The bootleg Game Boy Advance : First look and teardown

[beretta85]

They cleverly picked many games that have no saves, or use passcodes.

what about the pokemans?

[ASSEMbler]

what about the pokemans?

They save, what I meant was they balanced save games with non save shooters, side scrollers, or password games.

[l_oliveira]

That way they can be lazy with their save code or hardware.

By the look of it (they have two SDRAMs) they have an cartridge emulator set up on their LSI along with the ARM core and the graphics/audio hardware.

Given the complexity of the system it's probably made/backed up by some large Chinese company such as Sunplus or UMC.

But obviously they would not leave any clues that could lead Nintendo to them.

Like a old botleg Golden Axe arcade board I saw recently. It had original Yamaha and Hitachi chips. The botlegger knows that SEGA had relations with Yamaha/Hitachi and the parts could be reversely tracked down through the datecodes. So the parts had their datecode numbers sanded out.

[nesworld]

I have a feeling that Kensington is behind this... they have a gba lookalike on their website

[ASSEMbler]

http://www.kst1388.com/

[nesworld]

Yeah.... eventhough they write that it can contain 3000 NES/Famicom roms, maybe it can hold GBA games as well

[ASSEMbler]

I don't know if it's the same company! The kensington has no nintendo logo on the top,and there's also a famiclone with a onestation slot that looks just like this on focalprice. Kensington tends to make only famiclones.

http://www.focalprice.com/HD_Max_Dig...018L_6095.html



It's called the HD max.

The one I bought, I have no idea the maker. Most places want $100 for them now so buy one now if you want one.

[nesworld]

ah yeah it's definately different...

[ASSEMbler]

I think the GBA clones are expensive to make and will
soon vanish. I enjoy mine a lot, tempted to get a spare.

[randyrandall]

Whats the white square with pink spots at the bottom left of the official SP?

[ASSEMbler]

Whats the white square with pink spots at the bottom left of the official SP?

It blocks some sort of test point that is open to the outside in the shell.
It looks like they started covering it over for some reason.

[karsten]

thanks kev i enjoyed the infos :)

[michal99]

If you plan to use homebrew to figure out the bottlenecks, I'd be careful of using any hardware from SuperCard. Many games don't run at full speed on a SuperCard because of the auto-patching it needs to do to get software work with the card.

I have no idea if they have changed designs with future models, but the patching requirement was really hurting them at the time. Especially considering the patches they did do were really hack-ish. I was in China a while ago talking with a SuperCard sales rep and this was one of the things people complained about. That, and SuperCard clone flooding.

It's not true. I did/do have almost all version of SuperCard and 98% of games works without problem. The main problem was/is with 512 Mbit games as there is not enought space in ram to deal with the "sc soft" and that big game.

[Trenton_net]

Hrm... Your probably talking about non GBA SuperCards because the GBA can only address 256mbits max for a game, not 512mbits. As for the reason for the slowdown (At least in the original SuperCard line), it comes from the software patching particular interrupts which get overloaded and start to effect the timing of games.

[XerdoPwerko]

Superb find, Assembler.

I was really looking forward to reading this and I'm quite surprised it's this good.

[michal99]

Hrm... Your probably talking about non GBA SuperCards because the GBA can only address 256mbits max for a game, not 512mbits. As for the reason for the slowdown (At least in the original SuperCard line), it comes from the software patching particular interrupts which get overloaded and start to effect the timing of games.

No I was talking about GBA SC carts.

[Trenton_net]

Man, these clone consoles are going to be a pain. They are starting to spread all over the place. Some people post pics of legit consoles, some sellers post IQue pictures. About the only thing you can do is look at the discription for "1G Memory" and "80 Games".

[Trenton_net]

For anyone intrested in classic clones, here's a GBC clone. Ah, memories!

[ASSEMbler]

For anyone intrested in classic clones, here's a GBC clone. Ah, memories!

Damn you I need that now! Any info?

[Trenton_net]

Ah, lets crack open the old archive of Chinese clones and see what I can find...

What? You talking about one of these? (^_^)!


Or how about a Subor brand one? They made more than Famiclones...


How about just a BW color one?


Or a GB pocket clone?


Oh ya, you didn't think they made the GBA clones from scratch right? Naterally, they probably took it from their old "stuff a GBC in a SP" design (^_^);


Ok ok, enough teasing! Now that I'm kind of intrested again, I'm going to see if any of my family knows if they still sell these in stores.

Damn you I need that now! Any info?

Unfortunatly, not much information to mention. My cousin sent me that picture a while ago.

EDIT: I don't know too much about these hardware wise, but I think they cloned them for the sake of selling Chinese original carts. Like this one:



Makes sense, since you can claim compatability with regular Gameboy games as well and absorb the whole back-cataloge of games (Which they would have pirated anyways. heh).