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Beginners > Hello....Newbie here, looking for some possible answers.

#21159 - Aceldamor - Tue May 25, 2004 2:36 am

Hello,

This question has been tossed around before by another member, but I was curious to know how difficult the following situation is.

I am an avid MAME fanatic and was using a standard 8x24 LCD screen connected via a com port to tell me what buttons had what function based on the game selected...another member of the BYOAC message forums proved it could be done with a Gameboy Advance LCD screen...See this thread for details...well the gentleman in question came to the boards to announce that he had accomplished this feat and even showed pics of it in action, and animated screenies of what he is displaying. When asked how he accomplished this his response was:

1. You edit a MAME picture then add your button assignments.

2. Create a GBA ROM of the picture

3. Connect your GBA to your computer

4. Link that ROM picture to the MAME ROM you are launching with a little programming.

It's a vanilla answer, so he was asked for more specific details (via PM, forum, and e-mail) such as: what did you use to connect the GBA to the PC? What did you use to code the "GBA ROM"? unfortunatly he never did respond to any attempt to contact him...which is a bummer, there were a few folks out there looking to do the same...

Well, I've decided that I might give this project a go and essentially what I was wanting to know is:

How hard would it be to replicate this project? I really want to give this a go, but don't know how complicated it would be. Any informational help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Aceldamor

#21163 - Miked0801 - Tue May 25, 2004 5:13 am

In theory, it is possible to connect to the GBA with the UART, but there's no real documentation on how to do this (official or otherwise) so I say good luck.

#21175 - keldon - Tue May 25, 2004 12:11 pm

you can connect your serial ports together by creating your own leads. However you NEED documentation on both PC leads (easy to get) and the Gameboy Link Cable so that you know which wires to connect.

The rest IMO is almost childs play.

Your GBA rom sits and waits for input from the serial port, the PC program transfers the graphics, the the GBA copies that to VRAM. Tada it's done.

Oh, and I also found this http://www.devrs.com/gba/files/mbv2faqs.php#Describe

So I guess all you have to do now is get programming.