Gaming Should I buy a GBA SP model AGS 101?

[RodrigoDavy]

One thing that's been bugging me is how can the supercard mini not have a 100% compatibility with GBA and has some issues like slowdowns and such that I have been seeing in videos? I mean, supercard DStwo runs pretty much all the DS ROMs on a DS or 3DS with no prob....if it was emulating the software but it kinda isn't since the games are native to the GBA no?

Well, the gba read the cartridges at a speed way faster than the mini/micro SD card can handle. So flashcarts basically copy the ROM from the SD card to a faster RAM memory.
I believe Supercard uses a cheap RAM that is not fast enough to mimic the GBA cartridge's speed so you have ocasional slowdowns.

EDIT: DS games doesn't suffer from this problem since they use a kind of flash memory similar to microSD cards, so the DS reads the ROM from the microSD directly.

 

[Fire_Slasher]

Well, the gba read the cartridges at a speed way faster than the mini/micro SD card can handle. So flashcarts basically copy the ROM from the SD card to a faster RAM memory.
I believe Supercard uses a cheap RAM that is not fast enough to mimic the GBA cartridge's speed so you have ocasional slowdowns.

EDIT: DS games doesn't suffer from this problem since they use a kind of flash memory similar to microSD cards, so the DS reads the ROM from the microSD directly.

Ah makes sense to me now. Thanks!

 

[Drud1995]

One thing that's been bugging me is how can the supercard mini not have a 100% compatibility with GBA and has some issues like slowdowns and such that I have been seeing in videos? I mean, supercard DStwo runs pretty much all the DS ROMs on a DS or 3DS with no prob....if it was emulating the software but it kinda isn't since the games are native to the GBA no?

I'm pretty sure it is all emulation, regardless of the fact that the system has built-in support for the games. The supercard DStwo either has a more perfected emulator, or is simply more powerful to keep the games from slowdowns and other issues.

 

[Fire_Slasher]

I'm pretty sure it is all emulation, regardless of the fact that the system has built-in support for the games. The supercard DStwo either has a more perfected emulator, or is simply more powerful to keep the games from slowdowns and other issues.

It's not just SC tho, I used it as an example but R4,CycloDS and SuperCard One all play DS games perfectly. That's why I was confused about the GBA stuff.

 

[DanTheManMS]

RodrigoDavy is exactly right. The GBA itself actually only has 256 KB of RAM. That's 256 KILOBYTES OF RAM, think about that for a second.

The only way the GBA can manage this is by executing most code directly off the cartridge ROM itself rather than loading it into RAM first like the DS does. Thus, all GBA flash carts from "back in the day" either needed to use a type of flash memory that could mimic those insanely-fast response times (the older NOR-based flash carts for example, which have very slow write times as a trade-off), or they would copy the GBA ROM into a stash of on-board RAM and execute it from there. The slot-2 Supercards unfortunately did use RAM chips that were *just slightly* too slow to to accommodate some, but not all, GBA games. With patching most games could be played easily, but for the games that did experience slowdown it was painfully obvious.

You may wish to read the following few pages:
http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/index.php?title=SupercardGBASlowdowns
http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/index.php?title=NAND_and_NOR
http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/index.php?title=Block_device#Implementations_in_practice

DS flash carts had it relatively easy by comparison, since the DS reads from its flash-based cartridges much in the same way that SD cards are read from. Read speeds are less important nowadays since all microSD cards are Class 10 minimum anyway.