Slashdot Mirror
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."
By the way, fuck you for assuming what you couldn't possibly know. Little smart ass priss.
I believe the main reason that your P166 with MMX can run SNES games full speed while my 400MHz PDA can't is because the lack of a floating point unit. As far as I know, the GBA doesn't have one either.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
If I had some mod points I would mod the above post as Insightful rather than some idiot who modded it as Funny. (Htf is that funny?) But instead of I'm replying to it.
Now, to actually explain the Hertz Myth for those mod idiots who don't know insightful rather than funny when they see it. I repeat, this isn't for the most common people here who actually know what this is.
Most consumers in the past bought computers based solely on the (mega && giga)hertz of a system. This was mostly because of the sales reps who advertised. And of course, because we humans tend to think, the higher number the better?
As most of us (should) know, the overall speed of a CPU is not the only determining factor in computer speed. Memory size and speed, motherboard capabilities, FSB speed, video card memory size/speed and gpu speed, and hard drive capacity/bandwidth/speed. Generally speaking, a computer is only as fast as its slowest component.
For example, I recently upgraded my memory and hard drive. The memory didn't need upgrading that much, but my hard drive was a Maxtor 40gb 5400 RPM ATA 66. The real problem with the hard drive is it was faulty; instead of the BIOS seeing it as ATA 66 it sees it as ATA 44, which of course, we all know there is no such standard (No, it wasn't the motherboard causing the problem; I had tried it in several other motherboards). Upgrading my memory and especially my hard drive made a huge difference in performance.