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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."
Of course, by the time you add liquid cooling, Lexan case sides, LAN carrying straps, enhanced power supply etc, it's going to be somewhat larger that Super Nintendo ;)
- To err is human; but to really screw up, you need a computer
...a lack of buttons. A SNES pad has two more of them than a GBA.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Wouldn't the biggest problem be the shorted battery life?
1990: The SNES was out, Bush was president, the US was at war with Iraq and the economy sucked
2004: The SNES emulator is out, Bush is president, the US is at war with Iraq and the economy sucks
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.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
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
What I've always wanted...
An overclocked gaming machine that will be so fast and so hot that in the winter I can use it as a portable heater...
Great, I can't wait to play Mortal Kombat with oven-mits.
...would have to be "Why the hell would anyone want to eumlate the SNES on a GBA?"
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
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?
You overclock your latest expensive gadget to emulate an outdated, less expensive gadget just for the hell of saying you overclocked it.
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
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)..
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...
I am Jack's witty signature line
You guys are chumps, overclocking everything independantly. I just skipped the middleman and overclocked my house.
Normal AC power is at around 120 volts and 70hz here in the USA, so I put in a frequency multiplier and upped it to 105hz and 160 volts AC. Now, all my lights are brighter, TV is faster to react in the menu, and I've pre-emptively overclocked all my appliances!
You've never seen microwave popcorn get done in a minute? Come on by! Sure, there are occasional fires, but nothing a little fire extinguisher and some aggressive product warranties won't fix.
There are downsides... all my clocks run fast... and my VCR keeps spitting out tape... and sure, my refrigerator has turned into a freezer, but I have to say that despite some of those challenges, it's still worth it.
Oops! Gotta run, my wireless access point seems to have killed the plant it's sitting next to. Maybe I should measure the rf...
Last year I spent quite a bit of time flying the route from SF to ATL. During one of these trips I reached what can only be one of the highest pinnacles of human evolution.
There we were at 35,000 feet cruising over the vast country of America. There I was in the toilet taking a rather righteous dump all the while playing Phantasy Star II, a game from my childhood, with the GBA.
There's nothing like soaring through the sky, shitting and reliving moments of your childhood all at once.
--- I do not moderate.
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
I found the liquid nitrogen really made me cold when stored in my shirt pocket. And I don't even want to say what happened when I stored one in my pants pocket. You haven't seen shrinkage like liquid nitrogen shrinkage!
How about they get the emulator past v0.1 before I start mucking with my hardware.
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.
I'm working on underclocking my ..err.. clock, so I can get more time into a day.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
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...
The Zodiac has had a working SNES emulator for weeks now. No overclocking required. Runs pretty damn good too.
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.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
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.
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!
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.
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.