Topic: Overclock Your GBA?

[Jonnyboy117]

Believe it or not.

According to Slashdot.org's Games section, those clever folks at Ahead Games have figured out a method to overclock the Game Boy Advance.  By tweaking settings on the GBA's processor, they have managed to double the system's speed.

Of course, the real question is why anyone would want or need this extra power.  It seems that it will affect your games somehow; the Ahead Games rep mentions that F-Zero will play faster, and presumably other games will be affected in a similar way.  But the real applications seem to lie in playing homebrew software and emulators.

Ahead Games is currently testing the mod, and they plan to offer it soon as "GBAccelerator".  Like any other hardware mod, it will void your system's warranty and could possibly cause damage to the inner workings.

[S-U-P-E-R]

As I understand, you can do this with LOTS of consoles. But, y'know, there's not really a good reason, I suppose.

[Ian Sane]

You would have to be pretty skilled to want F-Zero to play faster.  

This falls under the "neato but has no real use" category.  Maybe if some shooters with a lot of lag come out it will be useful but other than that there's no real use.

[Rob91883]

  With the extra processing power, maybe the GBA will be capable of illegally emulating NES games.(that would be Naughty)

P.s.
This reminds me of the Xbox mod that has a Pentium 4.

[KnowsNothing]

I was surprised to see that the processor speed doubled, but that doesn't mean that it's particulaly useful......just cool.

[enigma487]

yay.  F-zero...faster...  sounds fun...

[thecubedcanuck]

Does this mean I can hate F-Zero twice as much?

[DrZoidberg]

i saw somewhere where you can overclock Sega Megadrives / Genesis (omgwtf cross country naming shenanigans) for some bizzaro reason.

[KDR_11k]

From what I understood they plan on using this to make a full SNES emulator (apparently they failed to emulate the sound chip so far). At least that's what was written on Slashdot. Homebrew devs might make better use of it, though.

[Epitaph]

They need a way so you just push a button and it changes, but i can totally understand why it would be usefull for emulation. I really love my dreamcast for that sole reason

[mouse_clicker]

Quote
Does this mean I can hate F-Zero twice as much?

No, it just means you can hate it twice as fast.

In any case, this sounds really cool, but, like a lot of other people said, pretty pointless. I think it's great that people are playing around with their consoles, though.

[S-U-P-E-R]

Quote
Originally posted by: DrZoidberg
i saw somewhere where you can overclock Sega Megadrives / Genesis (omgwtf cross country naming shenanigans) for some bizzaro reason.

Wasn't blast processing just spot-overclocking the system? I heard that's what it was from a Linux nerd

[DrZoidberg]

windows more like hitlows am i rite? bill fuhrer gates comin' like what.

[Edisim]

well, i think "loopy" has a working SNES emulator running on the GBA. It's not very fast (in fact, it's quite slow) and there's no sound, but it's still impressive that it could be done. I guess with this new development, this will be a little easier for loopy. Loopy has already written LoopyNES and also PocketNES (a great NES emulator you can use on your GBA... with the right hardware of course). I can say from personal experience that PocketNES works GREAT. Haven't tried the SNES one though.. compatability reportedly still isn't great (well, last i read..).

[DrZoidberg]

i've allways wanted to play SNES games on GBA

[Infernal Monkey]

Mario's Time Machine, Barbie's Holiday, Shaq Fu and Home Alone 2 comin' soon to a GBA near you.