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No, no. The sytem has RAM. It's just that you can load on the fly from a cart, and a CD you have to read it off the disc. As the games got bigger and more elaborate they would load from cart more frequently, and the CD couldn't keep up.Quote:
Originally posted by Chibi Nappa
I thought the Neo Geo itself didn't have any RAM. It's all in the carts, right? That's why the cart games got bigger and bigger and the Neo CD (that did have RAM in the system) hit it's limit and couldn't keep up.
So what about the Gameboy Advance? Is that really 32 bit like the box claims, or is it just 16?
the GBA has a 32 bit processor
Chibi: Every game system including the Neo Geo has operational RAM. This is where volatile DATA like variables get stored. The video registers that control graphics on a given system are also positioned in RAM at fixed addresses.
For example a line in C language to set the video mode on the GameBoy Advance is:
*0x4000000 = 0 | 0x1000 | 0x100 | 0x200;
Where *0x4000000 is a hexadecimal representation of the Video Controller Register Base Address in GBA Ram. The "|" operator is a combiner. This code tells the GBA to set the video mode to mode 0, display sprites, and enable Backgrounds 0 and 1, respectively.
Ashod: The ARM7TDMI processor in the GBA is 32bit if you judge by the DATA bus and General Purpose Register size. Each is 32 bit. However ARM has two operational modes, a mode where each CPU instruction is 16 bit- Thumb mode, and a mode where each CPU instruction is 32 bit- ARM mode. If a program is created in Thumb mode then it will be smaller than the equivalent ARM program because the instructions are smaller in size. However, the 32bit ARM instructions execute faster because they don't have to be decompressed before being executed by the CPU as in Thumb mode. You can switch between Thumb and ARM modes in a program, but there are some precautions.
Most programs for the GBA are written in ARM 32bit mode even though it takes more memory.
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