cpu upgrade

[firepika]

hey guys im very experienced with electrical wireing and soldering i was wondering if it was possible to upgrade the gp32's cpu to maby an arm9 that is faster or possibly an arm11. im willing to sacrifice my gp32 to the cause by desoldering the cpu out of it and replacing it if you guys think it would be worth a try because i ordered a flu unit it should be here shortly.

 

[generalnmx]

It would be interesting. However, unless the ARM11 is fully backwards compatible, nothing would run on it. And I would suggest doing the experiment on a regular GP32 - why risk the extra $50 investment?

Note that Amdahl's law especially applies to CPUs - when you increase the speed of one component, that does not necessarily mean a huge increase in efficientcy. The 133MHz ARM9 CPU is fine for all of the applications of the GP32, it's the RAM that's the biggest obstacle IMHO.

 

[firepika]

oh what if i upgrade the ram instead then to maby 32mb i seen some at a semiconductor store near my home they look exactly the same like the one in my gp32. oh by the way i was going to keep the flu unit for myself and experiment with my old one

 

[Shane]

well I heard you need to upgrade the bios for the extra memory to work. Thats the problem.

 

[firepika]

oh well if any programmers are willing to sacrifice a gp32 and create a upgraded bios we may be able to upgrade them. by the way i found a site that sells arm920t's that clock at 200mhz not overclocked i think upgrading both the ram and the cpu would seriously improve the speed of our gp32s and be able to hopefully run a neoragex port or a completely reworked ver ugh problem with that is size of the roms (mslug3 =72mb) :blink:

heh sorry if i sound silly thinking about upgrading a machine that is already great! :unsure:

 

[generalnmx]

Yes, RAM upgrades have been done. Anarchy's mod was the most widely talked about. The problem with upgrading the RAM, from what Anarchy said, is that none of the old programs can access the new memory, and some software interrupts may stop working.

If you can find a way to utilize the new memory, we'd all be indebted to you.

 

[firepika]

um is the ram on the gp32 anyway alike to the ram in our pdas? because my cousin had a pda and he put new ram and had a problem of it not using the new mem and he made some kind of hack or something to the bios of it and it works fine now.

ps his pda has a total of 128mb now. used to have only 16mb :blink:

Edit:wow imagine our gp32s with 128mb ram that would be like my only wish for this christmas oh that and more optimized emus

 

[Evil_Cartman]

Edit:wow imagine our gp32s with 128mb ram that would be like my only wish for this christmas oh that and more optimized emus

Then we could have GBA emus.

 

[jegHegy]

Edit:wow imagine our gp32s with 128mb ram that would be like my only wish for this christmas oh that and more optimized emus

Then we could have GBA emus.

no.

 

[Grinder X]

This is a very intresting topic
Would be to be able to upgrade the GP32.

 

[nerd of nerds]

actually i believe that in the EARLY early days of the gp32 (when they had the old pics on lik sang) it said that it would have ram upgradable to 16mb, that could be the reason for the ram being on the back of the gp32, for easy installation. they could have just put a socket in but scrapped the idea. i bet that 16mb could be compatible with the current bios or maybe version 1.0 not 1.57

 

[Anarchy]

Hi:

The problem is that we need a bios able to access to the 32Mb. The actual bios can only use 8Mb. Maybe with a new bios, all emus will be able to use the whole ram.

Anarchy

 

[nerd of nerds]

i'm sure that i read on liksang and on the OLD gampark site that it could be upgraded to 16mb, my guess is that they were going to put a socket on the back of the pcb so you could just pop the memory out and put the new one in without soldering. but they obviosly scrapped that idea becuase i haven't seen anything offical about upgrading it <_< .

could you post some pics of your mod? i would like to see it, not that i don't believe you.

another idea i had was this: on the playstaiton psone vcd kit (internal) it has a socket that fits right over the old bios chip thus loading the new "vcd" bios. it wouldn't be too hard to do a similar think if somone could find some suitable sockes someone could make pcbs with the socket on one side and the memory on the other side, you could even add a heatsink.....if i had a hosting service (i actually might still have access to one) i would post pics of my idea

EDIT: so what you are saying is that the gp32 bios only can tak advantage of 8mb of the 32mb?

 

[Anarchy]

EDIT: so what you are saying is that the gp32 bios only can tak advantage of 8mb of the 32mb?

Yes

 

[nerd of nerds]

is there any way se could disassemble the bios into arm assembly code? that would make it much easier to "hack". where did you get the memory chip from? i would like to see how had this would be. and did you desolder the chip or just piggyback it?

 

[Sonic-NKT]

read on gp32spain that there are 60$ reward for someone who hack the bios to get it working..
Was it hard to replace the ram? cause we have custom bioses, it shouldnt be to hard to get those working with the new ram.
i heard also that the ram which is in our gp32 goes (normally) up to 150/156 mhz, so thats why the gp32 freezes when its overclocked, so when the new ram supports mhz up to 160-180 these clockspeeds should also be possible.
then gba emulation is possible (even if you dont want it) perhaps not perfect but good without sound..

 

[nerd of nerds]

actually technically we don't have new bioses, we have new firmwares. the bios is a small part of the firmware (not sure how big tho) and the other part is a gamepark executable, the bios sets evrything up and the executable lets you launch programs. mister spiv's site has a .txt file with bios info...

 

[firepika]

hey guys. today i installed the new ram i bought. it is 32mb and i installed it by removing the old one. well actually my brother put it in for me because his hand is more steady then mine and i dont see any proformance increase. the ram i got was 32mb 190mhz. :blink:

oh and i dont suggest any of you who only has 1 gp32 to experiment on yours just yet because when i turned it on the plug to hook up a ac outlet plug dosnt work anymore

 

[Anarchy]

hey guys. today i installed the new ram i bought. it is 32mb and i installed it by removing the old one

You must solder a wire to CPU's A12 or it will not be able to redirect the whole memory.

 

[firepika]

oh maby thats why it wasnt wanting to work right with the usb port (cause i was missing a cable lol) thanks for the info about the wireing i hope this will also make it work faster also