Curious..

[Ratamahatta]

Is this thing trustworthy (from those of you that have used one), I mean does it hold the game information well? and if I were to use a 256 meg cart, with multiple images on the cart is the cart menu driven? The reason I ask, instead of selling my gba, i might as well program for the thing, gotta have a good port of death duel and technocop. Also how hard would it be to reprogram say a genesis game to the GBA? Is there any GBA Game creation / programming software out there on the net? Any help on this issue would be greatly appreciated.

 

[ExCyber]

Is this thing trustworthy (from those of you that have used one), I mean does it hold the game information well?

I've had approximately zero problems with mine, not counting stupid mistakes on my part (not having it turned on, etc. )

and if I were to use a 256 meg cart, with multiple images on the cart is the cart menu driven?

Yes.

Also how hard would it be to reprogram say a genesis game to the GBA?

Both systems are quite well-documented, so this comes down to two questions:

1) How good are you at reverse engineering object code?

2) How reasonable/insane is the code to the game you want to port?

There's also the issue of sound - GBA doesn't have a sound generator comparable to the YM2610, so you'd have to find some other way to implement that. I'm not sure how much of a correspondence the GBC sound hardware has with the SN76489 PSG.

Is there any GBA Game creation / programming software out there on the net?

Yes. It seems most people are using a standard ARM-targeted GCC/binutils toolchain, but there are also assemblers that are written specifically for GBA stuff. More info about GBA development in general can be found at Gameboy Advance Devrs and GBADev.

Hope this helps.

 

[Ratamahatta]

Actually it helps quite a bit, you answered all my questions as always Ex, thanks a ton man!

Oh, BTW, the game I wanted to port over the most was Technocop. Classic Razorsoft game.

 

[Ratamahatta]

Actually, 1 last question, if I were to put roms on the cart, (I dont plan on lugging around all my legit games, how many of those could I put on the cart?

 

[ExCyber]

I've not tried the menu with commercial games, but with demos it seemed that size was pretty much the only limiting factor. I'd assume that there's a limit somewhere though, probably 256.

 

[Ratamahatta]

Ok, well thanks a lot for all your help Ex, I'll probably pick one up.

 

[megametalgreymon]

if your looking at 8Mbyte games, then 4 will fit on the cart

i have the 128mbit cart, and can fit 2 8mbyte sized games onto it

the menu/multirom system is also better than the ngpc one, since you dont have the waiting time like the ngpc one does (if you switch to the other game it takes ~2-3 minutes to presumably rearrange the carts info before you can play it, the gba you just select your game and play)

 

[Myname]

This may be a lie or a dream I had, but I'm sure I remember seeing that GBA games can theoretically be as big as 128mbits, so in time the smaller flash carts could be next to useless. I'm debating buying one myself, think I'll have to make it the 256mbit one.

 

[ExCyber]

There is no theoretical limit, at least not one that doesn't have to do with the theoretical limits of memory manufacturing. The GBA cart address space is 32MB (256Mb), but there's no technical reason that a mapper couldn't be added to the carts to address more memory than that.

 

[Myname]

Cool.. I wonder when we'll see games that big on the GBA. Speaking of GBA, has anyone seen the games using that 3d engine? Can't remember who came up with it but there's some screenshots flying about. It doesn't look too far from PS1 graphics, though we've yet to see them moving I guess.. Promising though