Gameboy Advance For Non-Gaming Applications

摘要

With more than 100-million units shipped since 1989, Nintendo's Gameboy is a hugely popular game console. The Gameboy Advance is powered by a 32-bit ARM processor and it sports a color LCD with 240x160 display resolution, stereo sound, headphone support, multiple input buttons, serial I/O, DC-power support, and a cartridge to change programs. Moreover, it operates for 10 to 15 hours on just two AA batteries. And all this for only about $70.00. As it turns out, the Gameboy Advance (GBA) can also be used for a variety of nongaming applications, ranging from real-time control and image processing to robotics and data collection, to name a few. What makes this possible is the GBA connector slot that game cartridges plug into. Figure 1 shows the pinout of this connector, which provides access to internal ARM processor signals. The connector can be used to interface external memory through the cartridge connector, as well as I/O devices as memory-mapped ports. The ARM processor does not differentiate between memory or ports, and uses a single address map to access both types of devices.