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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.
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
Great, I can't wait to play Mortal Kombat with oven-mits.
You overclock your latest expensive gadget to emulate an outdated, less expensive gadget just for the hell of saying you overclocked it.
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)..
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.
You are mistakenly taking technology for better games. I know a lot of games who need a PC in the order of 1000$ to play nicely and still they aren't remotely as fun as pac-man. Better graphics Better games.
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. --
The problem with your thinking here is that you seem to regard the SNES as being made in the infancy of video games, and that is hardly true. The SNES (and the Sega Genesis) was the system that turned the corner for the gaming industry. It was the SNES that helped convince Sony that real money and real entertainment could be had through video games again (since the crash in the early 80's many still regarded the industry as very risky). I love my modern technology and games, but many SNES games continue to shine a decade after their release. It's like books, no one says "Why read classic books, how many times can we sit and read 'A Tale of Two Cities' now? Isn't the progression to new literary techniques so that we can read new stories, not reheat old ones" Not trying to mock, just making a point.
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.