this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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For something like the Gameboy the cartridge is literally part of the hardware of the system. The cartridge contains ROM (and sometimes a bit of flash/eeprom as well) which the CPU can read from directly, just like the ROM and RAM it has inside the console. So there is no loading time, as soon as you insert the cartridge all the data is simply there.
Now this can get a bit complicated, but sometimes there can be a tiny bit of loading. Although I don't know if any Gameboy game did this. ROM chips could get expensive and the bigger the more expensive. So in order to get away with a smaller ROM chip, sometimes data was compressed or generated when required. This is a trade off between RAM/CPU and ROM space. I know there are NES and SNES games that did this. Something that is noticeable on the SNES for example is music and digital sound effects. They need to be into memory in a specific way and this can lead to a little bit of loading, mostly this is done at times when you wouldn't notice it, but sometimes it can cause a bit of lag as the system transfers the data. But it's usually less than 1 sec.
Something like a spinning piece of media like a CD or those little discs used for the PSP work very differently, where the data must be read from the disc and put into memory. This takes time, thus the loading times. Often these media were much larger than the memory available, so it would only load what is needed. Then when other stuff is needed, more loading is required.
As for you modern emulator. Compared to the original system your emulator is leaps and bounds faster. The games are tiny and even if they need to be loaded from flash to RAM, it's basically instant.
that's very interesting.
thank you for the in depth explanation.
would be very interesting to see how the R36S compares to the real GBA. i'm definitely getting one at some point, but for now i wanna spend what little spare money i have on emulator stuff :D
The RK3326's CPU in it is around 100x faster than the GBA SOC, as well as 64 bit and has 4 cores - so at their respective peaks can be around 1000x faster than a game boy.
The R36S has 1GB of ram, or around 4000x what the GBA had.
So long story short you're minimum 100x overkill for playing gameboy games (assuming an insane 10x overhead)
Surely it doesn't actually run the CPU that fast when emulating GBA games? Speeding up the CPU meant actually speeding up the game as well. Emulators, especially for these older consoles, try very hard to get as close to real hardware as possible.
that's nuts.
do u have some kind of source for the cpu being that much faster?
Just did a google search, here's the GBA and here's the RK3326 (which is the SOC in that handheld).
are you referring to the mhz and ghz?
cus that isn't really entirely reflective of performance.
when the difference is that huge, it obviously says something, but there's 20 year old CPUs that have a higher cpu clock rate than modern CPUs but easily get destroyed by the modern CPUs in benchmarks
Well yeah, I can't say I pulled out my hardware for a benchmark - but I think its a reasonable indicator of a minimum bounds when comparing older hardware with low clocks to newer. ie presumably the GBA doesn't have AVX, but if you're running gameboy games thats just wasted silicon.
Between the GBA to the RK3326 there's almost 2 decades of improvement, honestly 'only' 1000-4000x improvement is actually kinda disappointing considering the previous decades following Moores law.
well, then again the r36s costs like 30 bucks and the gba cost like 180 dollars adjusted for inflation
But just imagine how much the r36s would be worth in 2001.
that being said that's mostly because of different markets though, it'd be better to compare the switch to the GBA (Nintendo wants maximum money) vs the Chinese government trying to home grow a chip fab (government subsidiaries and a desperate need for good PR)