#18977 - crashwg - Fri Apr 09, 2004 2:36 am
First off... Hi, this is my first post here, and no offense to anyone but I'm not really looking to get too much into some of the things you do here. I am more so looking to see if something is being worked on by anybody and someone dirrected me here to look into it.
So anyways. My question is this: is it posible/will it be posible any time soon, to attach a gba permanantly or not to a computer and have it display text/images easily through batch files?
For example, I'm currently in the process of building an arcade machine which will be mainly running MAME. What I would like to do is have the lcd of the GBA display what controls are needed for what games. One of the main concerns of mine is speed/proccessor usage. When I start a game, I want the GBA LCD to display the information as quickly as posible and withought slowing down my pc more than a second or so.
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#18978 - niltsair - Fri Apr 09, 2004 2:55 am
It is possible.
Wouldn't be too hard for someone with experience with the serial communications of the GBA to do, but to my knowledge, there is no such thing at this point.
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#18983 - tepples - Fri Apr 09, 2004 4:16 am
You can set up a display-server on the GBA and then have PC based clients send drawing commands to it. Talking serial from a PC's COM port to a GBA in UART mode is rather easy (just need some voltage conversion), but you can't multiboot over UART. However, if you get an MBV2 cable from Lik-Sang.com, you get a multiboot cable and a UART cable in one package.
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#18999 - crashwg - Fri Apr 09, 2004 7:07 pm
Could you please elaborate in laymans terms tepples? I don't know a whole lot about GBAs and all the things available for them.
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#19000 - niltsair - Fri Apr 09, 2004 7:37 pm
You can buy a 20$ cable to hook the parallel port of your computer to the Gba.
You need to create a small Gba program that will be able to communicate with your computer.
-Once your program start, it upload that program to the gba.
-The you can freely communicate between Pc<->Computer.
-The gba program you create would be able to excute commandes like :
.....Display Text
.....Display Picture
.....Return Keypress
.....Play Sound
.....etc...
You could do quite a lot. The only limitation is that the Gba program must be 256k.
This would require someone to dev this for your, there's no soft that actually do this(that I know of)
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-Inside every large program is a small program struggling to get out. (Hoare's Law of Large Programs)
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#19002 - crashwg - Fri Apr 09, 2004 8:51 pm
Sounds easy enough. My next question though is, is anyone willing to write a program capable of doing this. Obviously I don't have the technical skills to do such a thing.
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#19003 - poslundc - Fri Apr 09, 2004 8:57 pm
| crashwg wrote: |
| Sounds easy enough. My next question though is, is anyone willing to write a program capable of doing this. |
I find these two sentences quite humorous when placed side-by-side like that.
Dan.
#19005 - Miked0801 - Fri Apr 09, 2004 10:05 pm
Sure, how many thousands are you gonna pay me to do it? ;)
Seriously, this is a hobby board where people come to get information and quick (and sometimes not so quick) help about the GBA - not a "get complicated work for free" place. BTW, nothing to do with GBA communications is easy. I'm probably the most experienced person here with the stupid thing's serial communications port and it would take me at least a week of full-time work to do what you are asking. I don't think you are going to get what you want here, sorry.
#19009 - dagamer34 - Fri Apr 09, 2004 10:42 pm
I didn't even think it was possible to send that much data using the comm. port in such a small time, consistently, without getting some lag and tearing when drawing.
Well, good luck!!
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#19013 - yaustar - Sat Apr 10, 2004 12:50 am
If it is just for the controls of the games then it would really just be one screen. so lag shouldn't be that much of a problem. My concern would be, when you load up a ROM, who would write the program to send the info down the cable
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#19015 - tepples - Sat Apr 10, 2004 2:48 am
| tepples wrote: |
| You can set up a display-server on the GBA |
A "display-server" is a program that takes drawing commands from an application and renders graphics on a display device. It may also relay inputs back to the application. X Window System is an example of a display-server.
| Quote: |
| Talking serial from a PC's COM port |
The COM, or communications, ports on the back of most PCs are 9-pin bidirectional serial ports following the RS232 standard. A "UART" is a Universal Asynchronous Receiver and Transmitter that handles translation between parallel signals (such as the PC's 8-bit I/O bus) and serial signals, including baud rate clocking, parity checking, and other related issues.
| Quote: |
| to a GBA in UART mode is rather easy (just need some voltage conversion) |
The GBA's serial chip can be set to act as a UART for a nearly RS232 connection. However, the connector is obviously different, and the voltage levels aren't the same.
| Quote: |
| but you can't multiboot over UART |
"Multiboot" refers to loading up to 255 KB of code from another machine (such as a GameCube, a PC, or another GBA) and executing it on the GBA. The GBA can speak GBA normal, GBA multiplayer, GameCube joybus slave, and RS232. It can receive a program over multiboot through Normal, Multiplayer, or Joybus, but not RS232.
Crashwg: Are you planning on having a flash cartridge in the GBA, or are you planning to use multiboot?
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.
#19100 - crashwg - Sun Apr 11, 2004 6:45 am
I hadn't realized that it would be such a hard thing to accomplish. I certainly don't expect anyone to do this for me, I just thought it might be easy enough and someone would be willing to.
As for how I planned on doing it, I have no idea. I know diddly squat about GBAs and how things work, but I probably would be doing things the cheapest way I could and still accomplishing what I want.
Well, somone suggested to me to use a pda and that it might be a little easier, so I think I'm going to persue that method.
Thanks for everyone's input.
I'll be checking back on this post for a while if anyone has any more insight on this.
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