooling, Lexan case sides, LAN carrying straps, enhanced power supply etc, it's going to be somewhat larger that Super Nintendo ;)
- To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
I mean, you can legally buy the old cartridges and all, but won't they spin this as IP theft?
...a lack of buttons. A SNES pad has two more of them than a GBA.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Wouldn't the biggest problem be the shorted battery life?
1990: The SNES was out, Bush was president, the US was at war with Iraq and the economy sucked
2004: The SNES emulator is out, Bush is president, the US is at war with Iraq and the economy sucks
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with the fact that now I can get as much horssepower into a few AA batteries and the palm of my hand as I could in the entire SNES+TV combination.
I really wonder why Nintendo couldn't have done this so that they cold just re-release all the old SNES games in GBA format?
Makes me think theres a reason they didn't.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
This is all well and good, but how would you get the games TO the GBA?
:( .
On a slightly more humical(is that even a word?) note, where is my genesis emulator I want to play zero wing
What I've always wanted...
An overclocked gaming machine that will be so fast and so hot that in the winter I can use it as a portable heater...
Great, I can't wait to play Mortal Kombat with oven-mits.
...would have to be "Why the hell would anyone want to eumlate the SNES on a GBA?"
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
or the next thing you know is that Japan (Nintendo's headquarters) will need to be liberated from it's vicious emperor.
It's a bit like the re-release of the old Atari games for new PC's. How many times can we really sit and play Frogger now? Isn't the progression to new tecnology so we can play better games, not reheat the old ones?
You overclock your latest expensive gadget to emulate an outdated, less expensive gadget just for the hell of saying you overclocked it.
He's not talking GBC (god no, a Z80 can't emulate a 65816!), he's talking GBA. L & R are DEFINITELY on a GBA. It's only X & Y that are missing.
lack of buttons will be made up by a 2 button combo l1+a l2+b etc.. the forums at http://www.pocketheaven.com/boards/viewforum.php?f =33 have the info. The tests so far are great
Why not just get a GP32, you can emulate loads more machines and it looks like GBA soon (it's an ARM as well as the GBA)..
Still, reminds me of the overkill feeling when I heard about overclocked, dual sound chipped, hard drive equipped C64 machines that were being modded back in the day...
I am Jack's witty signature line
GBA has 6 buttons + Direction pad. A,B,L,R,select and start. All are used in games, and some emulators have even virtual keyboards. ZX spectrum on GBA
GBA's have L & R.
Its not often that I look at a mod and thing "cool", but this is. I don't know why. I have no better reason than it makes me feel all tingley in the same way that Transformers did when I was 7.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
...Final Fantasy III of course!
They are already here :) : GBAGI
You guys are chumps, overclocking everything independantly. I just skipped the middleman and overclocked my house.
Normal AC power is at around 120 volts and 70hz here in the USA, so I put in a frequency multiplier and upped it to 105hz and 160 volts AC. Now, all my lights are brighter, TV is faster to react in the menu, and I've pre-emptively overclocked all my appliances!
You've never seen microwave popcorn get done in a minute? Come on by! Sure, there are occasional fires, but nothing a little fire extinguisher and some aggressive product warranties won't fix.
There are downsides... all my clocks run fast... and my VCR keeps spitting out tape... and sure, my refrigerator has turned into a freezer, but I have to say that despite some of those challenges, it's still worth it.
Oops! Gotta run, my wireless access point seems to have killed the plant it's sitting next to. Maybe I should measure the rf...
Last year I spent quite a bit of time flying the route from SF to ATL. During one of these trips I reached what can only be one of the highest pinnacles of human evolution.
There we were at 35,000 feet cruising over the vast country of America. There I was in the toilet taking a rather righteous dump all the while playing Phantasy Star II, a game from my childhood, with the GBA.
There's nothing like soaring through the sky, shitting and reliving moments of your childhood all at once.
--- I do not moderate.
That can be used on the GBA.
http://www.pocketsnes.net/ They have a few games going so far on it that have no speed issues, and they are working on fixing problems with other games. Tried it with a few games myself on my GBA, some work some don't (as expected) either case it is exciting to see these emmulators are in development!
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maybe if you run everything from IRAM or ERAM you'd find this useful... Let's not forget that the ROM bus is dog-slow.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I found the liquid nitrogen really made me cold when stored in my shirt pocket. And I don't even want to say what happened when I stored one in my pants pocket. You haven't seen shrinkage like liquid nitrogen shrinkage!
How about they get the emulator past v0.1 before I start mucking with my hardware.
SNES Advance was originally called PocketSNES (PocketNES is by the same author, loopy).
But after that ripoff site appeared he changed the name to SNES Advance and got the www.snesadvance.org domain.
I'm working on underclocking my ..err.. clock, so I can get more time into a day.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
We really want to know how you feel.
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I haven't used one but it seems like a real useful way to do robotics platform development, especially since you can output to the GBA screen, that sure would make debugging all my Sharp IR sensors a lot easier than reading a binary LED display.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
A,B,X,Y,Left shoulder,Right shoulder,Select and Start. What to do about X and Y is the problem.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
... can this be done without impacting the speed of currently existing GBA games? Do GBA games naturally have speed throttling in them to handle this?
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[] Does it run linux ?
[] Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
[] In soviet Russia, GBA overclocks YOU
Pick one and move over.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Shift button?
This was already posted by anon (me) above.
Also, are you blind or just stupid? The ripoff site is pocketsnes.NET. The only way to prevent it would be to get every pocketsnes.* domain out there, which would have been complete overkill.
And loopy isn't trying to shut anyone down. He just moved on and don't really give a shit about what that asshole is doing. He has a whole network of ripoff sites out there. Some of which has already been posted to this story.
The Zodiac has had a working SNES emulator for weeks now. No overclocking required. Runs pretty damn good too.
I didn't see your post. It was modded zero for annonymous coward.
Actually the rippoff site was ORIGINALLY www.pocketsnes.com. It was taken because Loopy released the emulater on his WIP page and later at pocketsnes.pockethaven before getting the domainname pocketsnes.com - so they got it first.
As for getting it shut down. I don't know whats currently happening right now, but I recall when it originally happened there was quite a stink in the forums. I do recall Loopy saying to just ignore the assholes though. But I do infact recall a move to get the site shut down in the pockethaven forums, even going so far as people emailing the sites host and telling them that its a ripoff site.
In short, I was trying to be helpfull. You don't have to flame my ass because you posted it first as Anon. Thank you.
If you got it right I wouldn't be flaming you. The ripoff site was always pocketsnes.net. The original forum thread about it is still there.
And it's PocketHEAVEN. not haven.
And the site was on snes.pocketheaven.com. Still works btw.
Any more bullshit you wanna spout?
I hate to be pessimistic, but full speed SNES with sound support probably won't happen on the GBA anytime soon, even with overclocking. My PDA, which has a 400MHz Intel Xscale processor overclocked to 472MHz can only run maybe 5 or 6 SNES games with low quality sound at full speed, everything else skips. Without sound, almost every game will play full speed.
If an almost 500MHz ARM processor can't do it, I highly doubt that a 16MHz ARM or whatever powers the GBA can do it either; even overclocked. I know the GBA is a non-moving target in reguards to software development, and developers can highly optimize thier software for it as well, but so is the Dreamcast; and they (the Dreamcast emulation community) still don't have full SNES emulation with sound.
Hopefully these guys will prove me wrong and succeed, I really wouldn't mind playing some of my favorites that haven't been ported yet.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
Hey, it's still on the front page. Give it another hour or two.
forgive me for mispelling the sacred pocketheaven name :P
As for pocketnes.net. Oops, I goofed. You're right. I remembered wrong.
As I said, I was just trying to be helpful. Much like the original poster actuall.
Actually, it's 60 Hz and 240 volts.
You just normally split off one side for 120 volts.
Try again.
poor me, up to now i was convinced that emulation is for porting software to a BETTER hardware platform ... why, why, why would anyone want to emulate a better platform(SNES) on a worst one(GBA) !? ... could it be that this is sponsored by Nokia?
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don't know how the parent got to +3 but it links to a goatse.cx-type site.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Why the hell would anyone want to emulate SNES on a Gameboy?
Except half of the titles you mentioned are already playable on the GBA. Super Mario World and Final Fight are ported to GBA. The PSOne has a car kit; Final Fantasy VI is ported to PSOne. Earthbound has a prequel for NES (called Mother) that was translated to English but never published on cart (the existing dump comes from a leaked proto); the GBA already emulates the NES.
Will it run Linux?
But video games? These are stricly entertainment.
That seems to imply that you do not consider video games artistic. Could you please back up that view?
So why the hell would anyone want to overclock their gameboy...?
We emulate old games because they can be run better on newer systems, or they are no longer available to buy. The problem that I'm having with this is that most of the best SNES games have already been ported over to GBA, and can be bought in many stores. There are a few noteable exceptions, but I honestly don't see much reason to go out of your way to run SNES stuff other than the sheer geek factor. But there are some things that just shouldn't be done.
But it's also important to remember that by making your GBA SNES compatible, you are breaking GBA compatibility. GBA games are coded for very specific specs. If a developer has timed something to the GBA's CPU, you are going to have some rather serious timing issues. The display is usually timed to the vblank, and I would need to check on the DMA controller, but sound samples might be played at too fast of a rate. Sound on a GBA is done by feeding the DMA controller the data, and the address of the sound FIFO, and the rate at which the samples are to be played. I am unsure if the timers in this case would be running too fast. I am leaning toward YES.
you suck!
I have the gameboy advance player for Gamecube, and I wonder if this would work on that? It has more than enough buttons, and it shouldn't need overclocking.
It works find on gb player. But there is no known way to use the extra buttons. Feel free to reverse engineer it to find a way.
n/t
link is a goatse thing
meh
When are the slashdot editors going to replace the Gameboy picture up there in the article with a GBA or GBA SP picture? The Gameboy was a child's toy and was never really fun when I owned one back a few years ago. Even the GBA has only really been worth owning since it came with a blacklight.
Um......
WHy not just throw out the sound emulation altogether. WHen I play most of my GBA games I turn off the sound. Mainly since I'm on the bus or train and I don't want to disturb other people. A lot of other GBA players do that too.
I mean, I suppose this thing could also help some games to cope with slowdowns and over the top particle effects like in Golden Sun. Unless the graphics chip is the limitation.
Anyone checked that out?
Equally bad would be GBA's inferior resolution. SNES minimum resolution is 256x224. GBA resolution is 240x160.
Also, GBA's audio DAC is a POS compared to a real SNES.
A much better idea would be to strap an ARM CPU to an SNES cartridge and emulate GBA on a real SNES instead.
If we're including start and select then the SNES had 8.
Layout is the issue though. Try playing Street Fighter 2 on SNES Advance with (for example) heavy punch and heavy kick mapped to Start and Select. You'd never reach them in the middle of a game. They're fine for things like Zelda and Secret of Mana, but most games.. no way.
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That sounds like a really slow emulator. It's probably an interpreting one, which means you can expect it to be something like a 100-1000 times slower than the emulated system clock-for-clock. A good example is Bochs, which is pretty damn slow, but the interpreted approach allows it to run on many systems with little porting.
What you really need for a fast emulator is dynamic translation - rewrite snippets of emulated instructions into native ones, and run that instead. You can get close to a 1:1 ratio of native:emulated clocks, which means in your case you'd have a 472MHz XScale emulating as if it were a 472MHZ SNES.
There's plenty of examples of dynamic translators about. Transmeta's processors all run a dynamic translator from x86 to some freaky native instruction set (they call it "code morphing"). Java's JIT (just-in-time) is an example of a very similar thing - it translates byte code to native instructions on the fly, but doesn't have to worry about maintaining the virtual system's state, because Java doesn't have the concept of one.
So yes, it should be possible.
Overclocking the CPU is one thing. Finding a way to create the missing X Y buttons is another. I anticipate gameplay issues.
Just assign the L and R as modifiers, so that A by itself is light punch, L+A=Medium punch, R+A= Hard punch.
Is it going to play the same? No. Is it still playable? Yes.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Still...what about games where you need quick access to all of the buttons? Fighters, Street Fighter II being the big one, would be nigh impossible to play, as would any games that require the use of multiple buttons in quick succession.
I still think that SNES emulation on the GBA is a lost cause...Wait until the next system, possibly the DS, and get it right then. Don't bother when you don't have enough buttons OR horsepower.
Goo goo g'joob.
I still play Super Mario Kart battle mode for the SNES, on a regular basis, with my friends. The games are short, action packed, full of strategy, and lots of fun. So you can squeeze in a few games every now and then with your friends. Super Mario Kart is over 10 years old!
Another perfect example is Chess. It is hundreds of years old, and people still play it today as they find it entertaining to do so. Board games can be seen as the precessor to video games. They are visual games that require manual human intervention to enforce the rules and update the board layout.
In fact, it could be argued that some games get better with time. When Chess was first invented, everyone was equivalent to how you and your friends were when you first tried to play it: they all sucked. Games were won basically by luck in the begining. As time went on, what people knew about Chess and how to play it improved. So the games of Chess that were played when it was first made are not nearly as good as some of the games played hundreds of years later.
I notice the same thing with many of the video games that I play for more than a year: Tetris, Quake, Super Mario Kart, etc... my enjoyment of them has increased over the years because my knowledge of the games has improved.
For multiplayer videos games, my skills as well as the skills of my opponents have improved. Hence our matches are more entertaining than the early years, when matches were won mostly by luck of a player stumbling onto on aspect of the game that had yet to be discovered.
You could use button combos for start and select, and use start and select as the missing two.
Granted, the layout is gonna suck for action games that use all those buttons, but RPGs will be just fine. What about screen resolution?
if the demand is there for the game, why not port the game?
Not all publishers are still in business. Even among titles published by companies that are still in business, not all have a wide enough demand base to make a port profitable. Five thousand signatures on a petition is not enough demand in the gaming industry; you'd probably need at least a hundred thousand pre-orders.
Another perfect example is Chess. It is hundreds of years old
But imagine what would have happened had Sonny Bono been around when it was invented.
I notice the same thing with many of the video games that I play for more than a year: Tetris, Quake, Super Mario Kart, etc
Super Mario Kart has been ported; once you've beaten a Grand Prix cup twice in Mario Kart Super Circuit, you unlock four SMK tracks.
For many other titles, only copyright issues prevent a port. However, abstract games such as Tetris aren't as susceptible to copyright-based monopoly enforcement; there exists at least one Free tetramino game for the GBA.
Overclocking gaming systems is not new. I overclocked my Atari Lynx back in the day.(24MHz from 16MHz)
The reason I did it was to play games in turbo speed. STUN Runner played great at 1.5 times speed. A 1.2 to 1.4 increase would be great for most GBA games. Underclocking could also be useful for poor gamers. I know a lot of gamers who would like a speed switch on their system.
SNES pad = 8 buttons
GBA = 6 buttons
Yep, 2 more buttons.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
GP32 is hardly dead.
But where can an ordinary online-shopping-phobic family buy a GP32 for the kids? What toy store in, say, the State of Indiana carries the system?
It sounds interesting, but I'll wait until I can hook up the modified blaster and play Duck Hunt.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
You need a proprietary set of earphones on the GBA SP
With a cheap adapter, which is also sold by third parties, the GBA SP works with any pair of lightweight headphones with a common 1/8" diameter miniplug. If you're ordering anything from, say, Lik Sang, you can add a headphone adapter to your order for just $2.99.
there's no reason you should have to give nintendo more money for the same game.
Other than that you or your parents continue to vote for senators who refuse to scale back copyright?
What on earth are you doing on Slashdot?
I shop online. I have friends who either refuse to or have parents who refuse to. And in order for a game system to gain a profitable foothold in a given territory, it needs to gain a profitable foothold among those who shop only in Wal-Mart, EB Games, GameStop, and other brick-and-mortar outlets. The point is that people who do not read Slashdot can spell the difference between profit and loss, the difference between a commercially thriving system and a commercially dying system, and the difference between continued production of the system and its EOLing.
Or do people spend WAY too much time trying to emulate the older consoles on the newer consoles?
>Some ppl browse Slashdot while at work
Ask yourself: IS THIS GOOD FOR THE COMPANY?
P.s., you're fired -- the boss.
"That is nasty, but if you're using a real browser, it is not as bad (i.e., only opens one page) as using a cum-guzzle browser (you get anally screwed)."
Actually if you use the Google pop-up blocker, you're fine.
"Ask yourself: IS THIS GOOD FOR THE COMPANY?"
Yes. My coworkers are software engineers, and they browse Slashdot frequently. The boss likes it as it keeps them up on what's happening in the IT world. I can also say that some interesting improvements were made as a result of browsing Slashdot. Even received warnings about big Windows viruses in time to prevent them.
"P.s., you're fired -- the boss."
Uh huh. Because I'd so have a future there if I wasn't knowledgable and up-to-date.
"Derp de derp."
A shift key is not a solution. You will end up having to press a key and a shifted key at the same time and it's not going to be possible unless you're constantly juggling controller configuration, which does not sound like fun.
GP32 anyone?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Long live the Zodiac.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Or perhaps you could carry around a SNES and hook it up to the GBA via the video input adapter. X-D
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I don't know why I'm getting modded down. I guess it came out wrong. Maybe I should explain.
I see all these projects to put emulators of old consoles on the PS2, the X-box, the GC, the GBA, whatever. It just strikes me as odd that people always try to do this with every single console that gets released. I just don't understand: Why not take the time with each console to appreciate the lineup that it offers, rather than trying to bring an old lineup onto the new hardware? Why spend the hours trying to make your old games playable on the new hardware? Why not take the time to appreciate the new games that are offered by these consoles?
To me, spending the time to develop emulators for old systems on new hardware just seems like a waste of time, a waste of resources, and a negligence of the games which are offered in the present. But that's just me. I guess there are a lot of people who no longer have any access to older libraries, so they try to make them accessible on newer hardware. But wouldn't it be easier to just download an emulator on the PC,then?
My flash cart has two buttons. They're supposed to be for "infinite reloads" or something of equally dubious value. If they're not too fixed in function, they could easily be the two spare buttons a SNES emulator needs.
And all this time I thought the mile high club was something tototally different!
anybody else have the urge to run this snes emulator through a gba emulator through an xbox emulator or something? something about emulating emulators just feeds some primal nerd instinct or something.
Does this mean I can brag that I beat Tetris at level 52 or do I have to say I beat tetris at oc26?
Actually I think this means I will lose at tetris twice as fast.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
Here's my question...
Does it play pong?
DeMe
Of course, I have been playing this game for over 10 years, so I wouldn't doubt that there are things that stick out like a sore thumb to me, which other gamers can't see.
In my experience playing the Mario Kart games, I found some design oversights in the games. Some are listed on this page. The most important bug is that Nintendo has been too lazy in all three versions reviewed on that page to add bots in battle mode.
sorry, no text for you here.
Cool thanks, didn't know it was a rip off site. Won't go there again!
E.
Never rub another man's rhubarb - The Joker
Why not develop specs for a two-button attachment that connects to the GBA via the link port?
The author of the SNES emulator can code in support for the hardware and make the circuit specs available for any willing nerd to build and figure out how to stick it onto his GBA (duct tape, clips, super glue, magic). Maybe a small third party manufacturer could even step forward and produce them all professional and shiny-like.