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Why do GBA games boot so damn fast? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by kuiskaaja@lemmy.ml to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world

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For context: I have basically 0 experience with anything pre-PS2 except that I had a PS1 as a kid with a few games. Never had an official gaming handheld console, Gameboy, DS, PSP or anything like that.

I've recently started playing the GBA game Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced on my R36S (Chinese low end emulator handheld) that was collecting dust and wow, the game boots up blazing fast!

It's very convenient as I don't want to leave the thing on sleep mode, as that drains battery.

Is this how it was like on the real console too and how were the loading times on the previous Gameboy and Gameboy Color? How about the NES and NES? Were the handhelds more optimized to be picked up on the go: were the PSP loading times short too?

I remember having to wait quite a while on the PS1 and PS2 and that is still a thing on an emulator on an actual gaming pc while this 27€ handheld boots GBA games so so fast.

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[–] hayvan@piefed.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] klankin@piefed.ca 1 points 6 hours ago

That's pretty cool, so like DMA but because the hardware couldn't (directly) tell the difference instead of an actual standard