GBA Aging Cartridge Demo

Channel:

Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

Subscribers:

982

Published on March 17, 2021 3:40:16 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmP3lOFcLkU

Game:

Mario Party DS (2007)

Duration: 0:49

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Nintendo released this rather odd test and demo cartridge for the Game Boy Advance. A dump of it is available, and I decided to run it on my GBA EverDrive X7. This demo is extremely difficult to run perfectly, no emulator including as Higan, VBA-M, mGBA and no$gba can pass it 100% correctly. Many currently-available hardware clones have issues. NanoboyAdvance and MiSTer's GBA core seem 100%, but those are very recent developments. Some unofficial methods of running the demo freeze, crash or show graphical errors.

To capture this video was a feat in and of itself. As the border suggests, I am using the GameCube and a Game Boy Player. Originally I tried using Game Boy Interface but the Aging Cartridge failed to pass the Interrupt tests and would hang on all three versions of GBI. The Official Game Boy Player disc can run the Aging Cartridge demo, but on its own it gives a terrible capture, even in 480p mode. The Official disc has some ugly scaling that VCS and the Datapath E1s cannot fix on their own. But by using Swiss to boot the disc, you can force the disc to use a 1:1 horizontal scale. This allows for evenly-sized pixels, but I had to boost the brightness and contrast because the Official disc does not like bold colors or pure whites when displaying the GBA window. Extrems is responsible for GBI and partially responsible for Swiss, so his work was still useful here.

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