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.
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.
Oh gosh no it certainly doesn’t - while that would be absolutely halarious, part of the overhead is usually making the GBA games play well with something like the Linux scheduler.
Some games back then do crazy stuff like use the number of CPU instructions executed as a timer, so for a playable experience this has to be pretty controlled.
That being said, most emulators allow a time multiplier for their virtual console, so you usually can experience it as fast as your hardware can run (Imagine hooking up a water cooled modern CPU to a minimalist realtime linux kernel and seeing how fast that bad boy can wheel).
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)
For Gameboy, there should be no difference in loading time for an emulator or the original system. The roms are only a few MB in size, and get loaded fully into ram. The initial loading is probably well under 1 second. On the official system you will see a short Gameboy advance logo animation. I don’t know if the emulator strips that out or not.