The bootleg Game Boy Advance : First look and teardown

If you can get a hard list down eventually , or at least a highlight of the top 25 or something, please let us know . Those alone might be worth the purchase price, ya know?

 

Do the built-in games run at fullspeed? Or are these speed-compromised, as well as cartridges?

 

This one of the coolest clones I've ever seen. Really neat!

 

This is an amazing clone, its a shame about the slowndown, if it wasnt for that id get one, it would be nice to have a GBA with a built in selection of games. I hate carrying a bunch of tiny carts with me.

 

Given the pictures, it looks like a clone and not Emulation. I suppose the glitches could be due to poor reversing? But considering how successfull (depending how you look at it) Chinese manufactures have been able to sell MP4 machines that can emulate consoles, to varying degrees of success, I don't see why they wouldn't just build on tech they already have.

 

How likely is it that Nintendo will go after the manufacturer of this device? I mean, the thing is basically a blatant copy...right down to the GBA name on the box and packaging.

 

@skavenger216: You can get Supercard MiniSD for your GBA and pack it with 2GB of roms.

Now I'm waiting for my parcel with this cloned GBA. I will check how it works with flash linkers and flash cards like flash2advance.

 

It would be pretty cool to get some homebrew booted on this, that way you could work out what is causing the slow down.
It’s going to be one of two things causing the slow down:

- Poor CPU implementation
- Hardware limitations – poor quality hardware

Or both.

Can anyone provide a super-high res shot of the processor? The hacker potential for this device is insane, ROM replacement, expansion etc

 

Well here is where i think the crystal is, but its hard to be 100% without more detail - can you take some high res shots of the board on both sides Assembler? It would be pretty cool if it turns out just to be a shitty quality crystal oscillator

 

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.

 

Well i was thinking more about custom written applicatiosn to poke the hardware and narrow down the root of the slowdown.

 

That Hynix TSOP looks like a NAND flash, btw ...
HY27UT084G2A-TPCB 4 Gigabit (512MB) large sector NAND flash
Typical memory found on thumb drives and music players. Dirty cheap nowadays...

btw it's of the same line of chips Nintendo use as storage on the Wii.
(The one on the Wii is HY2UF084G2)

 

VREG is used to adjust the voltage level for the LCD screen. If the voltage is incorrect, the system will have a weird effect on the screen which is somehow similar to "scanlines" on a CRT TV.


The botleg system is also missing the SW13 switch, which is meant to indicate to the AGB-CPU chip that an Gameboy or Gameboy Color cartridge has been inserted. This causes the slot to be powered up in 5V and the Z80-ish GB core to be enabled. The clone probably has no GB CPU so it would not work with GB carts.

Now about the NAND, it should be readable if you get a device capable of reading RAW blocks. Thumb drives are too customized to offer such capability.

I had some success using an screwed up EGOMAN MP4 player (Based on ACER LABS ALI M5661R chipset. Anything based on that chip should be usable as chip reader) and it's chipset SDK to make RAW dumps of large page (128MB or bigger) NAND chips.

 

This is just a guess, but the NAND Flash chip probably is being used for save game management and whatnot? I mean, you have 90 some odd games built in and I can imagine a large portion of them require saves of some kind.