this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Solid state storage is fast. CDs are slower and because it's a physically spinning disc, there are seek times that delay reading too.
On gba you should be able to just stream things directly from the cartidge instead of loading everything to memory firsr.
Actually you don't even stream from the cartridge. The cartridge connector is part of the system bus. The equivalent of the CPU-RAM connection on the current motherboards. When you insert a cartridge, the ROM chips inside the cartridge becomes part of your system memory. So you literally run it directly from the cartridge. Imagine today's games came inside RAM sticks, and inserting them into DDR5 slots.
More like a PCie storage device with DMA no?
Sorry if that's pedantic lmao, but I feel like even the GBA ram blew nonvolatile storage out of the water
I'm not sure about GBA architecture specifically, but earlier systems just plugged those into the system bus directly.
According to here the ROM is directly on the bus, but since ROMs are slower than RAM, there is a cache-like buffer in between. But it's not a separate IO bus, it's still the memory-mapped system bus.
That's pretty cool, so like DMA but because the hardware couldn't (directly) tell the difference instead of an actual standard