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.
The Gameboy Advance is a little weird, but most cartridge-based game systems featured little to no boot or loading time because the ROM chips in the cartridge are attached to the CPU the same way the RAM does (electrically speaking), and has similar performance. So game data, things like textures, sprites, level data, audio, are just…accessible to the CPU already. It has to do a very brief initialization to set up some variables but other than that everything is just ready to go.
On a disc-based system like Playstations, the game data is on an optical disc. So the game has to be read into memory from the disc before the game can start. That takes time, hence boot times and loading screens. PCs are similar, it takes time to load the game data from a hard disk or SSD or optical drive or diskette into working memory. Fun fact about this: CD-based games usually stored the background music as red book digital audio, so the console would load game data into memory, start executing it from there, then the optical drive just starts playing the disc like a normal CD simultaneously, which 1. allows the background music to be very high quality and 2. completely frees the CPU from that task.
Another fun fact, on at least some consoles it was possible to add additional RAM or even sound or graphics accelerators to the cartridge. Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES has additional RAM in the cartridge, Star Fox on the SNES has a 3D accelerator chip.