Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MenhirMike 976 days ago
> And there are homebrew/piracy cartridges that fill that space with 32mb of ram.

There's even an official one, the Opera Web Browser came with a second cartridge for the "GBA" slot to add 8 MB of RAM and a MMU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS_Browser#Memory_Exp...

(I've long lost the Opera DS cartridge, but the memory expansion is still in my DS Lite as a slot cover)

3 comments

Huh, does it really have an MMU? I don't remember that when I coded for it back in the day, and wiki seems to be the only one saying that (uncited). It also doesn't make a lot of sense to be at that point in the system as it's so far away from the main bus matrix.

But perhaps my memory is going bad and my Google Fu is worse.

Edit: gbatek doesn't document an MMU in those cards either. https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#dscartexpansionram

I think wikipedia is wrong. I don’t see how it would make sense to have a mmu in the ram expansion card.
I have no idea, just quoted Wikipedia. It looks like there is only a single chip in that module, so it would make sense for that only being a RAM chip. Can't edit the post anymore though.
We were pretty proud that we had a graphical browser running under DSLinux a good 6 months before Nintendo released the Opera cart.
Haha! I always wondered as a kid why that was a requirement. The number of times I had to use the Opera browser to get around my restrictive mother, sigh.