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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."
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
Lik-Sang sells carts and cart writers, but I've always used Jandaman's reliable service.
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)..
They do rerelease snes games on the gba. Mario Kart, Yoshi's Island, and many, many more. It's just that they are ports, as there is not enough horsepower to run it through emulation.
with one of these.
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
Burn them to a ROM. Check out the Advance Linker or any other linker at Bayside. (No, I'm not an owner or even a customer, but they're one of the few places that seem to reliably offer information. Most other sites get shut down for one reason or another; generally, they're offering ROMs when they shouldn't, or products which skirt the line of the law as well as those which don't.) There's also a huge number of public domain cartridges available including a remake of my favorite, Barbarian. (Heh, cut the guy's head off and a little laughing demon comes out and drags it away.)
Combine that with a ROM dumped from the S/NES and multiboot / emulator autorun and you're set. Basically at boot the ROM prompts you what game you want to play. You choose by cycling through a menu, hit A, whammo.
Playing S/NES games on the go.
Pretty fun too. That's what scares me. These games from the S/NES, PCE, Genesis era are a whole lot more fun to me than most PS2 games.
(S/NES represents Super Nintendo and Nintendo Entertainment System. Most everything above applies to both.)
My reality check bounced.
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
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70 hz?
60 hz comes out of every wall socket I've ever seen here in Nashville..
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.
if you RTFA, you see apparently battery time is hardly affected, because the CPU is not the major battery drain. i would guess something else like the screen is.. and probably the flash cart if you have one. IIRC the GBA has an ARM7, I don't have the specs to hand. but they (the OCers) say there is very little heat build up and no need for cooling, and since heat=power everything tallies. this is very different from PC overclocking huh :)
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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.
The Zodiac has had a working SNES emulator for weeks now. No overclocking required. Runs pretty damn good too.
2) The overclocking can be turned on and off at will, even while running games. ;b You would have known that if you had read the article.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
joke stolen from a Will & Grace episode from over a year ago:
The last time I went on a date... Bush was president and we were about to go to war with Iraq!
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.