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Hardware > Smart Media to GBA adapter

#4841 - joemmac - Fri Apr 11, 2003 8:06 pm

I'm interested in designing an adapter to connect a Smart Media card to the GBA cartridge bus. Has anyone worked on anything similar to this? Any ideas? Or does anyone know of potential problems I should think about?

#4843 - tepples - Sat Apr 12, 2003 3:21 am

joemmac wrote:
I'm interested in designing an adapter to connect a Smart Media card to the GBA cartridge bus.

In order to connect flash to the GBA cartridge bus transparently, it needs to be able to seek to an arbitrary address in under 100ns and transfer data at least 16 MB/s. I'm not entirely sure SM is capable of this. On the other hand, you could provide a more traditional SM interface and then have a small (e.g. 32 KB) bootable kernel that handles loading binaries (probably multiboot programs) from the flash card.
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#4906 - LEXsk8 - Mon Apr 14, 2003 6:20 pm

sorry i have forgot where i have found this picture !

[Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it][Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
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Sorry for my mistake but I'm not english !

#4908 - pollier - Mon Apr 14, 2003 6:38 pm

Interesting, but is there a version that works with the GBA?
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#4910 - FluBBa - Mon Apr 14, 2003 7:51 pm

Isn't that called "Smart Wallet"?
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I probably suck, my not is a programmer.

#4963 - treps - Tue Apr 15, 2003 10:15 pm

FluBBa wrote:
Isn't that called "Smart Wallet"?


Yes it is, the game wallet does the following :
- loads a .mb prog called b@@t_gb@.mb
- this little prog is then able to read the content of the smart media card and to copy anything on the smart media card to a flash card.

Note that any prog on the smart media called b@@t_gb@.mb is read at the launch of the gba in "slave" mode when the wallet is connected.

I actually use it to test .mb files on the hardware without flashing any rom.

The original b@@t_gb@.mb has to be reverse engineered to be able to understand how it does access to the smart media card(SMC). This program doesnt allows writing to the SMC but I don't know if it is an hardware or software restriction.

Bruno

#4980 - LEXsk8 - Wed Apr 16, 2003 1:17 pm

look this page :

http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=6&products_id=2592

look the other pictures :

http://www.lik-sang.com/image.php?category=6&products_id=2592&img=gba_am3

it's what you search ! no ?
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Sorry for my mistake but I'm not english !

#5198 - joemmac - Tue Apr 22, 2003 11:47 pm

First, I realize that SmartMedia cards have too long read and write times to be accessed directly by the GBA cartridge bus, I intend to have a 16 or 32mb ram as a buffer. Some microcontroller or state machine would copy the rom file(s) on the SmartMedia card onto this buffer, and then the GBA could access the buffer as if it were an origional rom.

Secondly, it would be different from the GameWallet and the am3 SmartMedia Player. Unlike the GameWallet, it would be self-sufficitent. No flash cart would be required. And the am3 only supports certain media types. Regular GBA roms are not one of these types as far as I can tell.

So one problem I've run into is that I need to write some program to make the GBA wait a few seconds until the buffer has been filled, and then execute the image on the buffer. It might even include some sort of menu for selecting which rom image to copy from the SmartMedia card to the ram buffer. The problem is that I have very little programming experience. Is there anyone out there who would be interested in writing such a program?