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Hardware > Is it possible to create special cartridges as seen on Snes?

#14105 - TheGuardian - Tue Dec 30, 2003 1:35 am

Hello,

I'm new here, so I hope I got this in the right forum. So, well I'm interested in the GBA from technical (Programmers) and a players point of view and I was wondering if there is any possibility to create "special" cartriges for this amazing piece of retro gaming. :) As most of you will recall the Super FX or the Super FX 2 chip. Long story short : Is that possible for the GBA too, is it "upgradeable" in this way, enhancing its longlivety? That would be awesome...

/me drools just imagining what would be possible then and if those would be relased as flashable cartridges too. :D

PS : Sorry for my bad english, but I think you'll get what I want to know... ;)

#14107 - tepples - Tue Dec 30, 2003 1:59 am

Short answer: e-reader.

Yes, it's possible for a cart to map hardware such as a graphics accelerator into the address space. Yes, it'll drain the battery more. Yes, it'll probably make the cart physically bigger; there just isn't as much room inside a standard-size GBA cart as there was inside Super NES carts. No, the Super FX 2 processor wasn't significantly faster than the GBA's ARM7TDMI; compare Id Software's Doom on both platforms.
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#14363 - ampz - Mon Jan 05, 2004 9:10 pm

I have had the idea before, for example a 66MHz ARM7tdmi could be added to provide extra computing power. It could even be done without increasing the cart size, but I don't see a market for such a flashcart.

#14367 - poslundc - Mon Jan 05, 2004 9:33 pm

What would you honestly do with a 66 MHz coprocessor anyway? 3D is the only thing that I can think of. Maybe you could use it for better sound (do the sound processing on the GBA and do the game processing on the cartridge).

Just go get a zodiac or something. :P

Dan.

#14423 - ampz - Tue Jan 06, 2004 10:26 am

poslundc wrote:
What would you honestly do with a 66 MHz coprocessor anyway?


Exactly.

#14427 - TheGuardian - Tue Jan 06, 2004 2:41 pm

Imho the Zodiac is a bit fugly. The games are 3d but now what they dont have the playability. And this thing only runs for 4hours. I think I'll stick with my GBA SP. :)

#14534 - haduken - Thu Jan 08, 2004 2:00 am

poslundc wrote:
3D is the only thing that I can think of. Dan.


Exactly
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