Another breakthrough in the HB scene! RAM expansion!

[wraggster]

Over at GBADev they have posted that they are now able to use the memory from the Ram Expansion and what Supercard Lite has too, what does this mean, well im no devver but it should mean more memory which should help quite a bit with Emulators and games.

UPDATE

Sonny_Jim posted this to me: (thanks)

The DSLinux ram breakthrough has NOTHING to do with the Opera RAM extension.

It uses the 32M on the Supercards (CF/SD/Lite). These allows DSLinux to use 16M on the Supercard as main ram. This means we get around 17M free in DSLinux as compared to 2M before.

No other homebrew so far uses this technique.

A Very Interesting Breakthrough, any Devs want to explain Further ?

[V3N0M]

Great, Things are really starting to look up for homebrew.

[battleroyalex]

Yes I hope they come out with a supercard lite version of snezzi with use of the ram !

[zac_531]

wha? Does this mean emulators can get better? Maybe a saturn emulator? N64?

[Video_freak]

Does the RAM expansion come from that Opera web browser pack, or from Supercard Lite?

[CampaKaze]

Yay! Better Stuff!! WooT (Fails To Understand But Happy Anyways)

[kcajblue]

Does the RAM expansion come from that Opera web browser pack, or from Supercard Lite?

i think its from both the Opera web browser pack and the Supercard Lite.

[Video_freak]

Thanks for the information kcajblue. I was wondering whent hey were going to incorporate it into homebrew.

[Sonny_Jim]

First off it's NOT the Opera RAM expansion, it's the 32M on the Supercards, that is normally used to hold GBA/NDS roms. At the moment 16M is used for romfs (I think) and the other 16M can be used by Linux. These means we get around 17MB free for userspace programs.

(can someone change the main page post to reflect the fact it has nothing to do with the Opera RAM extension?)


AFAIK even though the nessacery information has been available to developers for a while, no homebrew is doing this atm apart from DSLinux. If you want to access this memory in homebrew it's not impossible but then again, it's not just a case of changing a few lines. Amadeus and the others have had to do a LOT of poking around to get this working.


One thing to always bear in mind with emulation:

The host system CPU has to be roughly 10 times the speed of the emulated system. Having more RAM available is not going to make the emulator run faster.

One reason why Windows runs faster with more RAM is because it doesn't have to hit swap as much. This really doesn't apply to homebrew.

Once again, more RAM doesn't equal faster, just more room to store data. Also, the Supercard RAM is substainally slower I'm lead to believe than the main RAM due to the funky tricks needed to make it work.

EDIT: I can't believe I registered just to moan

[HaloJ]

EDIT: I can't believe I registered just to moan about the incorrect facts

I'm glad that you did as it means myself or others didn't have to.

Reading through everything it supports all versions of the SuperCard, from CF to Lite. It has been possible for sometime for homebrew coders to use this RAM but they would have to write the libraries themselves. Hopefully it will get added to DSLib for more ease.

Abs