this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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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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[–] VerdantTome@programming.dev 0 points 16 hours ago

One more note to clarify what's already been said: While the CPU in older consoles can read data and execute instructions directly from the cartridge because it's connected to the CPU's memory map like all the other hardware and RAM in the system, most consoles still needed graphics and sound data to be copied into specific areas of onboard RAM, and couldn't use them straight from the cartridge. This is because those subsystems were hardwired to work only from certain addresses, or even their own, separate RAM.

(I'm aware that the Famicom/NES doesn't do graphics this way by default, but in terms of hardware design it's an outlier, and getting into the weeds explaining everything related to that would at least double the length of this comment.)

Because the CPU can read and write that data so fast, however, it's still orders of magnitude faster than reading from most external media like tapes, floppy disks, and optical discs.