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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?
...a lack of buttons. A SNES pad has two more of them than a GBA.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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?
That, or the massive game library.
Sweet merciful crap, I know nobody reads the damn article, but why the hell not even the front page synopsis?
... user 'ahead games' says on Thu Mar 25, 2004 7:33 pm (approximately a quarter of the way down page 2 right now)
"They've been able to run it at up to 2x the regular operating speed without any major heat or battery life problems."
As for a followup in the forum
"I haven't directly measured battery life yet, but I've left a GBA running Accelerated overnight and I don't see it having a huge impact on battery life. There is very little extra heat generated (if any at all), so a heatsink won't be neccessary."
And before anyone replies with "Jeez, it was a joke, must've gone over your head" stuff, I already realize that.
How about they get the emulator past v0.1 before I start mucking with my hardware.
But in this case it is their hardware (just not the original platform), and if you can prove you own the original cartridge I don't see what the problem could be.
It seems like it could encourage GBA purchases.
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?
use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy
Well the GBA has some advantages your PDA doesn't, that being the built in graphics and sound processors. PDAs are very much like old PCs in design. Everything is done by the CPU. The graphics and sound output are generally real simple subsystems. Well the GBA has quite powerful graphics and sound processors, hence how it manages to have all those cool games with a slow processor.
Well, if an emulator can be made to successfully take advantage of those subsystems, it can accomplish a whole lot with the slow CPU. Now can that actually happen? I don't know, I'm not sure if there is an efficient way to use these processors, but it is possible.
I don't see this working very well honestly...
What about times when you need to run (b button), look up(L button), and fire your weapon (X button), for example?
There are many times when multiple buttons are pressed at the same time.
no comment
And, at any rate, SNESAdvance can already run some games at full speed without speedhacking; with overclocking and possible speedhacking, I'm certain you could get them to run with sound at full speed.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
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.
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.
Or do people spend WAY too much time trying to emulate the older consoles on the newer consoles?