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.

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: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...

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.

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.