MightyOhm.com

Hi everyone,

I just bought another extremely overpowered (32-bit ARM7, 240x160 16-bit display), underpriced ($11 shipped, on ebay, +$11 for a programmable cartridge and link cable on DX) device to use with the wireless radio: a game boy advance. I have only just begun to read about it, have not yet received my goods, and will likely not have much time until mid-May. Also, I think there will be quite a learning curve moving from 8 bit microcontrollers to the ARM, but I wanted to put out a heads up in case anyone would like to work on this with me.

Hal

Hal - What are the specs on RAM/flash for the GBA? Is there a cross-compile toolchain available for it and will it run Linux??

Flash depends on the cartridge you buy. I bought the cheapest one I could find, and it is 16 Mb (marketed as 128 megabits). It has 32k of "fast" ram, and another 256k of 'external' ram, although I'm not quite sure what any of that means yet.

There is a gcc compiler for it, and TONS of information - every memory address, tutorials, etc. I'm currently (slowly) working through this one: http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm Most tutorials and the like seem game focused (it IS a video game system...), and are dated from when the system and flash carts were expensive (~2003), but there are also a bunch of other projects that I have seen, more along the lines of what I want to play around with:

http://www.msh-tools.com/GBA/gbagps.html
http://www.pixelproc.net/gpsvario.html

I haven't seen too much about linux, but I'm also not really sure what advantages linux would give you. What were you thinking?

My original thought was that if you are trying to turn the GBA into a wireless radio, running Linux would take care of a lot of the details for you. But reading your post again I think you are planning to use the GBA as a display instead, right?

Oh yea - it doesn't have any networking functionality. I mean, that might be possible with a DS, but for ~$11 + cart, the GBA is still a bargain for a really nice display with microcontroller and input/output capabilities....