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."

Comments

Battery life

[taybin]

Wouldn't the biggest problem be the shorted battery life?

Its only a little scarry

[doublebackslash]

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.

Re:Its only a little scarry

[drinkypoo]

the (some) games run at full speed without sound. The GBA is a 32 bit 16MHz RISC core, the SNES is two 16 bit processors, one of which tops out around 3.5MHz and the other of which (the graphics chip) I dunno about, plus a slow little 8 bit sound chip. However, using a RISC processor to emulate three CISC chips is not going to be easy.

"The W65816 (also: 65C816), a 16-bit microprocessor developed by the Western Design Center (WDC), is an expanded and compatible successor to the venerable 6502. The 65816 has two 16-bit index registers, a stack pointer, a 16-bit direct page register, and a 24-bit address bus." (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/WDC-65C8 16)

That's four registers right there. The sound processor probably has more (but certainly has smaller) registers. The video processor, I have no idea about. Nonetheless the speeds of your processors put together are more than half the speed of your CPU, the total number of registers in the system probably exceeds the number of registers in the GBA CPU, the assorted CPUs run at different speeds so for perfect emulation you are going to have to play some neat little tricks that become more and more irrelevant as you get more processing power, but which are very significant at the levels we're talking about.

In short, there's not much CPU in there to emulate a SNES at full speed. Hell, the snes emulator on the dreamcast has trouble with some of the more complicated snes games for some reason :)

Disk Space?

[Steamhead]

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 :( .

more mods

[sleepypants]

I like the idea, especially if the mod is internal somehow. With video, audio, and TV players for the GBA available, maybe the higher horsepower will improve the resolution/quality if players are also modified to take advantage of the speed increase.

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...

Re:Timeline

[DR SoB]

I hear next year they will be overclocked the chip in my cell phone so I can emulate pac-man on it, concidentally, pac-man era = good economy, does this mean we should be seeing the NYSE sky-rocketing soon? :P

Re:For a 0.1 version emulator?

[Lewis Daggart]

This 0.1 emulator can actually handle quite a few games*perfectly* with speed hacks (only lacking in sound emulation. It may be an alpha, but its the most compatable 0.1 release I've seen. Also, the super DAT file on the site is updated multiple times a day, meaning that even without a new release, more games are becoming compatable on a dalie basis.

Besides, the overclocking has nothing to do with the software itself anyway. It's a hardware process. So, if its certain that it wont harm your machine, why wait until this specific piece of software works better? I'm sure theres plenty of other homegrown uses for an overclocked GBA.

Using GBA for a microcontroller

[Jtheletter]

The Xport is a nifty little device that turns your GBA into a microcontroller, with a bunch of I/Os, 4 Megs of RAM and a fully programmable FPGA. This looks like a good application for overclocking too, in case you need faster computing for something like image processing or mapping from multiple sonars, etc.

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.

Re:Won't Nintendo have a DMCA hissy fit?

[Cpt_Kirks]

According to Nintendo, if you aren't playing *THEIR* cartridges on *THEIR* hardware, it's theft. Period.

They're wrong of course. But tell that to their lawyers...

Re:Is there really a big market for this?

[spidergoat2]

I understand your point, but I don't exactly buy it. We read old books because they important in their style and language, and their impact on books that follow. We listen to older music to understand it and the music that follows. Same with art. But video games? These are stricly entertainment. Aren't these supposed to waste time in a more eye-catching and faster manner? That said, I should confess to playing PC games that are several years old, and not being impressed but most new ones, but SNES never did much for me.

Probably Won't Happen

[OutRigged]

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.

Half of the titles you mentioned

[tepples]

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.

Re:I would think an even bigger problem would be..

[I_Love_Pocky!]

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.

Re:the legend of Art?

[Fancia]

You seem to have lost your point sometime along the way. The GBA is new technology, not old technology. Why *not* use it if you can enjoy the old games easily without investing in old technology?

Furthermore, games don't just *have* to be simple diversions. Gaming *is* an art form and it's slowly maturing. Recall that video games are perhaps only 30 years old; they're speeding to maturity much faster than other artforms. Already, there are a few games that not only entertain and divert but also are undoubtedly works of art; Terranigma on the SNES is one of the best examples. Its story is amazingly deep; I'm continually discovering new things under its surface.

Re:Won't Nintendo have a DMCA hissy fit?

[I_Love_Pocky!]

hey don't make squat on the GBA

I wasn't aware they were taking a loss on the system, but I still don't think that this would cause them to LOSE money. It would encourage GBA purchases, and once some one has a GBA they are a lot more likely to buy GBA games than when they didn't have a GBA.

I originally bought my GBA to play games that were ported from the SNES, but I really like some of the games that were developed for the GBA directly. They are pretty cool, and I wouldn't have even tried them if it weren't for the SNES games that drew me to the GBA in the first place.

Re:I would think an even bigger problem would be..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Street Fighter would actually be pretty easy

[Syncdata]

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.

Re:Street Fighter would actually be pretty easy

[darkain]

what about games that require multiple buttons at once then? like in super metroid... L and R are for look, and then you have your run, jump, shoot, and what was the last button? wasnt that moon walking? wich is also useful. and start/select are also needed to go to menu, and switch switch weapons. *SOME* games will work, but not ALL. it really made me sad to find out the GBA was lacking two buttons when they made it tho... i'm hoping the DS has a more SNES style configuration.